ANKARA
Turkey’s leading pro-Kurdish figure on Monday rejected calls for legal action against those who have spoken out against recent attacks on Kurdish insurgents in northern Iraq.
Selahattin Demirtas responded to remarks from Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), in which he called on prosecutors to take action against those who “praise terrorists”.
Demirtas leads the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a pro-Kurdish party that entered parliament for the first time last month, winning the same number of seats as the MHP. He has condemned recent anti-terror operations targeting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as a threat to peace talks that were initiated two years ago.
“Parties are opened by people and closed by people,” Demirtas told reporters outside his party’s headquarters in Ankara. “History has repeatedly shown and proved it.”
Referring to the arrests of suspected PKK supporters and bombing raids on PKK bases in northern Iraq, Demirtas condemned the government’s “fascistic policy”.
"What could be more natural than those with fascistic ideas jumping at this policy, they are doing their jobs," he added in an apparent reference to the right-wing MHP.
"If we had anything to fear, we would not be in politics. They would do better to look at their dirty history."
On Sunday, Bahceli called on Turkey’s chief prosecutor to take action those who praise terrorism.
"The Supreme Court of Appeals (Yargıtay) chief public prosecutor's office should immediately take action against Qandil politicans who praise terrorists... and those who fail to distance themselves from terrorism," he said in a written statement.
Demirtas has criticized the decision to target the PKK alongside Daesh suspects in Turkey and their bases in Syria, saying it jeopardizes the “solution process” that Ankara has been working on to end the 30-year conflict between Turkey and the PKK.
"Peace was only a step away,” he said on Monday. “There was only one step needed to be taken."
He has accused the interim government under the Justice and Development (AK) Party of using military operations to retain power if there is a rerun of June’s general election.
"These are not state policies but palace policies," he said, accusing the AK Party of dragging the country into a civil war.
Following last week’s suicide bombing in the of Suruc that killed 32 activists, tensions have risen between the Turkish state and the PKK, with the latter stepping up attacks on police and troops while Turkish warplanes target the group’s camps and its followers are rounded up.
