Turkish main opposition introduces own proposal for Kurdish issue

ANKARA

AA Photo

Arguing that the government has failed to make substantial progress in the peace process, the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has put forth its own proposal aimed at resolving the Kurdish issue in Parliament.

The CHP’s 70-item bill outlines the amendment of both the internal regulations of Parliament and certain laws for “Societal Peace and Democracy,” CHP Deputy Chair Sezgin Tanrıkulu announced at a press conference on Dec. 22.

“The Justice and Development Party [AKP] should not seek a resolution at Parliament, nor elsewhere. Turkey’s civil society and Parliament have sufficient experience on this issue,” Tanrıkulu said.

Tanrıkulu argued that the government has not taken essential steps on the Kurdish issue despite the  adoption of a government-led important bill over the summer providing legal framework to the resolution process aimed at ending the three-decade long conflict between the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Turkey’s security forces.

“A process which is conducted secretly doesn’t yield an environment of peace. If the process is not democratic, then the result cannot be successful,” Tanrıkulu said of the process.

According to some of the amendments outlined in the CHP’s proposal, the infamous 10 percent election threshold for a party to be represented in Parliament will be lowered to 3 percent; a Social Conciliation Commission and a Collective Mind Delegation will be founded at Parliament; a street in the Şişli district of Istanbul will be named after Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was assassinated in January 2007 in front of the office of his bilingual newspaper, Agos, in Şişli; the village guard system, which was created by the authorities in the 1980s to protect villages against attacks by the PKK, will be abolished and village guards will be employed in other fields; and all archives in related institutions of the state regarding the Dersim massacre will be gathered at Parliament and be opened to researchers and the public.

In Dersim, now known as Tunceli, over 13,000 people were killed during a military operation to quash an apparent Kurdish tribal rebellion during the CHP’s single-party rule. Seyid Rıza, the leader of the movement, was executed in 1937.