The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) organised the first session of a number of meetings in Turkey’s southeastern city of Diyarbakır (Amed) that are planned to take place until Wednesday, MA reported.
With the meetings entitled “Let us get organised, defeat fascism and break the isolation,” the HDP has sought to meet with members from other parties and democratic forces to determine a new road map and lines of struggle that can be jointly taken during the forthcoming period.
Tayyip Temel, the HDP’s MP for Van (Wan) and its vice-chair, spoke during the first meeting and explained the goals of the meetings. “As long as the Kurds are not free, there will be no democracy in Turkey. What kind of a policy shall we conduct in the face of this fact? What shall we do against the closure case against the HDP? On which line of struggle shall we proceed against the prison isolation conditions that exist and the prison hunger strike? We will discuss all these matters,” he said.
Temel stated that Kurdish people have for a considerable period of time had to deal with multiple attacks being conducted against them at the same time. “Kurdish people and Mr. Abdullah Öcalan are under heavy isolation. The attacks targeting Kurdish people are not limited in scope but take place throughout the four parts of Kurdistan. They have also put into practice a new policy, targeting the HDP. They have tried all possible ways, but the HDP has not taken a single step back.”
Temel shared his view that the HDP offers a ‘third way’ to politics which remains otherwise stuck in a deadlock between two political poles, led by the Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
“You know Turkey is arranged in such a way that one feels obliged to respond to either of the two poles. One pole, the National Alliance, is led by the AKP and the other, the People’s Alliance, is led by the CHP. The biggest problem and the joint characteristic of both is that they have handed over their will and their initiative to the nationalists and the racists of Turkey,” he said.
“That is why, here, the value and the importance of the HDP and of the block that the HDP represents, emerges,” he noted. Temel appealed to the opposition forces in Turkey and stressed that the HDP plans to walk together only with those parties that defend an approach that advocates a democratic solution to the Kurdish question in Turkey.
“The people tell us everywhere we go that we should not be moving together with any political power that does not defend the democratic solution of the Kurdish question,” he said. “The HDP and the Democracy Alliance the HDP formed has no business with those political powers that do not give their word and do not commit to the democratic solution of the Kurdish question.”
