ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The leader of Turkey’s main opposition party paid a rare visit to the country’s southeastern Kurdish province of Diyarbakir (Amed) on Thursday, promising Kurds that he will bring peace to the country.
“I know that you have suffered a lot but we will definitely bring peace, tranquility, and brotherhood to this country. This country needs tranquility, no matter at what cost,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), told members of his party in the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakir.
Turkey’s southeastern provinces, populated by Kurds, have been subject to constant conflict between Turkish security forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighters since the early eighties.
The Marxist-Leninist group struggles for the increased political and cultural rights of Kurds in Turkey. Compared to the rest of the country, these Kurdish areas have been deprived of basic services.
Both the PKK and Ankara announced a ceasefire in 2013 which lasted just two and half years. The peace process saw Kurds gain a number of rights, but many of them were gradually taken away by the government after 2015.
The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) have been racing for Kurdish votes for nearly a decade. The CHP, the country’s oldest party, has performed poorly in Kurdish areas.
Kilicdaroglu admitted on Thursday that his party has not performed well in the Kurdish areas, blaming the party’s policy of heavily focusing on Turkish-majority areas. He also said that his party will begin reforms to gain greater Kurdish votes in the future.
He said that he was aware of unemployment and poverty in the province, and promised to resolve this in the future.
The opposition leader also met with a number of Kurdish folk singers (Dengbej) who sang for him.
#CHP Genel Başkanı @kilicdarogluk
— Rûdaw Türkçe (@RudawTurkce) March 10, 2022
Diyarbakır ziyareti kapsamında Dengbej Evi'n, ziyaret ederek #Kürt dengbejleri dinledi pic.twitter.com/x2HTFfopBt
Delvet Bahceli, the leader of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), slammed Kilicdaroglu on Twitter for his comments which questioned Turkey’s democracy, noting that the opposition leader’s comments were “incompatible” with facts.
Kilicdaroglu reportedly visited the mother of Selahattin Demirtas, the Kurdish politician and former co-chair of the HDP who has been jailed since November 2016 for alleged links to the PKK, in Diyarbakir. Bahceli criticized this, asking him if he would visit the PKK’s jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan’s mother in Sanliurfa (Riha) as well.
Turkey has recently mediated between Russia and Ukraine to end their weeks-long war by inviting them to Antalya. A trilateral meeting was held on Thursday between the foreign ministers of the countries but it has not yet yielded anything that could de-escalate the tensions.
Bahceli, whose party is unofficially part of the current cabinet, even claimed that Kilicdaroglu’s visit was an attempt to see the Russian-Ukrainian talks fail. The CHP leader reacted to Bahceli’s tweet with a mocking emoji.
