Berxwedan Jiyane — Resistance is Life in Kurmanci — has long been the slogan of the Kurdish movement and was heard most powerfully last week by Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) Leyla Guven as she was carted off to prison by Turkish state goons.

Like so many of her comrades, Guven was stripped of her parliamentary status along with Diyarbakir MP Musa Farisogullari and the pair were detained just hours later, with the HDP warning that the latest move by the Turkish state amounted to a political coup.

She has since been released, but Musa remains behind bars. And it is easy to see why the HDP makes such claims amid speculation the party may be shut down by the state.

Founded in 2012, the HDP brought together a broad coalition of Turkish and Kurdish left organisations including the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), Green-Left, and the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP).

It was born from the People’s Democracy Congress, whose participants also included trade unions such as the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (Disk).

From its inception the party attempted to build a bridge to overcome the Turkish-Kurdish divide.

It tested its electoral programme for the first time in the 2014 local elections and presidential election, where its candidate and then party co-chair Selahattin Demirtas polled nearly 10 per cent of the national vote.

During that campaign, Demirtas made a point of appealing beyond the Kurdish vote.

“You are not only Turkish or Kurdish,” he said, “not solely Armenian, Arab, Circassian, Georgian, or Bosniak. You are all of them. You are not only Alevi, Sunni, Syriac, or Yazidi. You are not solely Jewish, Hebrew or Christian. You are all.”

During a campaign characterised by large rallies and a broadening base of support, HDP deputy chairwoman Haltice Altinisik summed up the party’s approach to pluralism: “Please remember — even if we are perceived to be a pro-Kurdish party, we are also pro-women, pro-Alevi, pro-Christian, pro-Muslim, and pro-peace.

“When you listen to Demirtas, I believe you hear he is in support of the working class, the oppressed. So being a Kurd is just one of the identities. We aim to unite the left in Turkey.”

The party puts forward a reformist but transformative programme including support for workers’ rights in a context where trade unions are regularly repressed and workplace conditions are unsafe. 

It has raised the demand for a new constitution in Turkey to democratise the country, give representation and rights to its minorities and impose safeguards against authoritarianism.

But it is for those reasons that the HDP represents a threat to the authoritarian rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The largest opposition party in parliament, if it can really be called such, is the Peoples’ Republican Party (CHP) — the party of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

But in reality the CHP is a nationalist petty bourgeois party at best, consistently voting with the government and supporting its illegal wars and occupation of Kurdish populated areas both inside Turkey and across its borders in Syria and Iraq.

The HDP has come under attack since its foundation, with an escalation of the oppression since its first MPs were elected in 2015.

Since then some 15,000 members have been detained, with 6,000 of them jailed.

More than 200 elected officials are behind bars along with seven MPs.

After Erdogan’s humiliation in last year’s local elections, losing the capital Ankara and being crushed in Istanbul — the jewel in the crown and the financial centre of Turkey — he again moved against the HDP.

At the time of writing, government-appointed trustees have taken over 51 of the 65 municipalities won by the HDP, with 21 elected mayors in prison on trumped-up charges of terrorism — an all-encapsulating charge levelled by Erdogan to silence opponents.

Thousands tuned in to a Zoom meeting on Thursday titled “HDP, State Repression and the War on Kurds” hosted by the revitalised Kurdistan Solidarity Campaign (KSC).

They heard debate and discussion about the way forward for the movement, with HDP women’s commission spokeswoman and MP for Batman Ayse Basaran, HDP executive member Alp Altinors, TSSA national women’s chair Sarah-Jane McDonough and former Aslef president Tosh McDonald.

The central message of the meeting was the demand to “break the silence” and build a campaign of international solidarity based in the labour and trade-union movement.

McDonough, who is also a KSC executive member, insisted that Kurdish solidarity must be as visible and high-profile as the Palestinian and Cuban campaigns are in our movement, and lamented the silence as our sisters and brothers come under attack at the hands of the Turkish state.

“HDP is the key to unlocking democracy in Turkey and also stopping Erdogan’s wars and genocide against Kurds, both domestically and in his ethnic cleansing operation in northern Syria.

“We cannot and will not be passive and must support all those fighting for freedom and democracy in Turkey,” she said.

KSC launched a Free HDP campaign, part of which seeks to twin councils in Britain to HDP run municipalities in Turkey.

MPs are also encouraged to twin with their HDP counterparts with a similar scheme for councillors.

It is calling on trade unions, CLPs, trades council and other organisations to invite KSC speakers to meetings and send urgent messages of solidarity to HDP and join the demand for Britain to stop relations with Turkey, including the halting of arms sales, until all political prisoners are released.

People are also asked to:

Sign an urgent statement: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfv-jXxCQG3noF-XL05gJ_-BWyhTD4-V_xG_ERy-_HSzkaUkA/viewform

Write to their MP https://docs.google.com/document/d/1neTaCJulrCoUD7J4JHsHH_l7-NJMpwWDmm1DmJ_i114/edit?usp=sharing

Affiliate to KSC: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eQ0Z8OUmR1yzi4K7fZ6x2OpL3_zwnLox/view?usp=sharing   .

All forms can also be found on the website www.kurdistansolidaritycampaign.org and for more information on how to become involved email [email protected]

Letters can be sent to Musa Farisollugari at: Diyarbakır D Tipi Cezaevi, C Blok, 8/4, Diyarbakir, Turkey.