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Voices: At last, a breakthrough for Turkey's Kurds


DIYARBAKIR, TURKEY — Like most acts of terror, the attacks were sudden and unexpected. On June 5, two bomb blasts ripped through a crowded pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP) rally in the center of Diyarbakir, injuring dozens of people and eventually claiming the lives of four.

The violence cast a pall over the city — the heart of southeast Turkey's Kurdish region — until the HDP's historic election into the Turkish legislature just 48 hours later turned an atmosphere of anguish and fear into one of triumph and celebration.

"The ballot box is our response to the bloodshed," said Nimet Cetin, 43, an HDP supporter who brought her two daughters to watch the election night revelry. "Twenty years ago, I couldn't even say that I was Kurdish in public. Now, my daughters have a chance to grow up knowing freedom and peace."

For two nights in a row, jubilant HDP supporters took to the streets of Diyarbakir to mark their party's entry into the Turkish parliament for the first time in history. Almost everywhere I turned, I saw the Kurdish colors of green, yellow and red — a stark departure from the darker era in the country's history when public displays of Kurdish identity, including speaking the Kurdish language, were outlawed by the state.

For more than three decades, Diyarbakir was at the epicenter of a bloody conflict between the Turkish state and separatist guerrillas from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which claimed nearly 40,000 lives before the announcement of a tentative ceasefire in 2013. The violence saw thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed and millions of Kurds uprooted from their homes. From 1980 until 2002, southeast Turkey's Kurdish provinces were ruled under martial law and state-of-emergency legislation — a time which many Kurds say they associate with the daily threat of arrests, prosecution and torture.

Few of Diyarbakir's families were unscathed by the conflict, which explains why nearly every HDP supporter I spoke to was more driven by his or her Kurdish identity as opposed to bread and butter election issues. To be sure, the war left the region economically devastated — but as one voter told me, "the honor of the Kurds is more important than the economy."

The election saw Turkey's governing Justice and Development (AKP) party lose its parliamentary majority for the first time in 13 years — a blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's bid for even greater power.

As prime minister, Erdogan won Kurdish support by acknowledging the state's oppression of Turkey's largest ethnic minority, and later helping to initiate informal peace talks with Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed PKK leader.

But the peace process has stalled, while Ankara's perceived foreign policy missteps towards Syrian Kurds, combined with Erdogan's campaign rhetoric — insisting that Turkey no longer had a Kurdish problem — saw most of that support evaporate.

To improve their lot, the Kurds chose to rely on themselves. Securing just over 13% of the vote, the HDP is by no means the largest party in parliament, but its victory is one of immense symbolic importance: By entering the parliament, the Kurds are now a legitimate political force to be reckoned with.

The fervent joy and optimism I witnessed on election night is understandable in light of the Kurds' difficult history. But there is reason to be cautious: no party won enough of a majority to rule alone, leaving Turkey with the prospect of a coalition government or fresh elections. The Kurdish peace process is likely to be derailed if the AKP forms a coalition with the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which opposes negotiations with the PKK. Meanwhile, there's no guarantee that the HDP would manage another electoral victory of Turkey was forced into snap elections.

There is no doubt that the Kurds made history on election day. What comes next, however, is much less certain.

Kafanov is an independent journalist based in Istanbul covering Turkey and the Middle East.