Opposition Party Calls for ‘Resistance’ as Turkey Kills 69 in Crackdown

Government Imposes Curfews on Kurdish Towns in Southeast

Turkey’s Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), one of three opposition parties in the Turkish parliament, is calling for citizens to engage in “honorable resistance” amid a growing military crackdown against Kurds in the nation’s southeast, an operation which has killed at least 69 in the past four days.

The HDP is a strongly pro-minority party and most of their votes come out of the Kurdish southeast, where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is launching a full-scale war against the PKK rebels, vowing to see Turkey “cleansed” of them.

HDP co-leader Selahattin Demiritas urged party supporters to expand their struggle against the Erdogan government, saying the people of the “lands of Kurdistan” would not be forced to abandon their beliefs by military force of arms.

Erdogan, ironically, initially launched the war at the behest of another opposition party, one vehemently anti-Kurd, though any hope that after winning last month’s election the war would simply be forgotten appears to have been misplaced, as Erdogan’s AKP Party continues to beat the war drums on tamping down Kurdish secessionist movements.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.