DIYARBAKIR-AMED, Turkey Kurdistan,— A total of 16,300 members of the Turkey’s Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) have been detained while 3,500 others have been sent to jail since 2015, according to HDP deputy Mehmet Rüştü Tiryaki, the Mezopotamya news agency reported.

Erdogan and his AK Party accuse the HDP of links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The HDP denies such links.

Tiryaki’s remarks came during a demonstration in the Kurdish province of Batman in Turkish Kurdistan (Bakur), southeastern Turkey, protesting the detention of 30 Kurdish activists and politicians.

“[Despite the detentions and arrests] our party is standing on its own two feet, and we made them [the government] lose in İstanbul, Ankara and in many other places,” he said.

The former co-leaders of the HDP have both been jailed since 2016 with several other prominent members accused of links to the PKK.

The HDP party last week called for an early election but ruled out withdrawing from parliament to protest the government’s dismissal of dozens of its mayors who were elected earlier this year.

Turkish authorities have removed 24 mayors of the HDP since August 2019, mainly due to alleged links to Kurdistan Workers’ Party PKK, and appointed replacements to run their municipalities.

The HDP said in a statement that President Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party and its ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), were “stealing the will of the peoples” by appointing trustees.

“We say ‘early election’ for the peoples of Turkey to be rid of the AKP-MHP authority. This is a call for confrontation. We’re saying bring it on,” the party said.

“We call on all of the opposition to unite around this request for an early election and to take action,” it said, also appealing for a campaign of civil disobedience.

The HDP (Partiya Demokratîk a Gelan) is the only party in the Turkish parliament that opposed the invasion in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava), the Kurdish region in northeast Syria, that began on October 9, 2019.

The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy in Turkish Kurdistan for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population. More than 40,000 Turkish soldiers and Kurdish rebels, have been killed in the conflict.

A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974 and currently serving a life sentence in Turkey, has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.

(With files from turkishminute.com | AFP | Reuters)

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