Kurdish lawmakers from the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Leyla Guven (L) Musa Farisogullari (C) and Enis Berberoglu from the Republican People’s Party’s (CHP), 2020. Photo: Ekurd.net/Daily Sabah/ANF/Parrliament
ANKARA,— Turkey’s parliament stripped two pro-Kurdish lawmakers and one MP from the main opposition party of their parliamentary status on Thursday after convictions against them became final, drawing sharp criticism from their parties.
Those stripped of their status were Leyla Guven and Musa Farisogullari from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and the Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) Enis Berberoglu.
The decisions were announced in parliament after appeals courts upheld Berberoglu’s conviction for disclosing government secrets and the convictions of Guven and Farisogullari for being members of a terrorist organisation.
“This disregards the national will. We will continue the democratic fight to obtain justice, rights and law,” CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu wrote on Twitter.
“This is the trampling and theft of the will of the voters and the Kurdish people,” HDP deputy Saruhan Oluc said in a speech in parliament.
The government has repeatedly accused the HDP of ties to the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought against the state in Turkish Kurdistan (Bakur), the largely Kurdish southeast. The HDP denies such links.
Leyla Guven, 55, launched a hunger strike on November 8, 2018 from jail in protest at the prison conditions for Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan.
Guven launched her action to pressure the government into allowing lawyers and family members to visit Ocalan.
She was released from prison in January 2019 as she was seriously ill after her 11-week hunger strike. Guven was freed under judicial control after serving a one-year term for labelling the Turkish military operation against a Syrian Kurdish militia in Rojava an “invasion”.
Despite being released from jail Guven maintained the hunger strike. Turkish police prevented supporters from rallying outside the home of the Kurdish lawmaker on hunger for 100 days.
Turkish authorities allowed imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan to see his lawyers for the first time since lifting a ban on such meetings in May 2019.
On May 26, 2019 Guven, thousands of Kurdish activists, prisoners and parliamentarians in Turkey ended their hunger strike against the conditions of jailed Kurdish leader Ocalan.
President Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party has 291 deputies in the 600-seat assembly, while the CHP now has 138 seats and the HDP has 58 seats, keeping it as the second biggest opposition party.
The AKP is planning to push measures through parliament with its nationalist MHP allies that affect how political groups may contest elections and could hamper new opposition parties taking part in any snap elections.
Those plans would not be affected by Thursday’s removal of the three politicians’ parliamentary status.
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.
Ocalan remains a key figure for Kurdish separatists in Turkey and in the region. Kurds see Ocalan, called “leader of the Kurdish people”, as a living symbol of the Kurdish cause in Turkey.
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