Fans of Fenerbahçe, one of Turkey’s top football clubs, fervently chanted “No place for Hizbullah in the parliament” during their game against Trabzonspor last night.
The outcry from Fenerbahçe fans stems from the election of four HÜDA-PAR members as MPs from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) lists as part of President Erdoğan’s People’s Alliance. HÜDA-PAR is an Islamist right-wing party with ties to the Kurdish Hizbullah.
The Kurdish Hizbullah, not related to the Lebanese Hezbollah, was an extremist Sunni group responsible for hundreds of murders against the progressive and Kurdish opposition in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority regions during the 1990s.
The AKP had invited the HÜDA-PAR to the People’s Alliance, following an ongoing suspected appeasement policy which included the release and pardon of the group’s convicted members from prison.
The HÜDA-PAR members who were elected as deputies in the recent election had previously faced trial as Hizbullah members for multiple murders, including the abduction and murder of Konca Kuriş, a Turkish Muslim feminist researcher and writer, who was found dead in 2000, 555 days after her abduction in 1998, in the basement of a “death house” owned by the Kurdish Hizbullah.
