ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Turkish government on Friday sacked two more Kurdish mayors, days after they were sentenced to over six years in prison following convictions on terror-related charges.
The interior ministry announced that the two mayors from Tunceli province (known to Kurds as Dersim) - Cevdet Konak, mayor of Tunceli city, and Mustafa Sarigul, district mayor of Ovacik (Pulur) - were removed from their positions and replaced with state-appointed trustees.
Konak, a member of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), and Sarigul, from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), were both sentenced to six years and three months in prison by a court on Wednesday for alleged links with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
They were voted into their positions during the March local elections.
“The fascist image, racist image, and invading image we are seeing here was shown to Dersim that day," Konak told Rudaw in front of his office on Friday, referring to the day he was sentenced.
He said that he will appeal the decision.
In protest of their sacking, DEM Party supporters gathered at the Tunceli mayor's office. Security forces have surrounded the building and there were clashes.
DEM Party said if the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) "believes the trustee coup will break our party, force people to abandon their political choices, and make society accept this injustice, they are gravely mistaken. Just as before, they will be defeated by the will of the people."
CHP Leader Ozgur Ozel said the replacement of both mayors with trustees is "a theft of national will that has not even been disguised."
He said that Sarigul was targeted for attending a funeral in 2012 and expressed his surprise that this has been treated as a "crime."
The politician promised to "resist this lawlessness, as we do against all attacks on elected mayors. We will not surrender this nation to those who put their own interests above Turkey's."
Birsen Orhan, who shares the mayorship position with Konak in a co-leadership system, predicted the government would install an administrator once his colleague was convicted.
“It seems that the next process is preparation for the trustee. We all clearly see that this decision is a political coup,” he said in a video posted on X.
The Turkish government has turned up the heat on Kurdish politicians, especially the DEM Party and its elected mayors. In June, a court sentenced the party’s mayor in Hakkari (Colemerg), Mehmet Siddik Akis, to 19.5 years in prison for alleged affiliation with the PKK. Akis was removed from his position days before the court ruling and was replaced by a state-appointed trustee.
Kurdish mayor Ahmet Ozer of Istanbul’s Esenyurt district was arrested in late October because of alleged PKK links and was quickly replaced with a trustee.
International rights groups have slammed Turkey for removing the mayors.
"Denying hundreds of thousands of voters their chosen local government elected representatives and replacing them with the government’s own appointees not only undermines the democratic process, but violates the right to free and fair elections,” Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said earlier this month.
He said that successive governments of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan "have adopted this method before, abusing their powers and smearing mayors with the charge of terrorism.”
Marc Cools, president of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe, on November 4 expressed his "grave concern" over the removal of four mayors.
Updated at 11:23pm
