Mehmet Siddik Akis, who was elected mayor of Hakkari city center 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 the appointment of the trustee and arranged demonstrations across several provinces in protest of the decision. Thousands of DEM Party supporters as well as leaders, gathered in the streets of Hakkari on Thursday.
“Until the Kurdish issue … is resolved through political dialogue on the grounds of peace and democracy, neither workers, nor laborers, nor women, nor young people, in other words, we, the people of Turkey, will be able to achieve freedom,” said Tulay Hatimogullari, DEM Party co-chair during the gathering in Hakkari.
Akis received the highest number of votes in Hakkari, obtaining around 49 percent of the vote.
Earlier this month, 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.
Ahead of the gathering in Hakkari, Turkish police were deployed in the streets to prevent the gathering as there is an ongoing ban on protests and public gatherings across the province. Hatimogullari said the deployment of the police was a “military coup.”
On Sunday, DEM Party spokesperson Aysegul Dogan called for the removal of the appointed trustee, stating that Viyan Tekce, the deputy mayor of Hakkari who is also unofficially serving as the co-mayor, should fill the role.
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.
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 under the Islamic State (ISIS) attack in 2014. The demonstrations were in solidarity with Kobane.
