Turkey’s repeat elections: the Kurdish wildcard

The PKK’s terror, which ended the reconciliation process despite the state’s wishes and efforts, and the HDP’s supportive statements of this terror seem to shape the electorate’s behavior in the Nov. 1 elections

Turkey’s election cycle continues, as the country heads for a new round of elections this November. Following the June 2015 elections, it proved impossible to establish a coalition government, and now, the caretaker government under Justice and Development Party (AK Party) leadership, is taking the country to “repeat” elections. Despite receiving nearly 41 percent of the vote, the AK Party could not form a single party government because the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) passed the national threshold with 13 percent and secured 80 parliamentary seats. The June elections showed that the electorate still saw the AK Party as the only party capable of governing, while denying the ruling party yet another single party government. The wildcard – that is, the HDP passing the national threshold – worked against the AK Party in June. Whether the HDP can surpass the threshold once again in a maximum security political atmosphere will be critical to these next election results.

The AK Party’s coalition talks with the Republican People’s Party (CHP) yielded no results, and the HDP had ruled out the possibility of a coalition with the ruling AK Party even before the elections. The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) set preconditions – a definitive end to the Kurdish resolution process, a full investigation of the Dec. 17 and Dec. 25 corruption allegations and the restoration of the traditionally ceremonial role of the president – that made it virtually impossible to even discuss a coalition government. Under these circumstances and after the failure of the coalition talks, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tasked Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu to form a caretaker government. During the coalition talks, the opposition parties had either ruled out coalition negotiations (as in the case of the HDP and MHP) or interpreted the election results as a total defeat for the AK Party (as in the case of the CHP).While the political process could not produce a coalition government, the security environment shifted with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and PKK attacks inside Turkey. As a result, political dynamics heading into this round of elections are significantly different than they were before the June elections, particularly in the wake of the renewed fighting between state security forces and the PKK. In July, the PKK announced the end of a two-year-long cease-fire and resorted to summary executions of security officials. The pretext for the PKK to end the cease-fire was the Suruç bombing that resulted in the deaths of 33 activists. The attack was linked to ISIS, and in its aftermath, Turkey announced that it would participate militarily in the U.S.-led international coalition against ISIS. The PKK claimed, however, that the government was supporting ISIS – a propaganda theme developed ever since the Kobani crisis. The PKK tried to bolster ethnic solidarity among Kurds in Turkey and in Syria for its regional as well as recruitment goals.

Turkey’s hesitation to act during the Kobani crisis was linked to questions about the political goals of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Syria. The PKK conducted an effective public relations campaign, promoting the idea that the Turkish state was supporting ISIS against the Kurds. This argument found resonance with many Kurds and resulted in dismal results for the AK Party, especially in the Kurdish-majority cities of southeast Turkey. As the country moves into the November elections, the course of the conflict between the security forces and the

PKK will undoubtedly have a strong bearing on the Kurdish vote. It will also play a large factor in determining whether the AK Party has the ability to once again be competitive against the HDP in the region.

As a result of the high-security political climate created by the fighting, stability as a theme of the campaign will likely have a significant impact on the election results. The Kurdish vote will be critical, and the AK Party and the HDP will compete for conservative Kurdish votes. However, the electorate in general, including the Kurds, will make judgments about how their vote will help bring stability. If voters sense that lack of stability is a direct result of the failed coalition forming process and the ensuing fighting, they may move towards voting for the AK Party in the hopes that it will garner enough votes to establish a stable, single-party government.It will be important to see who will be blamed for making the formation of a coalition government impossible. For instance, while the MHP appeared to have a principled stance in the immediate aftermath of the June elections, many inside and outside the MHP questioned the wisdom of the party’s refusal to be part of any coalition scenarios. Some MHP voters may veer toward the AK Party because the MHP has no prospect of coming to power other than as part of a coalition – a prospect that party leader Devlet Bahçeli has made impossible through his maximalist preconditions. Whether the AK Party can take back some conservative nationalist votes from the MHP through the stability argument will define its chances of forming a government on its own.

In June, the HDP was able to present itself as more than a “Kurdish party” to appeal to non-Kurdish segments of society, including liberals and Alevis among others. Many voted for the HDP strategically to counterbalance the AK Party for which there were no true alternatives. This November, however, in an environment where the HDP has been unable to unequivocally denounce PKK violence, non-Kurdish voters will likely be more hesitant to vote for the HDP. It will be critical to see if the HDP can keep such voters in its camp and whether the PKK leadership’s public reprimand of the HDP – and HDP’s inability to confront them – will make a significant difference in the ballot box. Furthermore, the nationalist backlash against the HDP may limit their ability to maneuver and appeal to non-Kurdish voters. In the end, however, all this may add up to only marginal changes in voting percentages and the HDP may still be able to surpass the 10 percent threshold.

The resolution process, which promised to bring about a political solution to the Kurdish question, appears to be shelved at the moment – “in the refrigerator” as Erdoğan remarked. It does not appear likely that the state security forces will end their efforts to reestablish control in southeastern Turkey before the November elections, barring a surprise call from imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan for the PKK to return to the negotiation table. The Kurdish wildcard, in its different manifestations, such as the renewed fighting or the HDP’s electoral success, will be the most important factor shaping voter behavior in November.

* Research director at SETA Foundation in Washington, DC

http://en.akademikperspektif.com/2015/09/28/turkeys-repeat-elections-the-kurdish-wildcard/

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Britain Joins the Drone Kill Club

The latest drone executions of the two Muslim British citizens by the British government gives rise to the question of how a country can present itself as a defender of international humanitarian law while using these killing machines.

On Sept. 9, the British government announced that it had assassinated two British citizens, Reyyad Khan and Ruhal Amin, by the use of drones. In Britain, news of the assassinations has been dominated by two questions: Was the killing morally justified and was the killing legal?

In order to protect itself from charges of illegality, the British government was fastidious in its desire to show that its actions were absolutely legal and based on the sound legal advice of the government’s attorney-general. The legal rationalization for this extra-juridical killing was, in the first place, given as being based on the principle of self-defense. David Cameron claimed the British government was forced to resort to using drones because it was in danger of attacks directed by these two individuals. When pressed for details on the nature of the imminent threat, British ministers spoke rather airily of reasons of national security and of planned attacks at major events, which, in fact, had already taken place and therefore the threat was neither imminent nor possible any longer. Even Cameron’s own party, has raised doubt about whether there was a real imminent threat. Subsequently, the government put forward another rationale for the drone strikes: the killings were carried out because of the collective threat against Iraq. Furthermore, it transpired that the British government has a hit list of Muslims who it considers to be extremist who are to be assassinated.

DRONES AGAINST THE US

Of course, state-sanctioned and state-actioned assassinations are hardly new. Western plutocracies, have, however, tried to use the fig-leaf of liberal-democracy to preach due process and rule of law, and have publically condemned assassinations as part of normal statecraft. The drone revolution however has lowered the perception of risk in carrying out assassinations and increased the temptation to use murder as a weapon of the “war on terror.” Pilotless vehicles have been used for aerial surveillance missions and even as bomb-carrying weapons since the 19th century, for example in the American Civil War and later during World War I and II. However the scale of its use by the U.S. presently – particularly during the Obama presidency – and the increase in the range and capabilities of drones, has meant the blurring of the rules of combat. Drones have not only been used by the U.S. in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan; they have also been used to target militants in Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen – outside the U.S.-declared war zones. As far as we know only the United States, Britain and Israel have used drones for targeted killings. The benefits, as are seen in those countries using them or seeking to use them, are that the operators are not at risk, they are meant to hit targets with great precision and, unlike other aircraft, they can hover for hours over potential targets waiting for a window of opportunity to strike. We do know that the supposed precision is not a guarantee of accuracy, as the loss of civilian lives can attest to. We also know that although they may succeed in killing their targets, the larger objectives are not always served, as drone strikes alienate those who control them from the violence they unleash while also contributing to instability and creating a backlash of public opinion outside the countries that operate them.

The debate that drone assassination has generated is important because it shows that the neo-conservative strategy for fighting the war on terror has now become hegemonic. The British had prided themselves on their approach of treating terrorism as a criminal rather than military problem. This assassination shifts the British position to being closer to the approach undertaken by the U.S., Israel and other neo-conservative regimes like Canada and Australia, in which policing is being increasingly militarized. The effects can be seen not just in abstract terms but also in the equipment, tactics and training as well as practices of many police forces, most clearly seen in the United States as the Black Lives Matter campaign exposes the frequency of police killings, particularly of African-American and Hispanic American men. The militarization of policing is not simply a matter of using a more robust approach to crime or the threat of crime, but rather it undermines democratic-liberal conceptions of citizenship. It also has an international dimension as many police forces in the U.S. are now staffed by men and women who were involved in the American occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and have been trained and equipped by specialists from the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

VIOLATING HUMANITARIAN LAW

The criticism of the British stance however has tended to focus almost exclusively on whether drone attacks violate international humanitarian law or the morality of a self-avowed democratic state executing its citizens without any due process. The United Nations has condemned these operations for their lack of accountability, transparency, violation of international law and overlooking civilian casualties.

Yet these criticisms miss the wider point. The war on terror has systematically stripped Western plutocracies of their claims to legitimacy and they contribute to the continuous erosion of the distinction between war and peace and the frontiers of national sovereignty. Water-boarding, rectal infusion and target-killings have become calling-cards of the war on terror. Driven on by a neo-conservative agenda, Western governments have been led to believe that coercion without legitimacy is sustainable when the difference in capacity to inflict harm is so great, that their enemies are impotent in the face of Western might. When countries who consider themselves to be guardians of the moral and legal framework of international order start to break the law, it is not a minor matter. In the same way, when police officers act like gangsters it is the same as gangsters acting like gangsters. These killings are just another sign that the war on terror is nothing more than a dirty war fought on a global scale and is beginning to signal the degeneration of statecraft into gangsterism and thuggery. The dream of a cosmopolitan world in which international laws and conventions contain the constant possibility of violence is giving way to a Hobbesian world order, in which the veneer of international agreements and laws are being worn dangerously thin. The United States led the invasion of Iraq arguing for the purity of its aims and desire to bring freedom, peace and prosperity. After Abu Gharib and Guantanamo, all they can say is “we torture less than Saddam did.” The drone executions of Muslim British citizens by Britain is another sign that the international system that emerged after the Cold War is beginning to unravel. When countries who claim to uphold international law start acting like gangsters, the entire system begins to lose legitimacy; as a consequence society is more violence not less, more instable, not less and more danger, not less. There is a need for countries that have not succumbed to the neo-conservative/neo-liberal offensives, to articulate a vision of a world that offers more than gangsterism on a global scale.

* Professor in Rhetoric, University of Leeds

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