Turkey's Kurdish HDP lawmaker Caglar Demirel gets 7.5-year prison term

Turkey Kurdish HDP lawmaker Caglar Demirel

Tugba Hezer, a lawmaker from the Turkey’s Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), 2016. Photo: HDP’s FB.

DIYARBAKIR-AMED, Turkey’s Kurdish region,— Turkey’s Jailed HDP deputy Caglar Demirel, given 7.5-year prison sentence over links to Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Caglar Demirel, one of the 11 jailed deputies from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), has been handed down a prison sentence of 90 months on terror charges.

HDP Diyarbakır deputy Demirel was first detained on December 12, 2016 in Ankara and arrested in Diyarbakır the next day.

Demirel was given 90 months of prison sentence by the Diyarbakır 5th High Criminal Court on charges of “membership in a terrorist organization.”

Currently, 11 HDP deputies including HDP Co-chairperson Selahattin Demirtaş are in jail.

Turkey has stepped up its crackdown on Kurdish politicians in recent months. Trustees have been appointed to dozens of municipalities in the country’s predominantly Kurdish Southeast, while hundreds of local Kurdish politicians and co-chairs have been arrested on terror charges.

The developments have attracted widespread criticism from the region and Western countries.

In November 2016, 12 Kurdish HDP lawmakers, including the two co-leaders, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, were arrested on charges of links to the PKK which they deny. The party holds 59 out of the 550 seats in parliament.

Thousands of officials from the HDP have been detained since 2015. The HDP says as many as 5,000 of its members have been detained as part of a crackdown that followed last year’s failed coup, and which rights groups say targets dissent.

Turkey’s government has accused the HDP of having links to the PKK, a charge that the HDP denies.

The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population.

A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974, and has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.