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‘You are my voice’: Kurdish leader campaigns from Turkish jail
[DAWN] ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... ’s leading Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtas is facing not only President Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan the First  ... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey...in this month’s presidential elections but the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of having to campaign from jail. Demirtas, the former co-leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and still by far its most prominent figure, has been held since November 2016 on charges of links to outlawed Kurdish bully boys. But the party chose him as its candidate to challenge Erdogan in the June 24 polls and, undeterred, Demirtas called on every member of the party to campaign in his name. "I trust you because you are my voice and my breath," Demirtas wrote last week. The ex-HDP leader was detained during the crackdown launched after the July 2016 failed coup which critics say went well beyond targeting just the plotters. Demirtas, 45, is accused of being a member of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and making propaganda for the group blacklisted as a terrorist organization by Ankara and its Western allies. He risks up to 142 years in jail. The former human rights ...which are often intentionally defined so widely as to be meaningless... lawyer won almost 10 per cent of the vote in the presidential elections of 2014, establishing himself as a serious rival to Erdogan. The HDP then became the first pro-Kurdish party to enter parliament in June 2015 elections, maintaining its status as the second largest opposition party in a re-run of the polls in November that year. "The fact that [Demirtas] is in prison is illegal and unfair. We wanted to show that we do not accept this injustice," said Demirtas’ campaign co-ordinator and deputy co-leader of the party, Saruhan Oluc. Posted by: Fred 2018-06-08 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=515984 |