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Internationalists urged to rally for HDP amid new closure threat

INTERNATIONALISTS have been urged to rally in support of the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) after Turkey’s Supreme Court opened terror investigations today that could see the party shut down.

The chief prosecutor’s office in Ankara confirmed today that the activities of all political parties were being investigated and warned that if the HDP was found to have organisational links to terrorist groups, it could face closure.

It asked for the files for the indictments made against all 108 defendants in the so-called Kobane case to be sent, including those of former HDP co-chair’s Figen Yuksekdag and Selahattin Demirtas.

The indictment calls for 38 counts of life sentences without parole for all defendants in the case. They are charged with a range of offences, including 37 cases of homicide and “disrupting the unity and territorial integrity of the state.” 

The case was brought by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who accused the HDP of being responsible for the deaths after it called for indefinite protests against the government during the siege of Kobane by Isis in October 2014.

Repeated calls have been made for the closure of the HDP, led by Mr Erdogan’s junior partners in government, the neofascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Mr Erdogan consistently links the HDP to the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Its bid to liquidate the party are seen as part of a wider attempt by the regime to marginalise the Kurdish freedom struggle and erode its leadership structures and organisations, which Ms Yuksekdag’s Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP) said can only be stopped “by mobilising the masses to disrupt the foundations of fascism.” 

“All those on the side of freedom and revolution must take their positions against the new liquidation attack on HDP,” it said in an editorial of the Atilim newspaper. The ESP insisted that the focus must be shifted from statements and protests about lawyers and representatives to engaging the masses on the squares and streets of the cities. 

“Real victory can only be achieved in the real conditions of class struggle; by organising the resistance of the hungry and unemployed, the working class and urban poor who have been ruined by the pandemic; by going from street to street, neighbourhood to neighbourhood organising anti-fascist fronts in every city,” the party said.

The HDP must move from localised action to mass mobilisations and develop “a more aggressive approach” to the united struggle, it advised.

There has been an upsurge in resistance in Turkey, most notably the protests centred on Istanbul’s prestigious Bogazici University, though many are trying to downgrade this resistance to a mere battle for academic freedom rather than what is being described as a “fight against fascism.”

But the ESP said that “as the scent of rebellion hangs in the air, it calls on us all to come forward and play our part; to turn the sparks of revolt and resistance into a revolutionary inferno.”

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