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Public prosecutor launches investigation into pro-Kurdish BDP
The public prosecutor is investigating whether crime and criminals were eulogized at the congress and whether the congress discouraged people from carrying out their military service.
The BDP, which replaced the Democratic Society Party (DTP) when it was closed down last year, held its first congress on Monday in Ankara and elected Diyarbakır deputies Selahattin Demirtaş and Gülten Kışanak as the co-chairpersons of the party. Ahmet Türk and Aysel Tuğluk, the former chairpersons of the DTP, also participated in the congress. Both of them have been banned from politics and their membership in Parliament revoked by the Constitutional Court.
Sevahir Bayındır was elected chairman of the gathering and in her speech, half of which was in Kurdish, she said that one of the addressees of the Kurdish question should be Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who is serving a life sentence on İmralı Island in the Marmara Sea. Participants at the meeting also chanted pro-Öcalan slogans.
Kışanak also said Öcalan’s mission was important for peace. In her speech she criticized the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party). “This government has not even achieved the reforms required of it for the sake of the EU accession process; just the opposite, they have crippled rights and freedoms,” Kışanak told participants.
In his address Demirtaş urged the public towards civil disobedience especially in relation to use of the Kurdish language. He asked Kurdish artists to produce works in Kurdish, and he also requested that teachers and doctors in predominantly Kurdish areas use the Kurdish language in the course of their jobs. “University students should engage in stronger campaigns for education in their mother tongue, and if necessary there should be classes given in Kurdish in the streets and squares of the cities,” Demirtaş said.
He also addressed parents whose sons are doing their military service or are in the mountains. “Don’t watch while your children are killed. To demand an end to this war is your right, before that of anyone else. Search for this right. Look, the PKK is saying that it is ready for peace talks. You mothers prepared the PKK for that, and by doing the same for the state you can be the architects of peace,” he said.
The BDP also amended its bylaws and introduced an executive board and rotating co-chairmanship, neither of which are implemented by any other political party. The executive board will be composed of two co-chairpersons, two parliamentary group chairpersons and deputy chairpersons. This body will be superior to the Central Executive Board. The BDP was also going to implement a 40 percent quota for women in all organs of the party, but this was replaced by a gender quota.
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