Author: Zaman Australia

Demirtaş, a former co-chair of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), has been behind bars since November 2016 on politically motivated charges.

Sharing two paragraphs from an interview that will be published on Thursday on the Artı Gerçek news website in a tweet posted through his lawyers, Demirtaş expressed his gratitude for constructive criticism directed towards him, adding that he’s stepping back from political engagement “at this stage,” although he’ll continue the struggle “like every comrade from inside the prison.”

The politician’s statement coincides with his article published on Artı Gerçek, in which he provides an analysis of the reasons behind the HDP’s poor performance in the May 14 general election, saying it wasn’t solely due to unfair competition.

The HDP ran in the election under the banner of the Green Left Party (YSP) because the party faces the risk of being shut down due to an ongoing closure case against it. The YSP secured 8.8 percent of the vote in the elections, while the HDP won 11.7 percent in the 2018 parliamentary elections.

Demirtaş stated that it would be “simplistic” to attribute the HDP’s failure in the election solely to such unfair conditions as the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its allies using all the resources of the state without limit, conducting a massive smear campaign against their rivals “without any regard for moral values” and “playing games at the ballot box.”

“The alarm bells have been ringing for quite some time now, and these election results serve as a final warning. The way to silence the alarm bells and play victory songs lies in accurate analysis and proper action,” Demirtaş said.

Stating that the HDP’s vote percentages decreased in 87 electoral districts, Demirtaş said it was mainly due to the party’s disorganized election campaign that lacked professionalism and the fact that the AKP and its far-right ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), had been conducting the campaign for the 2023 elections for the past five years.

“Our party intensified its campaign one month before election day, but it was still a half-hearted and disorganized effort. On the other hand, the AKP-MHP government has been engaged in a form of [social] engineering … particularly over the past five years,” he said.

According to Demirtaş, his attempt to conduct an election campaign from behind bars and his efforts to alarm the masses into working for a change of government have been misunderstood by some of his allies, who thought he was actually promoting himself.

“I acknowledge my own shortcomings. … I should’ve put in more effort and pushed for collaboration. It’s also necessary for all my colleagues to engage in self-reflection because they haven’t correctly deciphered the AKP-MHP system and failed to make timely and appropriate moves. They also haven’t taken measures against the perception operations conducted against me,” the jailed leader added.

Demirtaş said they need to make every topic, from the micro-level issues of society to the macro-level challenges, a main agenda and generate organizational and solution-oriented policies.

“Nobody can make significant progress through slogans alone,” Demirtaş said, adding that social collapse becomes “inevitable” if they fail to explain democratic modernity to a population that has been so heavily exposed to capitalist modernity and provide them with “alternative, beautiful and honorable ways of living,” along with the necessary institutions.

Demirtaş was an outspoken critic of Turkey’s ruling AKP and its leader, Erdoğan, before he was jailed. He ran in the presidential elections of 2014 and 2018 as a rival to Erdoğan. The imprisoned leader conducted his election campaign from jail for the 2018 election.

Demirtaş also actively supported the YSP’s and opposition’s presidential candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s election campaigns for the May elections on social media through his lawyers.

As part of an investigation launched by the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, detention warrants were issued on Tuesday for 13 individuals including former military cadets over alleged links to the Gülen movement, a faith-based group accused by the government of “terrorist” activities.

Turkish police conducted operations in nine provinces and detained 12 of the suspects.

The accusations include secretly communicating with their contacts within the movement via payphones. The detention warrants were issued based on lists drafted by the country’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT) detailing people who used payphones.

President Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by Turkish Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since the corruption investigations of December 17-25, 2013, which implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan, his family members and his inner circle.

Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began to target its members. He intensified the crackdown on the movement following an abortive putsch that he accused Gülen of masterminding. Gülen and the movement strongly deny involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.

The so-called “payphone investigations” are based on call records. The prosecutors assume that a member of the Gülen movement used the same payphone to call all his contacts consecutively. Based on that assumption, when an alleged member of the movement is found in call records, it is assumed that other numbers called right before or after that call also belong to people with Gülen links.

Following the coup attempt, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency and carried out a massive purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight. More than 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, as well as 24,706 members of the armed forces, were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.

In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.

“If we say we will send all Syrians back, this would not be accurate. Their labor is needed in some areas. My father has sheep, and he complains about not being able to find a shepherd,” Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said in televised remarks on Sunday

The debate about the repatriating of Syrian refugees has heated up after the presidential election held on May 14 as Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the main opposition leader and presidential candidate, stepped up his rhetoric and called for the urgent expulsion of Syrian refugees in the country.

Kılıçdaroğlu is seeking to defeat his rival, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in the runoff election to be held on Sunday since neither of them managed to exceed the 50 percent threshold in the presidential election held on May 14.

Turkey hosts nearly 3.5 million Syrian refugees who have fled civil war and were registered under temporary protection as of April 2023, according to official figures.

Refugees in Turkey are frequently targeted by Turkish politicians, who hold them responsible for the social and economic problems in the country.

Çavuşoğlu said Syrians are needed in Turkey’s agricultural and industrial sectors as well as in wholesale food and produce markets.

Some people said on Twitter that Çavuşoğlu’s remarks were an admission of the fact that the government sees Syrian people as source of cheap labor.

Elections in Turkey on Sunday were well managed and offered voters a choice between genuine political alternatives, but President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the ruling parties enjoyed an unjustified advantage, international observers representing the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) said in a statement on Monday, the Stockholm Center for Freedom reported.

International observers from PACE, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (OSCE PA) monitored the May 14 presidential and parliamentary elections in Turkey.

The presidential election will be decided in a runoff, after incumbent President Erdoğan pulled ahead of his chief challenger Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), but fell short of an outright victory that would extend his rule into a third decade.

The joint international observation mission found that the legal framework does not fully provide a basis for holding democratic elections.

“These were competitive but still limited elections, as the criminalization of some political forces, including the detention of several opposition politicians, prevented full political pluralism and impeded individuals’ rights to run in the elections,” said Michael Georg Link, special coordinator and leader of the short-term OSCE observer mission. “Political interference in the electoral process is not in line with Türkiye’s international commitments.”

Almost 61 million voters were registered to vote in the country as well as 3.5 million abroad, in an election that took place against the backdrop of devastating earthquakes in early February.

“Turkish democracy is proving to be amazingly resilient. This election had a high turnout and offered a real choice. However, Türkiye does not fulfil the basic principles for holding a democratic election,” said Frank Schwabe, head of the PACE delegation. “Key political and social figures are in prison even after judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, media freedom is severely restricted and there is a climate of self-censorship. Türkiye is a long way from creating fair election campaign conditions.”

According to the joint mission, misuse of public resources in some cases as well as announcements of significant social benefit programs provided undue advantage to those in power and blurred the line between party and state.

The joint mission included 401 observers from 40 countries, made up of 264 ODIHR-deployed experts, long-term and short-term observers, 98 from the OSCE PA and 39 from PACE.