The residents of Diyarbakır who spoke to Mezopotamya News a day before Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s visit to the south-eastern province showed that the people of the mainly-Kurdish city are not very eager to welcome the leader of the ruling party.
“His visit is totally related to the elections and he is coming here only for the votes of the Kurdish people,” said Adem Bayrak, a resident of Diyarbakır, referring to upcoming elections in Turkey currently scheduled for June 2023. “But they can no longer fool Kurdish people. Nobody that calls him/herself a human being will go neither to welcome him or any place he will be,” he added.
“As people of Diyarbakır, we do not want Erdoğan to come here and we are not happy that he is coming,” said Mehmet İhsan Atlı, adding that nobody should be attending Erdoğan’s rally on Sunday. “We cannot accept him being hostile to Kurds and then coming to Kurdistan lands. He is attacking four parts of Kurdish soil. Just a few days ago footage of chemical weapons being used against Kurdish guerrillas became public,” Atlı said.
Another Diyarbakır resident, Mehmet Ekinci, recalled Erdoğan saying “PKK members had 5, 10, 15 children”, a comment which many understood as implying the Kurdish people as a whole. “Let’s give Erdoğan the best response by not going to the rally squares,” Ekinci said.
Barış Sağ, another resident recalled Erdoğan calling Kurds his brothers when he first came to power. “But after he became president, the cattle died, the partnership ended. Kurdish question remains unsolved,” he said.
“Erdoğan has no message to give Diyarbakır, but to Kurds he owes lots to give an account for,” Sağ said.
The president was to visit the Kurdish political movement’s stronghold last week but postponed it after a mining incident claimed the lives of 41 people. The province’s governorship and the municipality has filled Diyarbakır with billboards inviting people to Erdoğan’s rally. The governor’s office is also sending several texts to the residents to encourage them to attend the event.
The provincial head of Ministry of Education ordered the personnel from top to the bottom to attend Erdoğan’s rally, according to audio recordings shared this week. Other public institutions are also making similar efforts, Yeni Yaşam newspaper reported.
Erdoğan needs the Kurdish votes to guarantee re-election as president in upcoming polls, yet his support in Kurdish-populated provinces have been declining since the collapse of peace negotiations between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 2015 and the military operations of the Turkish army that followed.
Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have for years enjoyed a high level of support, particularly from conservative Kurdish voters in the south-eastern provinces, but recent polls suggest that the popularity of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) is on the rise.
The provincial head of the CHP claimed this month that his party will come second in parliamentary elections in Diyarbakır and will win three seats.
In the latest elections in 2018, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) received 65.5 percent of the votes in Diyarbakır and won nine seats, while the ruling AKP got the remaining three seats with 21.4 percent of the votes.
