ANKARA, 4 August 2007 — Turkey’s pro-Kurdish lawmakers will not be working to win a state when they take up seats in Turkey’s Parliament, but for more democracy and an end to separatist violence, one of the newly elected MPs said yesterday.
Turkey’s Parliament reconvenes today with an oath-taking ceremony after July 22 elections in which voters handed a fresh five-year mandate to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party). The pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) has 20 seats in the 550-member Assembly, the first time supporters of more rights for Turkey’s large ethnic Kurdish minority have been represented in Parliament for more than a decade.
“The Kurds don’t want a state, they want democracy. If the Kurds send candidates to Ankara, those with power should draw a lesson from this,” DTP deputy Sirri Sakik told Reuters in an interview. “We want to solve problems all together within a united Turkey... We want to express our identity under the guarantee of the constitution and the laws and to find a formula, by consensus, for removing weapons and violence from the agenda.” Other DTP deputies made similar calls for dialogue and compromise during the election campaign.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government, which is seeking European Union membership, has eased some curbs on Kurdish language and culture, but the DTP says it must go much further. However, many Turks remain deeply suspicious of the DTP, believing it is just a mouthpiece of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) whose guerrillas are battling security forces in mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey.
Sakik said the DTP sought dialogue and compromise, not confrontation. He said the new Parliament, where Turkish nationalists will also be represented, provided a chance to hammer out a consensus on resolving the Kurdish issue. “We have to be able to speak to one another. If we can do this, we can solve the problems,” he said. Sakik said he did not expect any problems at today’s ceremony.
In 1991, Kurdish lawmakers from a forerunner of the DTP that was later banned caused an uproar when they entered the chamber wearing the colors of the PKK and tried to take their oath of office in the Kurdish language. The lawmakers were later stripped of their parliamentary immunity, tried and jailed for supporting the PKK.
