ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Veteran Kurdish politician and mayor of Mardin Ahmet Turk said on Friday that the recent controversial court rulings aim to silence Kurdish politicians in Turkey, adding they had expected such heavy sentences.
Turk, who was elected the mayor of the Mardin metropolis during the March local elections, was sentenced by a Turkish court to ten years in prison for his alleged involvement in 2014 protests in support of the Kurdish city of Kobane in northeastern Syria (Rojava).
The court also sentenced former co-chairs of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtas, to 42 years in prison, and Figen Yuksekdag to 30 years and three months, for their alleged involvement in the protests.
“They want to eradicate the achievements of the Kurdish people, they want to silence Kurdish politicians, they want to destroy the demands of the Kurdish people,” Turk told Rudaw in an interview a day after the ruling.
“We have been active in politics for many years, and we always wanted brotherhood between people. We hope that the Kurdish people enjoy freedom and equality; that is our aim,” he added.
Turk said they had expected such heavy sentences and warned that Turkey was drifting further from democracy and human rights each day.
In October 2014, Kobane was under attack by the Islamic State (ISIS). HDP now rebranded as the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), called for street protests to ask the Turkish government to open a corridor allowing military aid from the Kurdistan Region to reach the Kurdish city. The protests turned violent, and 51 people were killed and hundreds more injured.
Days after the start of the protests, Demirtas held a press conference in Amed where he criticized the violence while remaining firm in his support for the protesters. The demonstrations ended on his call.
“We criticize the policies against the Kurdish people… this policy against the Kurdish people does not recognize the will of the Kurdish people, and we are standing against that,” Turk said, stressing that such policies are not in the interest of Kurds and Turks living in Turkey.
Twenty provinces across Turkey have banned protests and social gatherings for four days following the controversial ruling.
On Friday, DEM Party spokesperson Aysegul Dogan announced that the party will arrange demonstrations in Adana, Diyarbakir, and Istanbul on Saturday, despite the ban.
The court ruling comes less than two months after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost the local polls. He has blamed the DEM Party for his party’s failure in metropolises like Istanbul, claiming that the pro-Kurdish party supported the opposition candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu.
Erdogan said earlier this month that he sees a political "softening" in Turkey following his election loss.
“We have been hearing normalization and softening messages from the government circles in these days, but today the HDP, Kurdish politics, and democrats are being attempted to be erased from the political scene,” DEM Party Co-chair Tuncer Bakirhan told reporters in Istanbul after the hearing.
Masallah Dekak contributed to this article
