Fréderike Geerdink
Throw back to election times this week in Turkey, as CHP leader Kılıçdaroğlu was scrutinized heavily for different reasons. Meetings are being held by popular party members without his knowledge to undermine his position, he is suing a Youtuber for ‘insulting’ him and last but not least, he made a secret deal with a far-right leader in exchange for the fascist’s support in the race to become Turkey’s president.
Especially the news about the deal between Kılıçdaroğlu and far-right Victory Party leader Özdağ was connected to Turkey’s Kurdish community. The deal was, Özdağ said in an interview, that his party would have been assigned to deliver the ministers for three ministries, among which the Interior Ministry, and the chief of intelligence agency MIT. Fascists lie all the time but in this case, Kılıçdaroğlu didn’t deny the news but just said that it was confidential.
War crimes
An outright fascist as Interior Minister and as MIT chief would have been extremely bad for the Kurdish movement. It would have meant an even more brutal crack-down of the political struggle, with more incarcerations and prosecutions, but also more war crimes in the fight against the PKK and against the autonomously governed regions in Northeast-Syria. If Özdağ would indeed have been in control of crucial positions, the expected release of former HDP co-leader Selahattin Demirtaş and other political prisoners, which were expected after the defeat of Erdoğan, might not have happened.
Such an agreement is, we can’t put it differently, a stab in the back of the Kurdish movement, which ran in the elections under the banner of the Yeşil Sol Party and supported Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy. We don’t know what kind of agreements were made between Kılıçdaroğlu and the YSP’s leadership about, for example, the release of political prisoners, but any deal with Özdağ would have counted stronger for sure. The Turkish public, after all, would rally behind him, not behind a ‘terrorist’ like Demirtaş and other Kurds. Özdağ became popular with his dirty incitement of Turks against Syrian refugees and it would be easy for him to turn his poison against Kurds.
Stamina
Still, even with this news, I think it was not a wrong decision of the YSP to support Kılıçdaroğlu. We can’t say “They should have known the CHP couldn’t be trusted” because I think they did know. It was the YSP’s goal to end the one man rule of Erdoğan, and supporting Kılıçdaroğlu was the way to try to do that. They knew very well, of course, that the struggle for freedom and democracy was going to require a lot more of their stamina than just voting Erdoğan out of the palace.
The throwback of this week confirms that. The resistance that is going on against Kılıçdaroğlu’s leadership, of which the popular mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoğlu, is a part, lays bare a power struggle that has been going on for some time already within the CHP. During the elections, they stood together, but everybody knows Kılıçdaroğlu is not seen as the CHP’s future. So what did Kılıçdaroğlu do? Soon after the elections, he tightened his grip on the party by changing some structures and rules.
It’s in line with Kılıçdaroğlu’s reaction to a Youtuber calling him a ‘leblebi’, meaning ‘roasted chickpea-head’, and ‘somebody with dementia’. Did the CHP leader shrug that of because of freedom of speech and because he had promised during the elections that if he were president, insulting him would be fine? No he didn’t: he’s sueing the man and demands 200,000 lira (almost 7000 euros) in compensation. If I were a free speech defender called a leblebi and a ‘person with dementia’, I’d laugh at the first and condemn the second because diseases shouldn’t be used as insults. The last thing I’d do is call a lawyer and take it to a court that is under the control of a dictator I claimed to stand up against.
New light
This all tells you a lot about the DNA of the CHP, the party once founded by Atatürk. Of course, it’s not the party of the 1920s any more, but changing DNA is more complicated than changing the appearance. Especially if the ones in charge aren’t really willing to face the fact that the DNA has some fundamental flaws that will keep producing the same unfavourable outcomes over and over again.
These flaws form the foundations of the CHP, but also of the state. One homeland, one nation, one language, one religion. To break that down, the one leader regime had to be tackled first. Whether the Yeşil Sol Party’s strategy to achieve that was the right one, remains to be seen – the results of the consultations with members that are being held will be interesting for sure. But this week’s developments don’t really put Yeşil Sol Party’s choice to support Kılıçdaroğlu’s candidacy in a new light. Maybe that’s why they haven’t reacted to the Kılıçdaroğlu – Özdağ deal at all. They know very well the state’s mentality was and is the hardest nut to crack.
Fréderike Geerdink is an independent journalist. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her acclaimed weekly newsletter Expert Kurdistan.
