AFTER more than four decades of war, peace between Turkey and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) seems within reach. Disarmament has begun and is expected to continue throughout the summer; a partial amnesty may also be on the table. Peace could unlock new growth in Turkey’s south-east, where the economy has been ravaged by PKK violence and scorched-earth reprisals from Turkey’s armed forces. The war has already cost Turkey some $1.8trn, according to the country’s finance minister. More than 40,000 people have died. Peace could lay the ground for Turkey to allow its Kurds a measure of well-deserved autonomy. It could also help avert yet more bloodshed in Syria by easing tensions between the PKK’s offshoot there and the new regime in Damascus.
This is all good, and outsiders should support it. But they must not allow Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to use peace as a smokescreen for repression. Having ruled for over two decades, first as prime minister and then as president, Turkey’s strongman is openly musing about yet another term in power. To have a shot at one, he needs parliament to bring forward the coming presidential elections, set for 2028, or to approve a new constitution, which would reset his term limits. Short of the votes he needs to do either, he may offer the Kurds concessions in order to win over Turkey’s main Kurdish party, Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM), while dismantling the rest of the opposition.
The Kurds should not, and probably will not, fall for any of this. They, more than anyone, know no good can come of a deal with a bully. A decade ago DEM’s predecessor scored an election upset, depriving Mr Erdogan’s party of its majority in parliament. Peace talks with the PKK, which had begun years earlier, collapsed soon thereafter, giving way to urban warfare across Turkey’s south-east. Thousands of Kurdish activists and politicians, including Selahattin Demirtas, a former presidential contender and one of Mr Erdogan’s most eloquent critics, ended up behind bars. Mr Demirtas remains there to this day.
Now it is the secular Republican People’s Party (CHP) that is paying the price for standing in the way of Mr Erdogan’s ambitions. The party’s most formidable politician, Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul, was arrested in March on trumped-up charges of corruption. Hundreds of others, including the former CHP mayor of Izmir and the CHP mayors of Adana and Antalya—three more of the country’s six biggest cities—have since been detained.
The CHP came ahead of AK in last year’s local elections for the first time in two decades. Unable to bring the party down through the ballot box, Mr Erdogan’s government is using the courts to do the job instead. By locking up Mr Imamoglu, Turkey’s strongman has removed his most serious challenger from the next presidential elections, whenever they are. He is counting on the outside world’s silence, and so far he is succeeding. Shamefully, not a word of criticism has come from America or Britain. The EU has complained, but in a mealy-mouthed way. Germany, which had held up the sale of Eurofighter Typhoon jets to Turkey in protest, backtracked this week. Turkey’s allies should urge Mr Erdogan to follow through with peace with the Kurds. But they also need to do more to hold him accountable for his autocratic excesses. ■
Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.
- Gecə Modu
- Ana səhifə
- Statistika
- Mənbələr
- Reytinq
- Hava
- Valyuta
