This week the Kurdish movement has decisively moved the table in Turkey. The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) announced on Wednesday, after the Kurdish New Year, that it is giving up presenting its own candidate in the May 14 presidential elections. It thus favors Kemal Kiliçdaroglu (CHP), candidate of the Nationalist Alliance, a circumstance that makes the re-election of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who heads the Popular Alliance, very difficult.
“It is necessary to put an end to 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.
This follows the script of the municipal elections, when the HDP did not present itself in the big cities and called on millions of Kurdish emigrants to vote for the CHP candidates, which allowed the Islamic Democrats to be kicked out of the mayoralties in Istanbul and Ankara, after 25 years.
The Kurds are an increasingly large proportion of the Turkish population and the HDP mobilizes 10% of the electorate, which is very disciplined. A fact that seems relevant enough to decide a rather contested election.
The road 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. A large number of his party’s mayors have also been disqualified by judges “for terrorist links”.
Although the formation denies organic relations with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerrilla, it does not condemn it either.
After their meeting, Kilicdaroglu simply said that the place to discuss and solve the Kurdish problem “is the Parliament”. The support offered by the HDP is also not explicit, in order to make it digestible to a part of its voters and, within its alliance, to ultranationalists such as the former Minister of the Interior, Meral Aksener, of the Partido Bo (IYI).
Likewise, the HDP has announced that its candidates will present themselves in the general elections on the lists of the unknown Party of the Green Left, in order 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 gets almost 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, which was badly affected by the earthquake.
But it is in the big cities where the game will be decided. Next to Istiklal Avenue in Istanbul, the Kurdish bookstore Medya has opened its bright new headquarters. In its sancta sanctorum – only books in Kurdish and Zaza – we find the publisher Qesim Etmaneik ??leafing through Demirtas’ latest novel. Etmanenik celebrates the HDP’s support for Kiliçdaroglu, Zaza like Demirtas and, moreover, Alevi”. “In Kars, my city, there are even Azeris,” he says proudly. Armenians, not anymore.
Very close is the brand new Kurdish translation of Joyce’s Ulysses. The website of his publisher, Avesta, was shut down for several days last month.
Its publisher, Abdullah Keskin, expands on this for La Vanguardia: “In 28 years, we have had 40 books banned. But now it is the new generations who are losing their language”.
Keskin – who lost a brother in the conflict – calls for “Kurdish officialdom” and its extension “in education and in all areas, as soon as possible. The oppression must end.” Although he also has some jab “for the Kurdish political movement, which does not have specific demands on language and culture, nor does it use Kurdish”.
