Turkey Detains Top Kurdish Opposition Leaders - Wall Street Journal
Turkish authorities detained the leaders of the country’s pro-Kurdish party in the early hours of Friday, launching a crackdown that threatens to crush a formidable opposition movement.
Police raided the homes of Peoples’ Democratic Party co-leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag and took them into custody for defying subpoenas to testify in connection with terrorism-related charges, according to party and state officials.
At least 11 lawmakers from the party, known as HDP, were also detained in the post-midnight operations, the Interior Ministry said. The police descended on HDP headquarters in Ankara, where party members resisted search warrants and arrests, chanting “We have no deputies to give up,” according to videos posted on the party’s official Twitter account.
“They came at midnight and took Yuksekdag by force—those who raided our headquarters, took away our deputies, also forcefully swept away Demirtas from his house,” the HDP said in a Twitter post.
The detentions mark the government’s most significant step yet against pro-Kurdish politicians since it began a sweeping crackdown in response to the failed coup attempt in July. The HDP’s popularity has soared under the leadership of Mr. Demirtas, who emerged as a popular challenger to check President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s expanding power.
Mr. Erdogan accused the U.S.-based imam Fethullah Gulen of masterminding the putsch, but the government quickly expanded its campaign from Mr. Gulen’s network to all terrorist threats, including the Kurdish insurgency.
The government claims elected HDP officials support the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies. The PKK has fought for Kurdish autonomy in southeast Turkey since 1984 in a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people.
HDP officials deny having links with or supporting the PKK.
The Interior Ministry said Friday that prosecutors are seeking to detain 15 lawmakers from the party, which has 59 deputies in the 550-member parliament. “Those who refuse to respond to the summons by prosecutors asking for their testimony in probes and hence break the laws are taken into custody,” the prime minister’s office said.
While the government said the measure was to make HDP deputies testify, a significant number of HDP officials who have been taken under custody for depositions have been arrested pending trial, according to the party.
The European Parliament’s Turkey Rapporteur Kati Pari criticized the latest detentions. Both the European Union and the U.S. have repeatedly warned Turkish leaders against sweeping measures that not only target alleged coup-plotters, but also silence the opposition and stoke the Kurdish conflict in the country’s southeast.
“Very bad news from Turkey. Again,” Ms. Pari said in a tweet Friday.
Turkish internet service providers, or ISPs, on Friday appeared to have limited access to social-media platforms while police raided HDP headquarters and deputies’ homes. Many users in Istanbul and elsewhere reported outages on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
“Our Turkey traffic is way down tonight and we’re probably being throttled by Turkish ISPs,” a U.S. social-media company official said.
Friday’s detentions mark Mr. Erdogan’s latest step to counter a rising Kurdish political movement. Mr. Demirtas helped HDP double its support to 13% in the June 2015 election, denying the president’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, a ruling majority in parliament for the first time since 2002. That outcome also dashed Mr. Erdogan’s hopes of overhauling the constitution to shift executive authority from parliament to the presidency.
Mr. Erdogan afterward called snap elections in which AKP won enough votes to form a single-party government. While HDP’s support declined to 10%, it was still the third-largest of the four parties in parliament.
In May, Mr. Erdogan’s deputies, joined by nationalists and some secularist opposition lawmakers, stripped almost all of the pro-Kurdish representatives’ immunity, paving the way for them to face terrorism-related charges.
HDP lawmakers, led by Mr. Demirtas and Ms. Yuksekdag, defied prosecutors’ demands that they testify, accusing the government of seeking to undermine elected officials and civilian politics amid a surge in violence. More than 2,200 civilians, Turkish security forces and Kurdish militants have been killed since the resumption of fighting last year.
Pro-Kurdish lawmakers accuse the president of stoking violence to bolster the government’s support—a charge Mr. Erdogan has denied. The HDP and other opposition groups also maintain that the government is using the failed coup to quash all criticism.
Mr. Erdogan’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“You cannot call this a judiciary process,” Mr. Demirtas said Tuesday during a speech to HDP lawmakers in parliament, criticizing raids against the party’s elected officials. “This is taking hostages, this is a political operation.”
Write to Emre Peker at emre.peker@wsj.com
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