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Turkey's Kurds battle legal hurdles on way to
parliament
18.7.2007 |
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July
18, 2007
DIYARBAKIR, Kurdish Southeastern region of
Turkey, -- At the headquarters of Turkey's
main Kurdish party, activists busily prepare
election material: leaflets and posters, but also
bizarre stencils and lengths of string that may help
sway the outcome of the vote in the southeast.
Creativity is at work to fend off the impact of a
recent law that complicated voting rules for
Sunday's election and which Kurds believe aims to
take advantage of the region's high illiteracy rate
to hamper their vote.
Zeynel Bagir, a party activist, placed a stencil
over a ballot paper containing a long list of names.
A circle revealed the name of a Kurdish candidate --
the only place left for an illiterate voter to put
the stamp.
"We will print about 100,000 stencils and distribute
them to the people," Bagir said. "Our volunteers
will teach them how to use it."
Another option the Democratic Society Party (DTP) is
considering is to provide their voters with strings
of specific length.
When stretched from the left of the ballot paper,
the string will lead to the box where the stamp
should go, Bagir explained.
Fourty-five percent of women and 19 percent of men
in the mainly Kurdish southeast are illiterate --
well above the national average of 20 and four
percent, respectively.
The DTP, which enjoys a strong support in the
region, has fielded 60 candidates to run as
independents in a bid to circumvent a 10-percent
national threshold required for parties to enter
parliament.
The threshold has blocked pro-Kurdish parties from
entering parliament, even though Kurds have become
lawmakers on other parties' tickets.
As soon as the DTP announced its new election
strategy in May, the outgoing parliament, in a rare
show of unity, responded with a legal amendment that
raised a new barrier.
The names of independents now figure on the same
ballot paper as all the parties running, resulting
in a long and complicated ballot paper that would
confuse illiterate voters. Earlier, independent
candidates had separate voting slips, which voters
simply put into envelopes.
"The fact that we were forced to stand as
independents is in itself a manifestation of
undemocratic practice," said Selahattin Demirtas,
one of about 20 to 30 Kurds expected to make it into
the 550-seat parliament.
His woes do not end there: Demirtas cannot address
his electorate in Kurdish because Turkish is the
only legal language of the election campaign.
"It is so hard to have a real dialogue with the
people. Sometimes I feel I fail to get my message
through," he said as he toured impoverished villages
near Diyarbakir.
The 34-year-old lawyer still greets the villagers in
Kurdish before switching to Turkish for his speech.
But the questions come in Kurdish: one man asks
Demirtas whether he would help the jobless relatives
of a local party
activist if elected. One woman complains that their
only source of water is the fountain on the village
square.
Demirtas answers patiently -- in Turkish.
To compensate where his message may fail, a
Kurdish-speaking imam steps in.
He tells villagers to support the Kurdish candidates
and not the ruling, Islamist-rooted Justice and
Development (AKP) party, which is equally popular in
the largely conservative southeast.
"In real Islam, all people are equal, but that's not
how the AKP acts," the Muslim cleric says. "They use
religion to manipulate the pure feelings of the
Kurdish people."
Demirtas's visit ends with Kurdish folk dances as
music blares from the loudspeaker of his van. The
villagers see him off with victory signs and waving
banners of red, yellow and green, the traditional
Kurdish colours.
"The law does not prohibit the use of Kurdish music
in election campaigns," Demirtas says, adding: "I
will continue to at least greet the people in
Kurdish."
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.
Kurds are not recognized as an official minority in
Turkey and are denied rights granted to other
minority groups. Under EU pressure, Turkey recently
granted Kurds limited rights for broadcasts and
education in the Kurdish language, but critics say
the measures do not go far enough.
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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