The Ethnic State Of Turkey asks Kurdish
party to end membership of former lawmakers, others
The Associated Press
Thursday, May 17, 2007
ANKARA, Turkey: A prosecutor's
office on Thursday ordered a Kurdish political party to end the membership of
lawmakers imprisoned for ties to separatist Kurdish guerrillas, and several
others, ahead of elections in July.
The Democratic Society Party is seeking to
circumvent a rule that parties must gain a minimum of 10 percent of votes before
they can enter parliament by fielding independent candidates who would then
regroup as a party after winning seats. The party won 6.22 percent of the votes
in the previous elections in 2002.
The prosecutor's office of the country's
Appeals Court ordered the party to end the membership of 116 people, including
prominent politician Leyla Zana, for having criminal records, or risk being shut
down. It also said that they cannot assume other positions in the party's
structure.
A day earlier, a separate prosecutor asked a
court to sentence Zana to five years in prison for speaking respectfully of the
imprisoned Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan.
Zana and three other former lawmakers have
spent 10 years in prison for links to separatist Kurdish guerrillas. They were
ejected from Parliament in 1994 at the zenith of an insurgency by Kurdish
separatists.
The return of Kurdish lawmakers to Parliament
could stir fresh tensions with nationalists who view them as a threat to the
Turkish state.
It was not clear if Zana or her friends would
be able to run for Parliament again. The prosecutor's office on Thursday said
the country's electorate board would have the final say on the issue.
Also on Thursday, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer
approved a decision by Parliament that makes it harder for the Kurdish party to
organize politically.
Parliament amended the electoral law earlier
this month and scrapped the right of independent candidates to have separate
ballot papers from those used to choose candidates running for elections under
party lists.
Previously, the independent candidates could
stand outside polling stations and hand over ballot papers with their names
already inscribed to voters, giving them a slight advantage over the political
parties' candidates.
Literacy is low and some people don't speak
Turkish in the relatively poor, Kurdish-dominated southeast. Voters in the past
had found it easier to pop an independent candidate's ballot paper into the
envelope than to select a candidate from a long, complicated ballot paper
listing all of the parties.
Still, the party says it hopes to win around 30
seats if independent candidates are elected to the Parliament.
Kurdish politicians elected to the Parliament
would have a higher political profile to push for cultural, social and economic
rights for the country's Kurds, who are not recognized as an official minority.
Kurdish parties in Turkey are often accused of
ties to the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has recently
escalated hit-and-run attacks from bases in northern Iraq and inside Turkey.
DEHAP, the predecessor of today's Kurdish party
dissolved itself in 2005 as prosecutors tried to close it on charges of being a
focal point for separatist activities and having ties to Kurdish guerrillas. The
constitutional court has closed down four previous pro-Kurdish parties,
including DEHAP's predecessor, in 2003.
The conflict between autonomy-seeking Kurdish
guerrillas and the government has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of
people since the guerrillas took up arms in 1984.
Under EU pressure, Turkey recently granted
Kurds limited rights for broadcasts and education in the Kurdish language, but
critics say the measures do not go far enough.
