Former HDP Co-chair and current political prisoner as defined by the ECHR, released a scathing open letter from Edirne High-Security Prison, hours before he announced that he would leave his political life behind. Demiratş has been imprisoned since 2016 despite an order from the ECHR for his release. In his letter, Demiratş criticized the HDP’s inability to defeat the 21 year AKP rule.
Demirtaş Tweeted:
Hello. I want to share two paragraphs from my interview that will be published tomorrow in Artı Gerçek:
“I sincerely apologize for not being able to offer policies worthy of our people. I promise to remedy these shortcomings.
I also, thank you for constructive criticism. I will try to take your criticism to heart. Though I continue to fight in the resistance movement along with all my other imprisoned comrades, I have decided to leave politics at this time.”
Yesterday, Demiratş had also penned a scathing letter, roundly criticizing his party, HDP. HDP, along with Green Left Party, forms the core of the Kurdish political movement in Turkey, advocating for democracy, equality and rule of law. While Demiratş both served as HDP co-chair and was the parties presidential candidate in 2018, he appears less than satisfied with the parties overall performance and it’s campaigning efforts this election cycle. The full letter published in Artı Gerçek reads:
We have left behind a very important election process. A group that has seized control of the government used every resource of the state to run a smear campaign and temper with the ballots, completely uninhibited by moral values.
However, it would be easy to attribute our party’s failure in the parliamentary elections to these alone.
I analyzed the parliamentary election results on the basis of provinces and constituencies. Our party’s vote rate has decreased in 87 electoral districts. It is not possible to explain the reasons for this decline in one letter. Our party must discuss this issue in depth and conduct field investigations.
Although I do not have the ability to do this myself, I can share a few of my observations. The opinions I will express in this letter will not be on practical topics such as election strategy and tactics, candidate preferences, field studies, but will be a more general analysis.
Firstly, it should be noted that one of the greatest features of the Kurdish democratic political movement is that it is not just a party or electoral movement. For many years, the Kurdish people and their party has been struggling for the resolution of the Kurdish problem and has been adapting and reshaping itself according to the conditions of that struggle.
This is the nature of the business. But the very same movement is also able to compete in an election of 63 million voters and is able to form the 3rd largest group in parliament. When you look at it that way, we have a party that, despite all the obstacles, is still able to stand tall. And we have the people to thank for that.
For the Kurdish political movement, of course, elections are not a matter of life and death. However, the Kurdish political movement realized this too late how critical past elections have been. By the time we did that, it was already too late.
Our party only began campaigning a month before the elections and the campaigning process was messy and sketchy.
The AKP-MHP coalition, however, has been engineering a strategy for the last five years as part of their plan they hatched in 2014.
While the government was trying to crush and suppress the opposition by using the resources of the state to the fullest, it incessantly ran a smear campaign and dirty propaganda tactics to convince its own base.
The AKP-MHP government has begun building an identity of Turkishness that can be called AKP Turkishness using a sense of locality and nationality.
For this purpose, they have been leveraging every tool to full effect for years, from TV series based on distorted historical narratives, to exaggerated heroic stories, to religious cults, to tabloids, women’s TV shows, religious talk shows, education, news, posters and billboards to music. An attempt was made to create an entirely new type of human.
In doing so, they created such a cultural collapse that they created a mass that clings to injustice, theft, corruption, oppression and slander as if they were the conditions of Islam. You occasionally see some members of these people on street interviews.
Medyascope'u destekle. Medyascope'a abone ol.
Medyascope’u senin desteğin ayakta tutuyor. Hiçbir patronun, siyasi çıkarın güdümünde değiliz; hangi haberi yapacağımıza biz karar veriyoruz. Tıklanma uğruna değil, kamu yararına çalışıyoruz. Bağımsız gazeteciliğin sürmesi, sitenin açık kalması ve herkesin doğru bilgiye erişebilmesi senin desteğinle mümkün.
They tried to keep the crowd in a neighborhood. They made the neighborhood comfortable by using the state’s resources to the fullest.
They declared everyone in other neighborhoods terrorists. Their aim was to prevent voices from other neighborhoods reaching their own audience.
If your goal is to attain 15% in the MP elections and help the presidential candidate get over 50% in an election where 63 million people will participate, you cannot achieve any degree of success through local unions if you start campaigning only a month before the election date.
Thus, I want to clarify a few things in this regard. I have been trying to communicate this to HDP for the last five years through letters, articles and messages, but every time I did, my voice echoed and returned back to me.
There are a lot of things going wrong in our institutions and since I don’t find it appropriate to make it public, I am trying to make them work the best I can. Unfortunately, they still don’t work most of the time.
Perhaps many did not understand but when I launched an election campaign in January 2023 using my limited resources, my aim was to animate the people and institutions.
I attempted to reach prejudiced pockets of society from my jail cell. I attempted to bolster HDP through letters, tweets, interviews and articles. Because there was a large vacuum present and no one was able to, or even trying to fill it. But some from our camp mistook these efforts as me trying to attain publicity for myself. Shortcomings and deficiencies can only be alleviated through critique and suggestions, not errant attacks.
At the end of the day, I tried to win a victory for our people. Unfortunately, we could not create the harmony and unity we wanted in the political arena due to the influence of those who deal with empty gossip in party headquarters. For this reason, I must first accept my own faults and critique myself. I should have tried harder and forced cooperation. All my friends must also self-critique as they did not accurately assess the strategy of the AKP-MHP coalition and did not develop measures against smear campaigns directed towards me.
The democratic Kurdish political movement is not only unable to comprehend the sociological divides experienced in the general Turkish society but exhibits a lack of understanding of the divides in Kurdish society as well.
After the “self-coup” by the AKP-MHP administration on July 20, 2016, our institutions of politics, culture, press, women, youth and local government were closed and usurped, and a vile system was put in place. Unemployment and poverty are ubiquitous, while the people have been devastated by drugs and prostitution imposed even on small children. Our young, who were previously valued and empowered, neglected and thus sought gratification elsewhere. We have thousands of young people who have been corrupted in this way and become mired in prostitution, drugs.
The Kurdish middle class rapidly retreated due to a lack of political aim and fear of being out of work.
Neither revolutionary ideas nor reformism can fill this void. Those who filled this void were radicals in rhetoric, but in practice, they were happy with the status quo. They had nothing more to offer other than slogans and flowery language and are responsible for a loss in quantity and in quality. They were able to rule by acting as loyalists rather than kings themselves.
If this is not resolved, the decline will continue. From now on, we must focus on problems on a micro and macro scale and organizational and solution oriented policies.
The Kurds living in any village of Şemzinan and the Kurds in Istanbul still have strong demands for language, identity and cultural rights, and no one has given up on them still. However, they look at beautiful shoes and dresses on amazon.com, listen to music from every language of the world, and watch cafes and restaurants with envy. Kurds who only had a choice between two types of shoes in the past have infinite options today, but no money to buy any. We cannot ignore or surrender to this reality.
No one can get anywhere by only shouting slogans. Social collapse will be inevitable if you cannot explain democratic modernity to a society brought up in capitalist modernity and offer an honorable alternative way of life, secured through institutions.
We have to analyze the situation accurately and develop measures. Alarm bells have been ringing for a long time, and these election results must serve as a wake up call. The way to silence alarm bells and play triumphant songs is through correct analysis and correct practices. We have to initiate a comprehensive restructuring of our party through constructive criticism.