Turkey Arrests Dozens of Dissidents, Opposition Politicians Ahead of Presidential Elections

Turkey on Tuesday announced the arrest of 110 individuals for allegedly financing, colluding with, or recruiting for the PKK, a banned Kurdish separatist organization.

The raids come only a few weeks ahead of the May 14 elections for president and parliament, in which the opposition coalition is supported by the pro-Kurdish HDP party.

Police officials said their “counter-terror” operation included raids in 21 of Turkey’s 81 provinces, including several operations in Diyarbakir, which has the largest concentration of Kurdish residents. Police accused the detainees of transferring funds to the PKK and organizing dozens of street protests over the past six years to destabilize the Turkish government.

Al Jazeera News quoted opposition leaders who found the timing of these arrests extremely convenient for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s faltering reelection bid:

Tayip Temel, deputy leader of the country’s pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), directly linked the arrests with Erdogan’s efforts to secure a third term as president.

“On the eve of the election, the government has resorted once again to detentions out of fear of losing power,” he tweeted.

Temel and several other sources said politicians, journalists, lawyers and human rights activists were targeted during the raids, details of which are being kept under wraps.

Temel’s suspicions were confirmed by the bar association in the Kurdish-majority province of Diyarbakir, which said the government has banned lawyers from communicating with their clients for at least a day, and a Turkish nonprofit group called the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA), which said executives from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) opposed to Erdogan were among those arrested.

The HDP is an unofficial member of the multi-party coalition backing presidential candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who appears to have the best shot at unseating Erdogan since the authoritarian Islamist strongman came to power 20 years ago.

The HDP is Turkey’s third-largest party and can probably muster enough voters to swing the election to Kilicdaroglu, but some other members of his coalition are uncomfortable with the Kurds and could bolt if the HDP formally joins the coalition or announces its support for Kilicdaroglu. To date, the HDP has helped his effort along primarily by refusing to nominate a candidate of its own.

Erdogan and his governing AKP party believe the HDP is just a respectable political wing of the PKK — in fact, the Erdogan government tends to regard every Kurd in the Middle East as a PKK puppet or sympathizer, an attitude that has hardened the HDP’s resistance to his reelection. The nominal leader of the HDP, Selahattin Demirtas, was arrested in 2016 for allegedly participating in a failed coup attempt against Erdogan and has been jailed ever since.

HDP leaders said Tuesday’s raids were “an operation to steal the ballot box and the will of the people.” The party noted that many of the detainees were lawyers and journalists who could blow the whistle on government efforts to rig the May elections.

The Erdogan government launched a court battle in January that could see HDP banned outright, so HDP candidates for the Turkish parliament often run on the ticket of other parties. In March, Turkey’s Constitutional Court lifted a ban on government political funding for the HDP, restoring a financial advantage enjoyed by all other major parties. The ruling freed about $28 million in frozen funds.