Ozlem Goner: Banning the pro-Kurdish HDP in Turkey is a move towards fascism

By Dilip -

On 17 March, a top prosecutor filed a case with Turkey’s Constitutional Court demanding the closure of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), as well as a five-year political ban on more than 600 party members. Around the same time, HDP parliamentarian and prominent human rights advocate Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu was forcibly removed from parliament, and later detained.

These proceedings came just weeks after Turkey’s failed military operations in northern Iraq against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in February and the arrest of more than 700 members and supporters of the HDP in a single day (14 February) on dubious charges of “terrorism”. The HDP is the country’s third-largest party, receiving six million votes in the last general election in 2018. It has faced mounting repression ever since it first won seats in parliament in 2015, preventing President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) from maintaining a single-party majority…

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/banning-pro-kurdish-hdp-turkey-move-towards-fascism/

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