by Farhad Chomani
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Selahettin Demirtas, the leader of Turkey’s left wing pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), said that the 1988 poison gas attack on the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja was a turning point in his life that helped define his Kurdish identity.
“I discovered my identity and realized what a heavy responsibility it is to be Kurdish,” Demirtas said in an interview Monday with the online Haber Turk website.
“We were in the classroom in high school when we heard people chanting outside,” recalled Demirtas, “We didn’t know what had happened, but our teacher said Saddam Hussein had mass slaughtered Kurds in Halabja,” he added, referring to the March 1988 poison gas attack on the town that killed 5,000 people.
Demirtas, who has been a co-leader of the HDP since 2010 and is an outspoken politician who ran for president in last year’s elections, said he had not understood “what it meant to be a Kurd” until the moment he heard about Saddam’s genocidal attack against the Kurds.
Demirtas, 41, has been a frequent participant in the so-called peace process between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Ankara since 2012. He publically called on Turkey to arm the PKK in its fight against the Islamic State (ISIS) last year as militants were closing in on the then besieged Syrian-Kurdish city of Kobane.
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