2:25, 15 December 2009
While I was telling academic and practitioner colleagues, with great enthusiasm, about how sincerely the current Turkish government is developing idea/projects to resolve the decades-old Kurdish question, the Turkish constitutional court’s decision of 11th December to close down the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) made me question Erdogan’s, Turkish Prime Minister, talks of national unity project and his efforts for democratisation.
Although Erdogan on the 14th December said his AKP (Justice and Development Party) will not give up on finding a political solution to the problem, exclusion of the DTP- from the Turkish Parliament and therefore from this national unity project on the basis of having close ties with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) – will make it rather impossible for the government to accomplish an united and peaceful Turkey. In fact, the riots and protests against the Constitutional Court’s decision in different parts of Turkey are evidence to this point.
First of all, the DTP should have not been closed, but the Constitutional Court should have warned the DTP. In this way both the DTP could have been given a chance to survive in Turkish politics and learn from its mistakes and the Turkish authorities would have looked welcoming towards the Kurdish politicians. And its Kurdish citizens – who Turkish authorities downgraded and ignored for many years by calling them as “Mountain-Turks”- would have felt as a valued, listened to, and respected segment of the Turkish society. I think a decision of this sort could have also contributed positively to Erdogan’s democratisation initiative launched to resolve the long-standing Kurdish problem
Instead, in addition to closing down the DTP, the Constitutional Court banned 37 members of the party from participating in politics for 5 years, including two members of parliament, party chief Ahmet Turk and Aysel Tuğluk. Furthermore, on the 14th December, the 19 deputies of the now-defunct DTP decided to resign from the Turkish Parliament. Once again, the most trusted body/organisation among the Kurdish people, expressing the Kurdish people’s view, interest, and future aspirations was eliminated from Turkish political scene, and the Kurds were treated as the “outsiders”.
There are couple of questions: how democratic is Turkey, since this is the 28th political party have been shut down in the history of Turkish political system? How democratic is it that a bunch of unelected and illegitimate 11 members of the constitutional court decides on the closure of a political party that was home to 20 democratically elected Deputies? Who or which political party/body/organisation would be representing the Kurdish people in Turkey from now onward? And most importantly through whom the AKP is going to reach the Kurdish people in Turkey? How is it possible to resolve the Kurdish problem without involving the Kurdish people and their representatives into this process?
