The incidents were partially a reflection of simmering anti-Kurdish sentiment in a week that saw 29 Turkish security personnel get killed in the space of three days at the hands of Kurdish PKK guerrillas. Since the resumption of hostilities earlier this summer between the Turkish state and the PKK, considered a terror organization by Washington and Ankara, more than 100 Turkish soldiers have reportedly died. Turkish airstrikes have pounded PKK positions in southeastern Turkey and across the border in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.

The conflict has claimed some 40,000 lives since it started in 1984. A cease-fire in 2013 led to a fragile peace. Elections in June saw Demirtas and the HDP clinch 14 percent of the vote and thereby prevent the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from winning a parliamentary majority. But coalition talks failed, tensions with the PKK mounted, and Demirtas and his political allies will now have to do it all over again in elections scheduled for November.

That is, unless, things spiral further out of control.

"It is becoming impossible to hold an election given the security situation in the region," Demirtas said Wednesday, pinning the previous night of arson and violence on state forces. "We are facing a campaign of lynching." The HDP's party headquarters in Ankara, as well as hundreds of other posts across the country, appeared to be targeted in coordinated attacks.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmed Davutoglu, a key Erdogan ally, decried the chaos, which also included attacks on a number of offices belonging to newspapers that had fallen afoul of the AKP. "It is unacceptable to damage media institutions, political party buildings and the property of our civilian citizens," Davutoglu said.

Still, the embers are hot. A Turkish chief prosecutor has now opened proceedings to strip Demirtas of his political immunity on grounds that he has "incited" his supporters to retaliate against the nationalist protests.

On Thursday, Demirtas led a delegation on foot in an attempt to reach the "besieged" southeastern town of Cizre, which has been encircled and kept under curfew for the past week by the Turkish military, who have been carrying out "counter-terrorism" operations in the area for the past week. There are conflicting reports regarding casualties in the predominantly Kurdish town.

The HDP is a motley party of leftists, feminists, Kurds and other minority groups, which scored a historic electoral victory in June by appealing to both rural Kurdish voters in Turkey's southeast and urbane anti-Erdogan voters in the country's western cities. But critics of Demirtas and the HDP say it's a dressed-up version of the PKK itself -- a polarizing outfit that is reviled by most ordinary Turks yet still commands considerable sympathy among Turkey's Kurdish population.

 

(Washington Post)