On February 11, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DPT) presented its
initial defense in the case brought before the Turkish Constitutional Court
calling for its closure. In its concluding arguments, the DPT warned that, by
regarding the Kurdish issue as one of terrorism and using military means to try
to suppress it, the Turkish authorities were dragging the country toward a civil
war.
On November 16, 2007, Public Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya formally applied
to the Turkish Constitutional Court for the closure of the DTP on the grounds
that it had become a "center of activities aimed at damaging the independence of
the state and the indivisible integrity of its territory and nation" (see EDM,
November 19, 2007). Now that the DTP has presented its initial defense,
Yalcinkaya will submit his case for the party’s closure. The DTP will have the
right to respond, after which a rapporteur will prepare a report that will be
distributed to the 11 members of the Constitutional Court. If seven members of
the court find in favor of Yalcinkaya, the DTP will be closed down and all of
its assets transferred to the Turkish Treasury. The Constitutional Court is not
expected to reach a verdict before fall this year.
The case against the DTP is the sixth against a pro-Kurdish political party in
the last 15 years. The fifth case is still ongoing. The previous four all
resulted in the court ruling to close the party concerned. Traditionally, the
members of each outlawed party have simply formed a replacement under a
different name. However, in addition to the financial losses resulting from the
confiscation of the banned party’s assets, the establishment of a new party is
very time-consuming, not least because under Turkish law a party must be
registered in each of the country’s 81 provinces before being allowed to
participate in nationwide elections.
One of the main charges leveled at all of the pro-Kurdish parties formed over
the last 15 years has been that they are affiliated with or are sympathetic
toward the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been waging an often brutal
insurgency since 1984. Even if there are no organic links between the DTP and
the PKK, no one doubts that the charges have at least a degree of justification.
Turkish intelligence officials insist that the DTP’s network of branch offices
remains one of the main conduits through which young PKK sympathizers are able
to join the militants in the mountains of southeast Turkey and northern Iraq. On
February 5-6, the DTP staged a series of protests against Turkish military
operations against PKK units in Turkey and the organization’s main camps in the
Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq (see EDM, February 5). The protests culminated
in an overnight vigil on Turkey’s border with Iraq where DTP supporters chanted
pro-PKK slogans and waved photographs of imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan (Aksam,
Hurriyet, February 6).
One of the charges against the DTP is that Ocalan gave orders to establish the
party during his weekly meetings in jail with his lawyers. It is an open secret
that both the authorities and Ocalan’s lawyers record the meetings. In fact,
until relatively recently, sources close to his lawyers posted transcripts of
the conversations on the Internet. The transcripts clearly showed that the
lawyers were often used by Ocalan to send messages to the PKK in the mountains,
albeit expressions of solidarity and broad strategic suggestions rather than
detailed instructions. In its initial defense, the DTP called on the Turkish
authorities to provide the Constitutional Court with the transcripts of Ocalan’s
conversations with his lawyers to prove that he was not controlling the DPT (Radikal,
Vatan, Milliyet, February 12).
The DPT also claimed that the application for the party’s closure was
politically motivated and that the authorities were using the PKK as a pretext
to deny the existence of the Kurdish problem. “The Kurds are the second largest
people after the Turks,” said the DPT in its defense. “They number more than 20
million. The Kurdish people are a different community to the Turkish people in
terms of their history, language, and geographical location. That is to say,
they are an independent people” (Radikal, February 12).
Even more controversially, the DPT’s defense also implicitly challenged the
characterization of the PKK as a terrorist organization by noting that there was
no internationally accepted definition of terrorism. It attacked those who
criticized the party for its refusal to distance itself from the PKK by
describing it as a terrorist organization. “No one can force us to express our
thoughts and opinions on any subject,” declared the DPT’s defense (Radikal,
February 12).
In recent weeks, the DPT has also stepped its calls for lifting of the legal
restrictions on a candid discussion of the Kurdish issue, bitterly noting that
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly described the government’s
efforts to lift the headscarf ban in universities in terms of freedom of
expression, while refusing to extend such freedoms to Kurdish nationalists. Many
DTP members have been particularly infuriated by Erdogan’s descriptions of the
Kurds as “brothers” and his calls for them to live in peace and harmony in a
unitary Turkish state with Turkish as the sole official language.
“The prime minister calls us his brothers and sisters. But there is no
difference between his notion of us being brothers and sisters and the concept
of a single nation with a single language,” complained Aysel Tugluk, a DTP
member of parliament from the predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir. “We
don’t want such ‘brotherhood.’ It will only be possible to find a solution to
the problem of the Kurds living together [with Turks] within the system if we
can also discuss a Kurdish federation or separation. This is the most natural of
rights” (Milliyet, February 10).
