Coming up to the Istanbul elections, the helpless pleads of the AKP government have been witnessed clearly through every speech and every action. These examples vary from establishing a workers rights approach, for the first time in 17 years. Throughout these 17 years, Turkeys economy has only reduced while unemployment continues to increase, whilst Erdogan has sat in his comfortable, 1,000 bedroomed home.
Recently, media outlets which are officially owned by Erdogan, are now making workers’ marches their agenda. These same marches have previously been greeted with attacks and arrests. This is not to say that AKP is now a workers party, but the opposite. AKP is aware of the deep faults it has created and wants to appeal to the fractions that are now damning the corrupt party.
Another example is the very thin political games that are being applied to the Kurdish population of Istanbul. It has been seen before, with HDP’s passing of the threshold, that the Kurdish votes are significant.
This time, Erdogan’s desperateness is seen through his amateur attempts to create a notion of pretence brotherhood. The President; who had previously threatened to hang the Kurdish people on poles, arrested them, massacred them, tortured them, continues to use these people.
Erdogan has created the base for a play, which was quickly exposed to be a lie.
In an attempt to divide the people; who he has previously divided into many fractions, he is now wanting to make it seem as if the Peoples Leader, Abdullah Ocalan and HDP Co-President Selehattin Demirtas are working against one other.
On the 20th of June, an unknown figure called Ali Kemal Ozcan appeared and stated that he had spoken to the Peoples Leader, Abdullah Ocalan and that the Leader had demanded that the peoples remain unbiased in the upcoming elections. Following this release, Erdogan appeared on every channel, live, sharing this message that he had probably written himself.
On the 21st of June, the lawyers of the Leader shared a statement from the Peoples Leader himself, in which he disclosed that he had not been visited by this figure, and expressed that HDP is the democratic solution for democratic negotiation. He described the HDP as the third route, which is the most democratic route in order to achieve peace and rights for the peoples.
Upon the release of the statement, firstly, Ali Kemal Ozkan was asked where he had obtained the false information from, which he replied ‘outside sources’; but most importantly, media outlets owned by Erdogan sold a story that the relationship between the Peoples Leader and the co-president had turned sour.
Today, Selehattin Demirtas, also imprisoned, released a statement through his lawyers. The statement is as follows:
Firstly, no one should doubt that I will stand by every initiative Mr Öcalan will take for democratization and peace, and I will make sincere efforts for his success.
Things like the war of power etc. are foreign and strange terms to us. No one should give a premium to this kind of informal discourse.
It is worth noting that we are not a party to such polemic games.
As someone who has personally observed the predominant influence of Mr Öcalan on a significant part of the population in the past, I consider it unfair and irresponsible to create a perception that he is being subjected to this test.
Those who want to do big and serious work should not patronize small and cheap perception operations. This is a sensitive issue for us.
I invite everyone and all parties to be more careful, not to be part of the psychological operation. Greetings, love.
