Mehmet Siddik Akis, who was elected mayor of Hakkari city centre in the March 31 municipal polls on the ticket of Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), was detained by security forces last Sunday, accused of affiliation with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). He was removed from his position and replaced with a state-linked trustee.
DEM Party has objected to the trustee.
“The correct action is not to appoint a trustee, but if you do appoint a trustee, and if this is truly a temporary measure as stated by the interior ministry, we, as the DEM Party, call for the following: the trustee should immediately transfer the duties to the legitimate authority, the elected official,” DEM Party spokesperson Aysegul Dogan said during a press conference in Ankara.
Dogan said Viyan Tekce, the deputy mayor of Hakkari who is also unofficially serving as the co-mayor, should fill the role.
“We call on the authorities to respect this decision and put an end to the trustee regime,” she said.
Akis received the highest number of votes in Hakkari, obtaining around 49 percent of the vote.
On Wednesday, a court in Hakkari sentenced him to 19 years and six months imprisonment for “leading an armed terrorist organization.” He was accused of carrying out violent activities on behalf of the PKK between 2009 and 2013, reported the state-owned Anadolu Agency.
Removing Kurdish mayors and replacing them with trustees is a familiar tactic of Turkish authorities. Dozens of Kurdish mayors have been dismissed and replaced with trustees because of terror-related charges since 2016. Many of them have been sentenced to jail.
Despite a ten-day ban on holding protests, demonstrations, and public gatherings across Hakkari province, DEM Party supporters and officials have poured into the streets since the decision was made.
Dogan called on supporters in Hakkari to protest on June 13 and in Mersin on June 14. There have also been protests in Diyarbakir.
Thousands of Kurdish politicians and supporters of pro-Kurdish parties, mainly the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which has been rebranded as DEM Party, have been jailed in the last decade on PKK-linked charges. A large number of them remain behind bars.
Last month, a Turkish court concluded a ten-year-old case against dozens of Kurdish politicians for their alleged involvement in deadly protests in 2014, including Selahattin Demirtas, former co-chair of the HDP, who has been in jail since 2016. Demirtas was handed 42 years imprisonment in what is known as the Kobane case, named after the Kurdish city of Kobane in northern Syria that came underIslamic State (ISIS) attack in 2014. The demonstrations were in solidarity with Kobane.
