Erdogan Government Moves to Criminalize and Shutter Turkey’s Pro-Kurdish Party

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling bloc stripped a pro-Kurdish lawmaker of his parliamentary seat on Wednesday and initiated a legal process to shutter Turkey’s pro-Kurdish opposition party. The U.S. Department of State immediately warned that this would “unduly subvert the will of Turkish voters, further undermine democracy in Turkey, and deny millions of Turkish citizens their chosen representation,” but unless the Biden administration backs up its statement with concrete action, Erdogan is likely to proceed.

The Turkish government’s latest steps to target the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the country’s second-largest opposition party, is a legal farce and makes a mockery of Turkey’s laws and constitution. Last month, Turkey’s supreme appeals court, the Court of Cassation, fast-tracked the jail sentence of HDP lawmaker Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu, a leading human rights defender, for “spreading terrorist propaganda.” Gergerlioglu’s “crime” was simply sharing a news article on Twitter about the Kurdish peace process almost five years ago. The article in question was never subject to a criminal investigation, and Gergerlioglu is the only person who has ever been tried and convicted simply for sharing this link.

On Wednesday, Erdogan’s Islamist party and its far-right allies in parliament stripped Gergerlioglu of his seat through an administrative process that involved merely reading out the Court of Cassation’s final ruling at the Turkish parliament’s plenary session. This fait accompli, which Turkey’s leading jurists found to be procedurally erroneous, came despite Gergerlioglu’s ongoing appeal to Turkey’s Constitutional Court. The real reason behind the Erdogan government’s panicked legal assault on Gergerlioglu is the embarrassment he has caused as a conservative Sunni Muslim of Turkish ethnicity whose presence in the ranks of the pro-Kurdish and pro-secular HDP belies Erdogan’s claims that the party is anti-Turkish and anti-Muslim. Last December, Turkey’s interior minister branded Gergerlioglu as a “terrorist” after the lawmaker exposed wrongdoing by Turkish police, including unlawful strip searches and torture.

Only hours after the Erdogan government revoked Gergerlioglu’s parliamentary status, Turkey’s chief prosecutor moved to ban the HDP for its statements and activities to “disrupt and eliminate the unity of the Turkish state.” Media reports indicate Erdogan wants to remain in lockstep with his far-right partners, who have long demanded such a ban alongside other draconian measures.

These attempts to oppress Turkey’s more than 15 million Kurds and their allies are nothing new. The HDP is the latest incarnation of a long line of pro-Kurdish parties that had to reinvent themselves following similar court-ordered bans. The list of pro-Kurdish parties established since 1990 includes the HEP (1990), ÖZDEP (1992), DEP (1993), HADEP (1994), DEHAP (1997), DTP (2005), BDP (2008), and HDP (2012). Few voters can name all these parties, but they know well that the pro-Kurdish opposition is here to stay.

As Erdogan comes close to dismantling what little is left of Turkey’s parliamentary democracy, the Biden administration should take concrete actions to back up its criticism of the Erdogan regime. Issuing Global Magnitsky sanctions against Turkey’s most egregious violators of human rights, both within Turkey and without, would be a good start. It is also essential to reach out to the European Union and its leading member states to get Brussels to wake up from its appeasement policy toward Ankara and join Washington in a concerted pushback strategy.

Aykan Erdemir is a former member of the Turkish parliament and senior director of the Turkey Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he also contributes to FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). For more analysis from Aykan, the Turkey Program, and CEFP, please subscribe HERE. Follow Aykan on Twitter @aykan_erdemir. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.