Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) has rallied behind the country’s largest pro-Kurdish group after police on Monday detained the democratically elected mayor of the southeastern Hakkari province on charges of ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
The CHP said it would dispatch a delegation to Hakkari after Mehmet Siddik Akis of the People’s Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) was accused of membership of the PKK and terrorist propaganda by a local court as thousands of Kurds across the country demonstrated against his ouster and arrest.
The move came after DEM called on “all those on the side of democracy to take a stand.”
Governor Ali Celik, a bureaucrat, was appointed acting mayor of Hakkari, a bastion of Kurdish nationalism that borders Iraq, in a replay of the eviction of dozens of Kurdish mayors in the wake of the 2019 municipal elections on similarly specious terrorism charges and their replacement by government trustees. Many were jailed, among them the former mayor of the Kurds’ unofficial capital Diyarbakir, Adnan Selcuk Mizrakli, who exposed the corruption of his government-appointed predecessor upon taking office.
