The Ethnic State Of Turkey asks Kurdish party to end membership of former lawmakers, others

The Associated Press
Thursday, May 17, 2007ANKARA, Turkey: A prosecutor’s office on Thursday ordered a Kurdish political party to end the membership of lawmakers imprisoned for ties to separatist Kurdish guerrillas, and several others, ahead of elections in July.

The Democratic Society Party is seeking to circumvent a rule that parties must gain a minimum of 10 percent of votes before they can enter parliament by fielding independent candidates who would then regroup as a party after winning seats. The party won 6.22 percent of the votes in the previous elections in 2002.

The prosecutor’s office of the country’s Appeals Court ordered the party to end the membership of 116 people, including prominent politician Leyla Zana, for having criminal records, or risk being shut down. It also said that they cannot assume other positions in the party’s structure.

A day earlier, a separate prosecutor asked a court to sentence Zana to five years in prison for speaking respectfully of the imprisoned Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Zana and three other former lawmakers have spent 10 years in prison for links to separatist Kurdish guerrillas. They were ejected from Parliament in 1994 at the zenith of an insurgency by Kurdish separatists.

The return of Kurdish lawmakers to Parliament could stir fresh tensions with nationalists who view them as a threat to the Turkish state.

It was not clear if Zana or her friends would be able to run for Parliament again. The prosecutor’s office on Thursday said the country’s electorate board would have the final say on the issue.

Also on Thursday, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer approved a decision by Parliament that makes it harder for the Kurdish party to organize politically.

Parliament amended the electoral law earlier this month and scrapped the right of independent candidates to have separate ballot papers from those used to choose candidates running for elections under party lists.

Previously, the independent candidates could stand outside polling stations and hand over ballot papers with their names already inscribed to voters, giving them a slight advantage over the political parties’ candidates.

Literacy is low and some people don’t speak Turkish in the relatively poor, Kurdish-dominated southeast. Voters in the past had found it easier to pop an independent candidate’s ballot paper into the envelope than to select a candidate from a long, complicated ballot paper listing all of the parties.

Still, the party says it hopes to win around 30 seats if independent candidates are elected to the Parliament.

Kurdish politicians elected to the Parliament would have a higher political profile to push for cultural, social and economic rights for the country’s Kurds, who are not recognized as an official minority.

Kurdish parties in Turkey are often accused of ties to the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which has recently escalated hit-and-run attacks from bases in northern Iraq and inside Turkey.

DEHAP, the predecessor of today’s Kurdish party dissolved itself in 2005 as prosecutors tried to close it on charges of being a focal point for separatist activities and having ties to Kurdish guerrillas. The constitutional court has closed down four previous pro-Kurdish parties, including DEHAP’s predecessor, in 2003.

The conflict between autonomy-seeking Kurdish guerrillas and the government has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people since the guerrillas took up arms in 1984.

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.