HDP’s Yüksekdağ: They cannot take Kurds, socialists being a power in central politics

ANKARA

The co-leader of Turkey’s Kurdish problem-focused Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has indicated that sovereign forces dominant in the country’s system could not endure the presence of both Kurdish people and socialists as “a power in central politics.”

“An ethnic cleansing war is being conducted against the Kurdish people. Lots of deaths and exiles have taken place; 600,000 Kurds have been forced to migrate from the lands they had been living in. But Kurds haven’t abandoned their lands. Heavy weapons have been used during these sieges of provinces. For example in Nusaybin [in southern Mardin province], F-16s have been used,” said HDP co-chair Figen Yüksekdağ.

The remarks by the HDP co-chair came during a panel held on the sidelines of a festival organized in northern Italy by the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (the Communist Refoundation Party - PRC), the party’s press office said in a statement released on June 26.

“While I’ve been speaking here, in the Lice district of [the southeastern province of] Diyarbakır, forests are being burned. There is only one [reason] for this atrocity; they couldn’t stand the fact that the Kurdish people and the leftist and the socialist segments that fight along with the Kurdish people have grown into a power in the central politics. Throughout history, they haven’t recognized Kurds as their equals,” Yüksekdağ said.

During the panel, Yüksekdağ spoke of the foundation process of the HDP, as well as the party’s program and goals. During the same panel, speeches concerning recent political developments and the ongoing conflict between Turkish security forces and militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which were reignited in July 2015, as well as concerning the pressures on the HDP, were delivered.

“The HDP has brought all segments which were denied by the system together and [through] this released a very big power. All of these segments were not entirely thinking the same things as each other. But there was one thing on which we all became partners: Overcoming fascism in Turkey,” Yüksekdağ also remarked. “A very enormous totalitarian regime has been generated in Turkey and the [President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan governance has further strengthened this oppressive structure. What essentially brought us together was the building of a populist and democratic structure in Turkey and overcoming the Erdoğan-AKP [the ruling Justice and Development Party] fascism,” she said.