Israel Matzav

Kurdish summer on the way in Turkey?

Will the Arab spring be followed by a Kurdish summer in Turkey and other countries that include parts of Kurdistan? If Turkey continues to make dumb moves like this one (Hat Tip: Joshua I), I'd bet on it.

Turkey’s High Election Board ruled yesterday that the 12 Kurdish candidates were ineligible to run in the June 12 election due to previous criminal convictions. The ruling meant the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party may boycott the vote, party official Selahattin Demirtas said, according to the state- run Anatolia news agency.

A boycott would raise the probability that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party may win a two-thirds majority in parliament at the election, allowing it to pass legislation including constitutional amendments unopposed, Inan Demir, chief economist at Istanbul-based Finansbank AS, said in an e-mailed report today.

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The election board’s decision “will lead to heightened tensions in the long-troubled southeastern region, with a likely end to a ceasefire” by militant Kurdish separatists affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, Demir said.

Peace and Democracy is the only serious challenger to the governing party in the mainly-Kurdish southeast, Erdogan said in an interview, Milliyet newspaper reported yesterday.

Parliament speaker and ruling party member Mehmet Ali Sahin said today that the election board’s ruling “weakens parliament’s mission” and should be reviewed, Anatolia reported.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, called for an emergency session in parliament to find a solution and to debate the 10 percent vote threshold for parties to win seats in parliament, according to televised comments from Ankara.

The banned politicians, who are allied to Peace and Democracy, were running as independent candidates to circumvent the 10 percent threshold.

The politicians won’t be able to name substitutes, Hasan Gerceker, head of Turkey’s Supreme Court, told Anatolia.

“If they were running for a party, then maybe they could run a new candidate,” he said. “Because they’re running as independents, I don’t think that’s possible.”

For a lot of Kurds, this could be the last straw.

We see that the “Arab Spring” has begun to affect Turkey indirectly.

Discussions over “a Turkey/AKP model for Arabs” due to the “Arab Spring” have put Turkish democracy into an X-ray machine, and made more visible the weaknesses, discrepancies, but more importantly, the course of events leading in the direction of authoritarianism.

After all, if many in the West say, “A country where journalists are arrested and where press freedom is spirited off cannot be presented as a model to Arab countries,” it is not Arabs but Turkey that loses.

What’s more important, however, is the historic overlapping between “masses in the Middle East turning into actors,” and “popularization of the Kurdish question.” Plus, any kind of cause and demands defended by the popularization in consequence of the “Arab Spring” in the region become legitimate in the eye of the world.

Popularization has now become a machine of legitimacy.

Fierce struggles between those who skillfully use this machine and those who stand against it wait for the Middle East.

Expected victory of the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, in the June 12 elections will not change the fact that the Kurdish question is the “Achilles’ heel” of Turkey.

Even more so, the Kurdish question has become more sensitive “Achilles’ heel” of Turkey because of the “Arab Spring.”

Hmmm.

Labels: AKP, Arab spring, Turkey, Turkish Kurds

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:44 AM