The third political force in the Turkish Parliament, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP, now DEM) has been the subject of relentless repression since 2016, the year when Selahattin Demirtas was arrested and imprisoned. Aged 51, Selahattin Demirtas, former co-president of the HDP, was on trial on 47 charges, including undermining state unity and territorial integrity and incitement to commit a crime. , during an outbreak of violence in Turkey in 2014, reported the Turkish media and the NGO MLSA.
The other former co-president of the HDP at the time, Figen Yuksekdag, was sentenced to 30 years and three months in prison. Fearing unrest, governors of at least 14 provinces in the south and southeast of the country, which are home to a large Turkish or Syrian Kurdish community, banned protests for four days, according to MLSA.
“The use of false criminal procedures”
When the verdict was announced, several DEM deputies held up portraits of the two leaders in the Assembly to protest against the decision. “We all witnessed here today a judicial massacre,” the DEM reacted in a statement, denouncing a “new dark stain in Turkey’s judicial history.”
His lawyers announced their intention to appeal the verdict. In this lengthy procedure, most of the 108 accused were convicted, but a few were acquitted. The hearing in Sincan, a suburb of Ankara, took place in the absence of the defendants in pre-trial detention.
Prosecutors had sought life imprisonment for 36 defendants, including Selahattin Demirtas. Some of the defense lawyers left the courtroom before the verdict was read to protest against the attacks on the rights of the defense during the trial.
“The use of bogus criminal proceedings to exclude democratically elected Kurdish politicians from political life will do nothing to end the decades-long conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK,” warned Hugh Williamson, director for Europe and Central Asia to Human Rights Watch.
Capture of Kobané
The violent demonstrations of October 2014, during which 37 people were killed in the country, began after an appeal launched by the HDP against the refusal of the Ankara government to intervene to prevent the Kurdish border town of Syria Kobané from fall into the hands of the jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group.
The fighting was visible on the Turkish side of the border and many members of the country’s Kurdish community had denounced complicit inaction by the Turkish army. Presented in the foreign press as the Kurdish Barack Obama, Selahattin Demirtas ran for president against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2014 and in 2018, from his prison.
After his conviction in 2018 to four years and eight months in prison for “terrorist propaganda” in one aspect of this case, the ECHR ordered Ankara to release him “as quickly as possible”, considering that his imprisonment aimed to “stifle the political pluralism.
Arrested in October 2017 then sentenced in 2022
Ankara accuses the HDP party, and today the DEM, of links with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), considered a terrorist group by Turkey and its Western allies – something the party denies. In the summer of 2015, a ceasefire in force for two years was broken after the launch of an offensive by the Turkish army against positions of Kurdish fighters in Syria and Iraq.
Thousands of HDP supporters and dozens of its elected officials, particularly in the predominantly Kurdish southeast of the country, are imprisoned, accused of supporting terrorism or threatening security. What everyone denies by denouncing political indictments. The verdict against Selahattin Demirtas comes after Wednesday’s rejection of a request for a new trial for businessman and philanthropist Osman Kavala, requested by his lawyer.
The 66-year-old man was arrested in October 2017 and then sentenced to life imprisonment in 2022 by Turkish courts for “attempting to overthrow the government” via the financing of major opposition demonstrations in Istanbul in 2013, known as Gezi. He has always denied the accusations against him.