This week your humble columnist attended the EU-Turkey Civic Commission conference in Brussels, which focused on “The EU, Turkey, the Middle East and the Kurds.”

When I spoke on “the prosecution of legitimate freedom of expression in Turkey” at the same conference last year, beside me on the panel sat my friend Selahattin Demirtas, the co-leader of the People’s Democracy Party (HDP) in Turkey. Mr. Demirtas, along with most of HDP’s elected parliamentarians, is now in jail in Turkey.

Venerable Turkish columnist Cendiz Candar, who no longer lives in Turkey and hence does not share a prison cell with HDP leaders or the thousands of journalists who dared criticize the government, spoke at the conference again this year. His statements very much echoed my own thoughts.

Mr. Candar pointed out how much things have worsened in Turkey during the last year, and noted this year’s absence of friends such as Demirtas, Ahmet Turk, and others.

Last year at the same conference, Mehmet Tunc – co-leader of the Democratic Regions’ Party (BDP) in Turkey – addressed the European Parliament by telephone. He was unable to attend because of the siege of Cizre in southeastern Turkey (North Kurdistan), where he had taken refuge in a basement with dozens of others. By telephone he told the EU Parliament in an agitated voice of what was going on:

The situation is not like how it is portrayed in the media. There is a massacre in Cizre; we are faced with genocide. All the houses have been bombed, tanks are being used. Weapons that are used against enemies are being used against its own people by the AKP government and Turkish state. There is a tragedy in Cizre. For 60 days now the people are without bread and water. Only 10 thousand from a population of 120 thousand have remained. The state has forcefully displaced the people. Similar policies were implemented in the 1990s. Four thousand villages were razed to the ground and the people were moved to places like Cizre. They depopulated the villages to finish off the PKK. Now they are depopulating cities and saying it is to finish off the PKK.

This is certainly a tragedy in Cizre. Twenty-eight people were injured in a house in Cizre. 5 of the wounded died of blood loss. There is no water left. We leave the building to get water and are shot by snipers. We cannot exit. The four-story building has been completely destroyed with mortar attacks. I am inside that building now. The situation is critical. That’s why I am calling on our friends there. Please stop this savagery. You are strong enough to stop this massacre in Cizre. You are strong enough to warn the AKP government and lift the siege on Cizre. Failing that you will also become accomplices to the massacre here.

Mr. Tunc died in that basement along with all the others there, reportedly burned alive by Turkish military forces (whose government never permitted EU or any other group to investigate the reports, the site of which was soon bulldozed over by government order).

Others at the conference this year remain Ankara’s targets. These include Salih Muslim, whom Turkey ridiculously tries to link to bombings in Ankara last year, as well as Osman Baydemir, the soft-spoken former mayor of Diyarbakir and HDP vice-chair.

During dinner in Brussels, a very frank American professor friend of mine asked Mr. Baydemir: “So why aren’t you in jail too?” Mr. Baydemir paused, smiled, and replied “Soon I probably will be.”

Yet Mr. Baydemir, like his other HDP colleagues, insists on returning to Turkey to face this very real and very likely outcome. They refuse to run away, refuse to bow their heads and insist on continuing their advocacy for peace and democracy in the country.

Cengiz Candar summed up what he sees as the main reason for this state of affairs in Turkey: He said that President Erdogan, on a plane returning from Somalia two years ago, explained to journalists on the plane with him about his ambition to become an executive president. In the same conversation with the journalists, he also said that Turkey could not permit “what happened in northern Iraq” to occur in Syria.

So what he meant was that Kurdish self-rule could not be permitted in Rojava. So even during Dolmabache “peace” talks with the Kurdish movement in Turkey, Erdogan had in his mind the determination to stymie Kurdish self-rule or autonomy even in Syria. The peace process could never have succeeded with such a mentality. It could not have succeeded because it is the same Turkish nationalist aggressive mentality that provides the glue for growing totalitarianism in the country.

According to Candar, the mentality cannot change as long as Mr. Erdogan remains at the helm of the Turkish state.

It was Selahattin Demirtas, speaking for the HDP a year and a half ago, who dismissed any possibility of cooperating with Mr. Erdogan’s party in order to create an “executive presidency” in Turkey. He said “Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, you will never be able to be the head of the nation as long as the HDP exists and as long as the HDP people are on this soil,” and then repeated three times that “We will not make you the president.”

Apparently Mr. Erdogan took the statement seriously and acted accordingly, abandoning the peace process and launching a full-out war against the HDP, the PKK and any others who would not bow their heads to his ambition.

David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.



The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.





