The Peoples' Democratic Party or HDP elected two new leaders on Sunday, one of whom replaced its jailed co-chief Selahattin Demirtaş. Demirtaş has been behind bars pending trial since November 2016 for alleged terror charges, accused of links to armed Kurdish PKK militants.
MP Pervin Buldan and former MP Sezai Temelli are to take the helm from Demirtaş and incumbent Serpil Kemalbey as co-leaders.
Sezai Temelli, an economics professor dismissed from Istanbul University by an emergency decree law, was elected as an Istanbul lawmaker in the June 2016 elections but failed to keep his seat in the snap elections held in November of the same year.
"The year 2018 will be a year when the HDP will contribute to the struggle of peace and democracy," he said.
KEY FIGURE IN SO-CALLED 'SOLUTION PROCESS'
"We are taking an open stance for peace in the homeland and abroad. We defend peace," Buldan said on Feb. 11 in Ankara in her speech as a candidate.
Buldan was a key figure in the so-called 'solution process' between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP government and armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and HDP in 2009 and 2015, as a part of the delegation that carried out meetings with PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, who is serving a life sentence in the İmralı island prison.
Buldan, a serving MP and deputy parliament speaker, replaces Serpil Kemalbay, who herself took over from another incarcerated former leader, Figen Yüksekdağ.
NINE LAWMAKERS REMAIN IN JAIL
Turkish authorities issued a detention warrant Friday against Kemalbey over her opposition to the current military offensive in northern Syria against the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units or YPG. Kemalbey spoke at the party's congress Sunday and has not been detained.
Demirtas and Yüksekdağ were among a dozen HDP MPs detained in November 2016. Nine HDP lawmakers remain in jail.
Prosecutors are seeking jail sentences of 142 years for Demirtaş and 83 years for former Yüksekdağ on charges of propaganda in support of the PKK. The HDP denies direct ties to the PKK, which since 1984 has carried out an armed insurgency in Turkey's largely Kurdish southeast that has left more than 40,000 dead.
