The Kurdish freedom movement needs to be vigilant and devise new plans against the Turkish government’s efforts to boost oppression and violence during and after the elections, said Duran Kalkan, executive committee member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on Saturday.
According to Kalkan, any relaxed attitude assuming that politics instead of violence will dominate Turkey in the coming months could be very costly, as Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the alliance between the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) indicate that they have other plans.
“This reaches different dimensions. Firstly they want to change the demographics. They want to disperse the patriotic and democratic population. Secondly, they want to create new wealth, and they are using all their power to that end. This is the issue they work on with the utmost speed. Thirdly, they want to maintain their system of governance,” Kalkan told Fırat News Agency.
“Things have become more serious now, those who expected that the elections would be easy, that the AKP/MHP coalition would lose and that the government would change, now see that it will not be so. We have warned numerous times that this issue is not that easy. There is no point in waiting for Tayyip Erdoğan to leave office,” the leading PKK member said.
The Turkish government is seeking ways to strengthen its dictatorship by using the earthquake as an opportunity to oppress the democratic struggles in Turkey, he added.
According to Kalkan, the AKP/MHP coalition will use every method possible to win elections and will revert to violence-based methods if they lose on 14 May.
“In that regard, they will increase their attacks. What will happen to Turkey is totally uncertain at the moment. If resistance against this rises, its consequence will be an even more intensive, violent war. Such a war will not be limited to within the borders of Turkey, it will spread to whole of the Middle East,” he said.
Kalkan recalled that the PKK stopped its armed activities following the February 6 earthquakes, but that the Turkish government has not stopped its attacks for one moment.
“Therefore we need to evaluate the situation seriously. This is absolutely not a situation where the politics have become dominant and there is a soft process ongoing, nobody should be mistaken about that. There should not be even a tiny bit of relaxation anywhere, we should carry on preparations and efforts for organising, while we become a power of the struggle by devising new plans rapidly,” Kalkan said.
Kalkan said that the PKK should succeed in preparations for a possible new phase of its struggle.
“And for that, we need innovative ideas, we need to develop novel forms of struggle and organisations for it, we need to renew, change and restructure ourselves. And on that basis, we should also need to change our understanding, our style,” he said.
