RSS Feed
July 8th, 2017 
Awake Goy 
nsnbc : The jailed co-chairman of Turkey’s leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) refused to attend a court hearing in the capital Ankara on Friday after police told him he would have to be handcuffed. Prosecutors want MPs Demirtas jailed for 142 years and Yükesdag for up to 83 years on charges of terrorist propaganda.
Demirtas – 2016 (archives)
Selahattin Demirtas, held at a prison in the northwestern Turkish province of Edirne, had first asked to be present at the hearing but then refused to travel to Ankara in handcuffs, stated his party, the leftist HDP which stands particularly strong in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish areas. In their statement released on Friday, the HDP said “(Demirtas) stated he was still a lawmaker, that his immunity was still intact, and that he would not attend the hearing if he were put in handcuffs.”
The HDP reported that the prison gendarme told Demirtas they could not take him to Ankara without handcuffs, upon which he returned to his room at the prison. HDP lawyers reportedly left the courtroom in Ankara in protest, while the public inside the court applauded the decision to handcuff Demirtas. Police dispersed a crowd outside the court.
More than a dozen HDP lawmakers, including the party’s former co-leader and MP Figen Yüksekdag, have been jailed, mostly due to alleged links with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), following the military mystery coup in July 2016. While the coup was blamed on the self-exiled Islamic cleric Fetullah Gülen and his Hizmet network, the post-coup purges and arrests targeted prominent Kurdish leaders including many prominent HDP members.
Serpil Kemalbay, who replaced Yüksekdag after her arrest, told reporters “This is an act of civilian coup, Selahattin Demirtas is the chairman of HDP and a lawmaker. … It is just another dimension of the ongoing injustice, and totally unacceptable. … We are protesting this use of force against our chairman and call for freedom and justice for all”.
Figen Yükesdag (archives)
Prosecutors want Demirtas jailed for 142 years and Yüksekdag for up to 83 years on charges of terrorist propaganda. Demirtas was sentenced in February for “insulting the Turkish people, the government and state institutions”. The arrests handicapped the second-largest opposition party before an April 16 referendum in which Turks narrowly approved constitutional changes sharply boosting President Tayyip Erdogan’s powers and transforming Turkey into an executive presidential system – some say with a rubber-stamp parliament.
The HDP is the third largest party in the Turkish parliament but a dozen of its MPs have been arrested, in what supporters say is punishment for daring to oppose Erdogan. The HDP criticized the AKP government and Erdogan, among others, for unilaterally ending peace talks with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party and for resuming the armed crackdown against Kurds in Turkey – and beyond.
The HDP says as many as 5,000 of its members have been detained as part of a crackdown that followed last year’s failed coup, and which rights groups say targets dissent. Turkey’s government has accused the HDP of having links to the PKK, a charge that the HDP denies. The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population.
Abdullah Öcalan (archives)
A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathize with PKK rebels and Abdullah Öcalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974, and has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers. Öcalan is being held in prison and denied fundamental legal and human rights. Ankara’s long arm could also be felt when Facebook, globally, blocked an article about Ocalan’s imprisonment (but one van read it HERE).
Since July 2015, Turkey initiated a controversial military campaign against the PKK in the country’s southeastern Kurdish region after Ankara ended a two-year ceasefire agreement. Since the beginning of the campaign, Ankara has imposed several round-the-clock curfews, preventing civilians from fleeing regions where the military operations are being conducted. Activists have accused the Turkish security forces of causing huge destruction to urban centres and killing Kurdish civilians. In March 2017, the Turkish security forces accused by UN of committing serious abuses during operations against Kurdish militants in the nation’s southeast.
CH/L – nsnbc 07.07.2017
Source Article from https://nsnbc.me/2017/07/07/turkeys-jailed-hdp-co-chair-facing-142-years-refused-to-attend-court-hearing-in-handcuffs/
Posted in 
Tags: 
