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Leyla Guven slams opposition silence over genocide of Kurds

JAILED former Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) MP Leyla Guven has delivered a broadside to Turkey’s second-largest party for its continued silence over the genocide of the Kurdish people.

In a letter sent from prison today, she accused the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) of “only demanding justice for its own party” and said that, by turning its back on the country’s sizeable Kurdish minority, it is complicit in the government’s oppression.

“If history one day happens to calls the [ruling Justice and Development Party] AKP to account for the suffering it inflicted on the Kurdish people, especially Roboski, it will ask which party was in the main opposition while all these were happening,” she wrote.

The Kurdish politician warned of “double standards” after the Constitutional Court ruled last week that the rights of CHP legislator Ennis Berberoglu had been violated when he was stripped of his parliamentary immunity for a second time last June.

Investigations are under way into allegations that he breached national security after he was accused of leaking information on Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation (MIT) shipping weapons to jihadists in Syria.

He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2017 but continued to serve as an MP until last summer, when his parliamentary status was revoked at the same time as Ms Guven’s.

He was released soon afterwards on health grounds and was reinstated as an MP last week after an Istanbul court ordered a retrial.

By contrast, Ms Guven, who is also co-chair of the Democratic Society Congress (DTK), a coalition of organisations that campaign for Kurdish autonomy, was jailed for 23 years and three months in December on trumped-up terror charges.

She said that it was clear that the law does not apply equally in Turkey, with herself and others punished “not because we are guilty, but because we are Kurdish.”

But Ms Guven, who stayed in the country to face her persecutors, said that despite the oppression, “we would rather stay in prisons with our dignity” and continue the fight against “the fascist AKP”government. 

The HDP has been under relentless pressure from the Turkish state, with some 20,000 of its members detained since 2016, 10,000 of whom have been jailed, along with 200 elected officials and at least seven MPs.

New constitutional proposals are believed to be being prepared by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP and its junior partners, the neofascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), with the intention of shutting down the HDP.

Last month, the Morning Star NUJ chapel awarded Ms Guven honorary membership and called on national, regional and local union branches and trades councils to do the same.

Messages can be sent to Ms Guven in prison by emailing [email protected]. They will be translated and posted to her.

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