Two other opposition parties slam premier

ANKARA - Hürriyet Daily News

Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. DAILY NEWS photo, Selahattin SÖNMEZ

The prime minister’s attitude in the controversy over the botched air strike at Uludere is another indication that he holds personal responsibility for the 34 civilian deaths and the issue will haunt him unless he offers a formal apology, opposition leaders argued yesterday.

“The Uludere incident will not leave Erdoğan in peace unless he extends a sincere apology. The government bears responsibility for this tragedy. The prime minister will eventually be held accountable for it. There will no lapse of time for it,” Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the head of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), said at his party’s parliamentary group meeting.

Kılıçdaroğlu also dismissed Erdoğan’s defense of the conduct of the police who failed to stop the two suicide bombers in Kayseri last week even though they tailed them for some time. “Civilians were killed at Uludere as if they were terrorists, but terrorists at Kayseri were not stopped, as if they were civilians,” he said.

Kılıçdaroğlu also slammed Erdoğan’s description of abortion as a murder equivalent to the Uludere killings. “How can a prime minister associate abortion with the killing of 34 citizens? Probably he was going to use another word, but Uludere has been embedded in his subconscious,” he said.

Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) co-chair Gültan Kışanak, for her part, said Erdoğan’s comments earlier in the day that suggested a link between the 34 slain smugglers and Kurdish militants were yet more proof that “he personally was behind the massacre” at Uludere.

‘Ill-bred language’

Erdoğan’s description of the BDP as “necrophiles” is “the most ill-bred language of Turkish political history” and an insult to the memory of the victims of the errant strike, Kışanak said. The AKP is “the most hypocritical, treacherous ruling party ever,” she added, insisting that the government should name the person who ordered the raid.

Parliament Speaker Cemil Çiçek was also a target of CHP and BDP criticism yesterday, after he said he had exhausted all means in efforts to hammer out a cross-party compromise that would secure the release of the eight jailed opposition lawmakers.

“What more am I supposed to do? Shall I lay down outside Parliament and start a death fast?” Çiçek told the Vatan newspaper. His latest initiative for a legal amendment was spurned by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which said the courts should decide the matter.

“If the Parliament Speaker says he is helpless, it means there is a dictatorship. All state institutions are being operated by the prime minister’s fascist administration. The state has lost its legitimacy,” Kışanak said.

Kılıçdaroğlu, for his part, argued that the AKP had rejected the formula agreed by the three opposition parties at the expense of discrediting Çiçek. “Mr. Speaker, they [the AKP] humiliated you. You cannot carry on in your post at ease. You have no power, you have confessed it,” he said. k HDN