Turkey unseats Kurdish mayors in crackdown after peace proposal
Turkey dismissedthe pro-Kurdish mayors of three southeastern cities on Monday for alleged ties to Kurdish militants, just two weeks after President Tayyip Erdogan’s main ally made a proposal for ending the militants’ 40-year insurgency in the southeast.
Turkey’s interior ministry said it had replaced the mayors from the pro-Kurdish DEM Party in the cities of Mardin, Batman and Halfeti with government-appointed administrators.
The move, which the ministry said targeted supporters of the outlawed militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), recalled past crackdowns on Kurdish politicians.
The DEM, the third largest party in Turkey’s parliament, condemned the dismissals, saying they stood in sharp contradiction with the recent overture from Ankara that had pointed to a possible peace process in the southeast.
“It is a repetition of the bankrupt attacks that have been continuing since 1994 to eliminate the Kurdish people from democratic politics,” DEM said in a statement.
“While we were expecting a hand to be extended for a solution and peace, the will of the people was violated.”
The three dismissed mayors deny various charges against them and are appealing existing convictions. Dozens of pro-Kurdish mayors from DEM’s predecessor party were removed in the past from their posts on similar charges.
In June, the state unseated a DEM mayor in the southeast’s Hakkari province, two months after local elections where the party won 75 municipalities.
Last month Erdogan ally Devlet Bahceli, leader of Turkey’s Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), suggested that PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, jailed since 1999, come to parliament and announce the end of the conflict in southeast Turkey and the PKK’s surrender in exchange for the possibility of his release.
CRACKDOWN ANNIVERSARY
The latest dismissals come on the anniversary of a crackdown eight years ago, when pro-Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtas, still jailed, and other top figures in his party were arrested.
It was the third time that Mardin’s mayor Ahmet Turk, 82, had been dismissed after being elected. He was one of many Kurdish politicians convicted in May for instigating large-scale protests in 2014.
Last week, a mayor from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) was arrested after prosecutors accused him of membership of the PKK, designated as a terrorist group by NATO member Turkey and its Western allies.
“The government has lost control and is wavering inconsistently,” Istanbul’s CHP Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, seen as a key potential rival to Erdogan, said on X.
After a peace process collapsed in 2015, the PKK conflict entered its bloodiest phase. Thousands of pro-Kurdish party members, including lawmakers, were jailed on militancy charges in an accompanying crackdown.
Kurds make up around a fifth of Turkey’s population of 85 million.