COULD THE KURDS OF SOUTH-EAST TURKEY UPSET ERDOGAN’S PRESIDENTIAL PLANS?
There’s simmering resentment for the ruling party and its leader among Kurds suffering from enduring oppression
Elisir’s family arrived at the hospital to pick up his body and found bullet holes in his chest and shoulder, purple bruises across his back and burns on his face and legs.
His family were aware that he, as a member of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), might be killed but they were shocked by his mutilated body.
The authorities never revealed how he died. The post-mortem examination merely stated that he was killed in conflict on October 5 last year.
The death of Elisir, which is his PKK nom de guerre, galvanised his sister Siyajin who said her 25-year-old brother had joined the group in 2014 because, as a Kurd, he was discriminated against in his military service.
As presidential elections approach on June 24, she said that defeating the incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has led a crackdown against Kurdish groups in eastern Turkey, would be a way to avenge her brother’s death.
“This election is the last hope for Kurds,” said Siyajin from a cafe in Turkey’s largest Kurdish majority city of Diyarbakir.
“We want a future where our young don’t feel the need to have to run away and fight.”
After narrowly winning a constitutional referendum last year, changing Turkey from a parliamentary system to one that gives the president sweeping powers, Mr Erdogan in April called a snap election in hopes of cementing his rule.
But simmering resentment among Turkey’s 15 million Kurds, many of whom have suffered from harrowing state violence in recent years, could undo that plan.
Six hundred members of parliament will be elected in the polls, as will Turkey’s president.
Most Kurds plan to vote for the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), a pro-Kurdish movement. They also intend to vote for the party’s leader, Selahattin Dermitas, as president. Mr Dermitas is campaigning from prison where he is being held on bogus terrorism charges.
But assuming the presidential race goes to a run-off, as most polls predict, many Kurds say they will support Muharrem Ince from the Republican People’s Party, who has been campaigning for the Kurdish vote.
The latest polls predict the HDP will surpass parliament’s 10 per cent threshold, which would deny Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) a majority.
That would be enough to curtail Mr Erdogan’s powers if he
is elected as president. “Parliament is still substantial,” said Sinan Ulgen, an expert on Turkish politics and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Brussels.
“If the opposition dominates it then it would be able to override presidential decrees while maintaining control over the state budget.”
In Diyarbakir’s historic district of Sur, which was destroyed in clashes between the government and the PKK in 2015, deep antipathy towards Mr Erdogan is driving support for the opposition.
Ahmat Sen, the state representative of Sur, intends to vote for the HDP.
During the fighting in 2015, which claimed the lives of more than 2,000 people and uprooted more than 400,000, Turkish soldiers stripped Mr Sen and other male relatives naked as they fled with their families.
“It was winter and we were freezing,” said Mr Sen, with his greying hair and tobacco-stained teeth. “One of the soldiers punched my nephew in the face.”
After the violence subsided in 2016, he was the only local allowed to see the destruction of Sur because he was an elected representative. More than half of the homes were damaged in the clashes.
But when he returned to Sur two weeks later, he found that almost all the properties there had been bulldozed to the ground, including his own.
The demolitions raised Mr Sen’s suspicion that the military operation was linked to a plan to gentrify the district. Furious at the AKP, he vows to vote to get rid of President Erdogan.
“I will vote HDP because I want a parliament that represents me,” he said.
Younger Kurds such as Gulan, 26, also want justice. Her younger brother, Shamos, was thrown in prison last February for posting pro-PKK material on Facebook, which the state considers to be a terrorist offence.
While Shamos is expected to be released in two months, Gulan said the stain of a criminal record has ruined his future.
“My brother will face a lot of difficulties because of Erdogan. I hope we vote him out,” she said. “Kurds hardly have any rights and if Erdogan wins the next election then we won’t have any rights at all.”
Umit Setiner, 30, a social worker, is one of tens of thousands of perceived opponents who was fired from a public service job in 2016.
Like many of them, Mr Setiner was not told why he was dismissed but suspects that he was punished for helping civilians from Sur during the fighting.
“I volunteered to give psycho-social support to children who were traumatised by the violence,” said Mr Setiner, a former Diyarbakir hospital employee.
“Many were suffering from anxiety or harrowing nightmares after they escaped.”
In 2016, Mr Erdogan used a state of emergency to close 370 non-profit organisations in the south-east, including legal, women’s and aid groups.
Their assets were confiscated and employees often suffered further consequences. Many were arrested and charged for “aiding a terrorist organisation” through their work.
Despite the oppression, Kurds are clinging to hope.
“I will use my vote to respond to all the injustices that Erdogan has perpetrated against me and the children of Sur,” Mr Setiner said.
“This election is more than an election. For Kurds it’s a matter of life and death.”