This week the Kurdish movement has made a decisive move in Turkey. The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) announced on Wednesday, after the Kurdish New Year, that it is giving up presenting its own candidate for the presidential elections on May 14. In this way, he favors Kemal Kiliçdaroglu (CHP), candidate of the Nationalist Alliance, something that makes the re-election of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who heads the Popular Alliance, very difficult.
“We must end the government of one man”, has justified the leadership of the HDP, despite the fact that neither of the two alliances has any proposal for the Kurdish problem.
In this way, the script of the municipal elections is followed, when the HDP did not appear in the big cities and called on millions of Kurdish emigrants to vote for the CHP candidates, which allowed the Islamo-Democrats to be thrown out of the mayoralties of Istanbul and Ankara, after 25 years.
Kurds are a growing proportion of the Turkish population and the HDP mobilizes a very disciplined 10% of the electorate. Something that seems sufficient to decant a fairly close election.
The way was paved on Monday with Kiliçdaroglu’s visit to the Ankara headquarters of the HDP, whose leader, Selahattin Demirtas, has been in prison since 2016. Most of his party’s mayors have also been disqualified by judges “for links terrorists”.
Although the formation denies any organic relationship with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerrilla, it does not condemn it either.
After their meeting, Kiliçdaroglu limited himself to saying that the place to deal with and solve the Kurdish problem “is the parliament.” The support that the HDP gives him is not explicit either, in order to make it palatable to part of his voters and, within his alliance, to ultranationalists such as the former Minister of the Interior, Meral Aksener, of the Good Party (IYI).
Likewise, the HDP has announced that its candidates will run for the general elections on the lists of the unknown Green Left Party, so as not to risk the illegalization of its acronym, now sub iudice.
The leftist party, in any case, does not represent the entire population in the Kurdish southeast, where Erdogan garners up to 40% of the vote. The latter’s alliance, moreover, has just obtained the support of Hüda Par, a radical Kurdish Islamist party, relevant in the province of Adiyaman, badly affected by the earthquake.
But it’s in the big cities where the game will be decided. Next to Istiklal Avenue in Istanbul, Kurdish bookstore Medya has opened its new and luminous headquarters. In its sancta sanctorum – only books in Kurdish and Zaza – we find Demirtas leafing out the latest novel to publisher Qesim Etmaneik. This celebrates the HDP’s support for Kiliçdaroglu, zaza as Demirtas “and besides Alevi”. “In Kars, my city, there are even Azeris,” he says proudly. Armenians, no longer.
Three books later, there is the brand new Kurdish translation of Joyce’s Ulysses. The website of his publisher, Avesta, was closed for several days last month.
Its editor, Abdullah Keskin, expands on it for La Vanguardia: “In 28 years, 40 books have been banned from us. But now it is the new generations that are losing their language”.
Keskin – who lost a brother in the conflict – calls for “the official status of the Kurdish” and its extension “in education and in all areas, as soon as possible. The oppression must end.” Although he also reserves darts “for the Kurdish political movement, which does not have concrete demands on language and culture, nor does it use Kurdish”.
