In the 1990s, the Kurdish political movement (KPM) in Turkey had started to carry its struggle to another level with trials of founding political parties and actively working in the elections. This process has been carried forward to the present; however, it has proceeded in different ways and forms rather than drawing a linear line. In order to be able to discuss the movement’s present and future, what we need is to better understand the movement in the historical process.
First of all, the initial steps of the movement that is to continue its struggle with legal political parties and election activities were taken in the era when real socialism was defeated, when the class politics were substituted for identity politics and civil-societism, and when the winds of liberalism became violent in both Turkey and all over the world.
The Kurdish politicians of Turkey were inside the Social Democratic Populist Party (SHP). After the Kurdish politicians participated in a 1989 conference in Paris titled “Kurds: Human Rights and Cultural Identity” had expelled from the party, the discussions and plans of founding a party had become an issue in Kurdish political agenda.
Kurdish movement started with the step of founding the People’s Labor Party (HEP). Having a democratic, critical and ethnic tone in its program, HEP was emphasizing labor and class more than the other parties to be founded. This emphasis, however, would be lowered in years systematically, opening the field for identity-based and liberal theses. The party program had never had a socialist objective from the day one.
The task of these Kurdish politicians at that time was difficult, when the pressure is severe, there were armed conflicts, and it was a “war” according to military sources.
HEP, which was founded by those expelled from SHP, took part in the 1991 election under the roof of SHP and got into the parliament with 20 MPs. During this first experience, some Kurdish intellectuals had been involved. For Musa Anter, who was proud of being a member of Workers Party of Turkey (TİP, in Turkish, the first socialist party in Turkey to win representation in the national parliament) and murdered by “unknown assailants” in 1992, for example, HEP was the second party that he became a member of. In his memoirs, in fact, he wrote that “I had never been a member of a party that is not leftist”.
HEP’s presence in the parliament was flaming the controversies in a time of assassinations and murders by unknown assailants. Inviting militant Kurdistan Workers' Party leader Abdullah Öcalan’s mother to the party convention in 1991, playing Kurdish marches in the event, Leyla Zana’s Kurdish statement in the oath-taking ceremony in the parliament played important roles in the emergence of the discussions over closing HEP.
Kurdish politicians had also taken some measures in this period. They founded another political party, Democracy Party (DEP), in case HEP was closed. DEP had, on its emblem, a wild deer that has an historical importance for Kurds and that is used by many nationalist Kurds today. They also founded another party named Freedom and Democracy Party (ÖZDEP) in 1992 for the same reason.
The life of these parties had been very short because they were closed after a short while. While the right to do politics of some Kurdish MPs were taken away, some had applied for asylum overseas and established “the Kurdish parliament in exile”. Some of them, including Leyla Zana, Orhan Doğan, Hatip Dicle and Selim Sadak, were arrested in the time when the ultra-nationalist politicians, including today’s presidential candidate Meral Akşener, were carrying out an “operation for the good of the state”. 76 members of HEP-DEP were assassinated until the time Turkey was getting prepared for the 1995 elections.
TURKISH GENERAL ELECTIONS IN 1995
This period can be marked as the re-emergence of politics in streets after the oppressive coup of 1980. Leftist and socialist circles had strengthened the struggle again and many lines of struggle had been regenerated. For Kurdish politics, the new party named People’s Democracy Party (HADEP) represented the new stage in this arena. HADEP’s party program was emphasizing class politics and referring to real socialism on the one hand, but had an increased local and ethnic emphasis on the other hand. HADEP participated in the 1995 elections within an electoral alliance (Labour, Democracy and Freedom Bloc) which included several other leftists and socialist political movements.
Winning 4.71 percent of the votes, HADEP could not send MPs into the parliament because of the electoral threshold of 10% in Turkey. However, it was clear that the party was influential in the Kurdish region. But support from the Kurdish migrants in other big cities of Turkey was not enough, and a part of Kurdish voters was still supporting Islamic movements. The response of HADEP to this situation had been making changes in its emphasis on the working class and trying to develop different instruments to be able to attract the rest of the Kurdish voters. Today’s AKP MP, Mehmet Metiner, and a religious fundamentalist from HDP had started their political careers in HADEP at that time.
For the Kurdish political movement, the problem in the legal arena was clear. If the movement wanted to survive in this legal arena, they would accept that the existing order would tolerate the movement only if they kept their distance with the class politics. While the centre of gravity for the Kurdish movement was moving towards identity politics, the movement’s determining role in class politics was still strong. The “Kurdish problem” according to the Turkish state was, first and foremost, based on this determining role of the movement. The Kurdish political movement, on the other hand, continued searching for the ways to stay in the legal arena while rebalancing the identity and class emphases.
1999 GENERAL ELECTIONS AND HADEP
HADEP had maintained its electoral base in 1999 elections, but could not send MPs once again due to the electoral threshold. Within this period, while localism and propositions for provinces were increasingly included in the political programs of Kurdish parties and European Union theses entered into their political manifesto, the form of the emphases on labour and class, and then on independence had changed by time. EU’s reform programs, pro-privatisation comments, civil-societism and western-centred identity politics were much more visible now.
However, HADEP’s influence in Turkish political arena was cut by the constitutional court’s closing decision in 2003. New founded other Kurdish parties had not been influential between 2002 and 2005 due to various reasons, such as the effect of the ongoing discussions during the time when the leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, was arrested, discussions over the program, local politicians’ deprivation of the right to participate in politics.
In 2005, Democratic Society Party (DTP) was founded and included many of the former Kurdish politicians, such as Leyla Zana and Hatip Dicle, since their political ban was lifted. With the 2007 elections, the Kurdish political movement sent MPs, running as independent candidates and including today’s jailed presidential candidate from the pro-Kurdish party HDP, Selahattin Demirtaş.
In the meantime, the bourgeoisie order in Turkey was insistent on and determined to solve the “Kurdish problem” by closing the Kurdish political parties. After DTP was banned by the Constitutional Court, Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) was formed.
'SOLUTION PROCESS', ELECTIONS, SHIFTS, ALLIANCES
By the 2000s, the Kurdish political movement started to adopt a different road than it did in the 1990s. The movement, in this period, made controversial decisions which are still discussed. Contact with jailed PKK leader Öcalan on İmralı, negotiations with the AKP government behind closed doors, so-called solution process, ecological-democratic modernity exchanged by the terms liberty and independence, etc.
While discussing the ecological-democratic modernity which was put forward by the anticommunist Murray Bookchin from the US, the movement started to do calculations for making alliances with a broad category of people, from Islamists to liberals, leftists to Kurdish nationalists and pro-Barzani people.
After forming a parliamentary group with the elected independent candidates, BDP founded today’s pro-Kurdish party HDP by collecting different political actors under a roof. Although this move, the attempt to become a political party representing the whole country, looked like a separation from the Kurdish identity, it was rather a reflection of the fact that the Kurdish political movement now completed its separation from the class politics. It was after the separation that the meetings with employer organisations and selecting candidates from former AKP MPs were seen as legitimate for covering the entire country. At this point, depending on the political winds of the time, HDP sometimes polished its old stager members of the bourgeoisie politics, such as Mehmet Metiner and Mehmet Mir Dengir Fırat, and other times Islamists, such as Altan Tan and Hüda Kaya. On the other hand, the party also added the leftist, socialist candidates to the recipe when necessary.
Today, the Kurdish political movement and parties are trying to produce solutions by focusing on the dilemmas of everyday politics rather than the needs of the working class. Kurdish politics, which has increased its influence by time and, thus, which has expanded its distance from the Kurdish workers it represents, declares today that it will use the election in favour of "big politics" in accordance with the rules of this order. For Kurdish workers, nothing will change on the other side of the front.
