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Turkey's Kurdish party to field independent
candidates
10.5.2007 |
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May
10, 2007
ANKARA, Turkey, -- Turkey's main Kurdish
party will pitch independent candidates in general
elections on July 22 in a bid to bypass the high
threshhold for parliamentary representation, its
chairman said Wednesday.
"We have decided to run in the elections with
independent candidates," Ahmet Turk, the head of the
Democratic Society Party (DTP), was quoted by the
Anatolia news agency as saying.
He was speaking after a two-day party meeting in the
mainly Kurdish southeastern city of Diyarbakir to
decide on their strategy for early legislative
elections brought forward from November.
Many Kurds have become legislators in Turkey as
members of mainstream parties, but pro-Kurdish
movements have failed to overcome the 10-percent bar
to enter parliament, even though they usually
dominate the vote in most areas in the southeast and
routinely win the local administrations.
Fielding independent candidates may allow them to
by-pass the barrier in the elections. Once in
parliament, the winning deputies can again regroup
under the DTP banner.
Turk said they would field independent candidates in
areas where the DTP is traditionally strong and back
"enlightened, democratic candidates" in other
regions.
He gave no further details, but the media has tipped
human rights award winner Leyla Zana as one of the
party's possible candidates.
Zana and several other Kurdish politicians entered
parliament in 1991 on the ticket of a center-left
party, but they lost their seats in 1994 after the
Kurdish party which they later joined was outlawed
for having links to armed Kurdish rebels fighting
the government.
Zana, the 1995 laureate of the European Parliament's
Sakharov human rights award, and three others spent
10 years behind bars for alleged links with armed
rebels. They were convicted on the same charge in a
retrial in March, but will not have to go back to
jail.
Kurdish politicians are routinely accused of being
instruments of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK),
which has led a bloody separatist insurgency in the
southeast since 1984 and is listed as a terrorist
group by Ankara and much of the international
community.
The DTP was set up in November 2005 as a successor
of other Kurdish movements, which were outlawed by
the courts.
It has pledged to try to resolve the Kurdish
conflict through peaceful means, but has so far made
no progress.
AFP
** The use of the term "Kurdistan" is vigorously
rejected due to its alleged political implications
by the Republic of Turkey, which does not recognize
the existence of a "Turkish Kurdistan" Southeast
Turkey.
Others estimate over 40 million Kurds live in
Big Kurdistan (Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Armenia),
which covers an area as big as France, about half of
all Kurds which estimate to 20 million live in
Turkey.
Turkey is home to over 25 million ethnic Kurds, some
of whom openly sympathise with the Kurdish PKK for a
Kurdish homeland in the country's mainly Kurdish
southeast of Turkey.
Before August 2002, the Turkish government placed
severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish language,
prohibiting the language in education and broadcast
media.
The Kurdish alphabet is still not recognized
in Turkey, and use of the Kurdish letters X, W, Q
which do not exist in the Turkish
alphabet has led to judicial persecution in 2000 and
2003
The Kurdish flag flown officially in Iraqi Kurdistan
but unofficially flown by Kurds in Armenia. The flag
is banned in Iran, Syria, and Turkey where flying it
is a criminal offence"
Southeastern Turkey:
North Kurdistan ( Kurdistan-Turkey)
wikipedia
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