Turkey’s President and the Chairperson of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, threatened at an election rally the imprisoned presidential candidate of Democratic People’s Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtaş, with the death sentence.
In Erdoğan’s rally in the city of Kocaeli on June 11, supporters of the AKP started to chant “Hang him!” while Erdoğan was talking about the release demands for Selahattin Demirtaş. Hearing the chanting of his supporters, Erdoğan called for the parliament to make up a decision as soon as possible, and said: “As I told you before, if the parliament had sent me their decision about them, I would have signed the bill a long time ago.”
The controversial statement made by Erdoğan arrive in the midst of a heated election campaign dominated by nationalist bluster. Speaking less than two weeks ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections, Erdoğan on Monday announced the start of a military campaign in northern Iraq against militant PKK targets, which has waged a decades-long armed conflict in Turkey.
In reaction to Erdoğan’s remarks, Demirtaş made a statement. “Erdoğan promises to have me executed if he was elected. Can you just look at the promise of a presidential candidate in Turkey in the year 2018?” Demirtaş said. He also underlined that he would not “take a step back”.
Addressing the release demands for Demirtaş, Erdoğan also said: “Who do you think you are releasing? There are laws, there is a judicial system in this country.”
Referring to the killings of 53 people during the protests against the Islamic State’s occupation of the Syrian city of Kobane, Erdoğan claimed: “These people killed 53 of my Kurdish citizens there.”
Demirtaş also replied to these words on Twitter, explaining that 43 people were killed during the Kobane protests in 2014, not 53 – and 6 of them were members of HÜDA-PAR (a fundamental Islamist political party in Turkey), while 2 were security staff, 2 were Syrian refugees, and 33 were HDP members. Saying that “there is not even one effective investigation about the killings except for the ones of the HÜDA-PAR members”, Demirtaş challenged Erdoğan: “If you share my ‘so-called order to kill 53 people’ until June 24, I promise you, I will withdraw from candidacy in your favour.”
