Eggless omelette and HDPless democracy

By Aydın Engin

Yayınlanma: 12.02.2018 - 10:54
Abone Ol google-news

Today, if it does not encounter an extraordinary obstacle, the People’s Democracy Party (HDP) is convening its third Major Congress in Ankara.
Does the tiny clause in the above paragraph that I have made bold and italicised in the eagerness for it not to escape your attention strike you as being exaggerated, needless or nonsensical?
For example, should the idea present itself to the AKP Chief and he come out with some such drivel as, “While our heroic army is writing history in Afrin, a party that officially and openly opposes the military operation should not even be permitted to convene its congress,” will all appointed, authorised people from the AKP’s politicians to its ministers and those with no ministry and the state’s uniformed and non-uniformed civil servants not roll up their sleeves?
For example, were the police to man all roads entering Ankara and block the way to all those believed to be HDP delegates coming to the congress in buses, minibuses, midibuses, cars and on motorbikes and bicycles and deny them entry to Ankara, would you be greatly surprised?
For example, if you read a newspaper report, “As delegates were unable to come, the HDP congress convened with the Ankara delegates and the MPs who were in Ankara alone,” would you say anything like, “Come off it, such nonsense is inconceivable?”
The best thing would be to end these “for examples” here. To be honest, I’m thinking up the most nonsensical of them and jotting them down, but what if they take them seriously?
I don’t need the grief.
 
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We are speaking of the HDP that has obtained the votes of six million voters, that gained 80 MPs in the 7 June 2015 elections and, when, with the AKP Chief saying like a spoilsport, “So what, so what, I don’t care, this doesn’t count, see, it doesn’t count,” a fresh election was bluntly embarked on, that gained representation with 59 MPs in Turkish Parliament on 1 November 2015.
You know, we are talking about a party that to best of my knowledge has nine MPs in jail and were an objection to come, “You’re mistaken, newspaper man, there are eleven MPs inside not nine” I would not be surprised.
I am speaking of Selahattin Demirtaş, one of the HDP MPs to be stripped of their immunity with the CHP also giving its genuine support under some such unatonable disgrace as “It is against the Constitution but we are supporting it” and then thrown in jail, and, to boot, one of the co-chairs, and, more to boot, who is pacing up and down in Edirne Prison while the third congress is convening in Ankara.
We are speaking of a political party about which we cannot keep track and do not know which of its 59 MPs have been convicted for how long and which ones have been stripped of their parliamentary status.
And...
And we are speaking of a Turkey in which a huge mass of people who vote for the AKP welcome all this calling it, “Correct, fitting, on the mark.”
Even more scarily, we are speaking of a Turkey in which a huge mass of people who are nothing like AKP supporters and dream of a Chiefless Turkey has come to treat this attack on the HDP as normal and is not unduly concerned.
 
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There is no need for lengthy analyses. Just as there is no eggless omelette, there is, cannot be and will not be an HDPless democracy.
If the conflict is to come to an end in this country and if we are to deliver it from being a country of grief in which the lamenting at the funerals of the fallen is interspersed with the tears in condolence houses, this can purely and simply be possible through attaining a peaceful solution to the Kurdish problem.
Depriving the Kurdish political movement of its need for the PKK can purely and simply be possible by making way for the HDP on the political plane.
Let nobody who objects to this deceive themselves; let them go and applaud the AKP Chief.


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