Peace in the Middle East depends on the two big resistance movements in the region coming together, the newly elected co-chair of the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (HEDEP) Tülay Hatimoğulları said in a debut interview on Mezopotamya Agency.
“The fate of Palestinians and Kurds are similar in many aspects,” Hatimoğulları said. “Both in terms of the oppression conditions, and the way they have been left on their own by the peoples of the region.”
Turkish airstrikes were targeting Kurdish-held northern Syria even as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called for peace in Palestine, Hatimoğulları said.
“If the Arab world stood strongly with Palestine, this war and conflict would not have happened. Again, if Kurds had a strong national unity, the situation would be much different,” she added.
The Middle East has faced a divide-and-conquer policy in the colonial and post-colonial period, according to the HEDEP co-chair, who herself is an Arab from Turkey’s Hatay province on the Syrian border.
“Solving the issues in the region will be a strong response to the imperialist colonial mindset,” she said. “To solve these issues, the Palestinian Intifada and the Kurdish Serhildan must come together, stand shoulder to shoulder.”
Hatimoğulları proposed democratic confederalism, an ideology developed by Abdullah Öcalan during his time behind bars as the founding leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), as a “unique recipe” for solution to the region’s problems.
“Is it that difficult to create a land where everybody speaks their own language, live their own religion freely, and nobody is looked down upon?” the co-chair asked. “If democratic confederalism takes root in these lands, our problems can be overcome.”
“There are wars in our region that have continued for decades. This is the path to end them,” she said.