Establishing permanent peace with AKP government not easy work, HDP co-head says

ISTANBUL

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Establishing permanent peace and ensuring democracy by working with today’s government is not easy work, Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-head Selahattin Demirtaş has said. 

Even if negotiations in the peace process would continue for 50 years, it is hard to establish a permanent peace with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, which has a shrinking and regressive understanding of democracy, Demirtaş said during a live television program on private broadcaster CNNTürk on Jan. 18.

“Expecting a solution to the Kurdish bid and the democracy problem ongoing for 100 years in three or four months [until the upcoming elections] would be a fantasy,” he added.

Demirtaş also touched on unrest in the southeastern district of Cizre, which has risen sharply with the recent killings of youths, accusing the government of implementing a policy of tension in the region.

“There are powers embedded in the government which have been trying to begin a conflict that can break the peace process for a long time. But these are not powers unknown by the AKP or formed despite the government,” he said. “The government is using this as a policy of controlled tension. I don’t see what happened in Cizre as a move against the AKP.”

“The government wants to send a message. It probably says ‘I can hold these powers of democracy as a sword above the public if I wish. Don’t trust yourself that much. I can mobilize such powers whenever I want. You cannot do anything,’” he said.

Demirtaş also said that the relationship between the government and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was only the distance between phone calls, referring to the recovering of a captured non-commissioned officer, as well as 49 people taken hostage in Mosul, from the jihadists.

He accused the government of tolerating those who were determined to be jihadists by allowing them to cross into Syria with touristic visas, saying that almost all of the militants of al-Nusra and ISIL arrived in Syria via Turkey.

The suicide bomber who hit Istanbul’s touristic site of Sultanahmet was covered-up by government officials because she was a Salafi, Demirtaş said, adding that the reaction would be louder if the assailant had been a member of the outlawed Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C).