Turkey's Deputy PM continues to lambast Kurdish problem-focused HDP

ANKARA

DHA Photo

Deputy Prime Minister Yalçın Akdoğan has continued to slam the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), accusing it of being “intolerant and closed to criticism.”

“'Shut up. Don’t talk' is the favorite discourse of some HDP people,” Akdoğan said on his Twitter account on June 9.

“Will those, who came from mountains, silence those in vineyards?” he also asked, in reference to outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) members in the Kandil Mountains of northern Iraq.

“[The] HDP cannot be democratic even [if] they win as many votes as they want. Because they are intolerant and closed to criticism,” Akdoğan said.
“[The] HDP cannot be democratic even [if] they win as many votes as they want. Because they are intolerant and closed to criticism,” Akdoğan said.

The deputy prime minister had earlier said the HDP can “only shoot the movie” of the Kurdish peace process, speaking a day after the general election delivered a hung parliament.

“The HDP can only make the movie of the peace process from now on. Peace does not come by saying 'peace, peace.' If they got 13 percent of the votes, they should call on Kandil [Mountains] and make [the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party] PKK lay [down] arms,” Akdoğan told reporters before attending a cabinet meeting in Ankara on June 8.

His remarks came a day after the general elections, in which the HDP received 13 percent of the votes and passed the 10 percent election threshold.

The HDP has sent delegations to İmralı Island, where the leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, is serving his life imprisonment, within the concept of the Kurdish peace process that the government launched in the late 2000s. 

The peace process has aimed to bring an end to the armed conflict between the PKK and Turkish security forces, which started in 1984. Some 40,000 people have lost their lives in the decades-old conflict.