Turkey's Kurdish Party to Field Independent
Candidates
AFP
May 9, 2007
ANKARA -- Turkey's main Kurdish party will pitch independent candidates in
general elections July 22 in a bid to bypass the high threshold for
parliamentary representation, its chairman said Wednesday.
"We have decided to run in the elections with independent candidates," Ahmet
Turk, the head of the Democratic Society Party (DTP), was quoted by the Anatolia
news agency as saying.
He was speaking after a two-day party meeting in the mainly Kurdish southeastern
city of Diyarbakir to decide on their strategy for early legislative elections
brought forward from November.
Many Kurds have become legislators in Turkey as members of mainstream parties,
but pro-Kurdish movements have failed to overcome the 10-percent bar to enter
parliament, even though they usually dominate the vote in most areas in the
southeast and routinely win the local administrations.
Fielding independent candidates may allow them to by-pass the barrier in the
elections. Once in parliament, the winning deputies can again regroup under the
DTP banner.
Turk said they would field independent candidates in areas where the DTP is
traditionally strong and back "enlightened, democratic candidates" in other
regions.
He gave no further details, but the media has tipped human rights award winner
Leyla Zana as one of the party's possible candidates.
Zana and several other Kurdish politicians entered parliament in 1991 on the
ticket of a center-left party, but they lost their seats in 1994 after the
Kurdish party, which they later joined, was outlawed for having links to armed
Kurdish rebels fighting the government.
Zana, the 1995 laureate of the European Parliament's Sakharov human rights
award, and three others spent 10 years behind bars for alleged links with armed
rebels. They were convicted on the same charge in a retrial in March, but will
not have to go back to jail.
Kurdish politicians are routinely accused of being instruments of the Kurdistan
Workers' Party (PKK), which has led a bloody separatist insurgency in the
southeast since 1984 and is listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of
the international community.
The DTP was set up in November 2005 as a successor of other Kurdish movements,
which were outlawed by the courts.
It has pledged to try to resolve the Kurdish conflict through peaceful means,
but has so far made no progress.
