Turkey’s Erdogan Accuses Pro-Kurdish Party of Criminal Activity

(Bloomberg) -- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken his condemnation of the nation’s second-biggest opposition party to a new level, accusing it of new, non-stop criminal activity.

Judicial proceedings against the Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP, “will be very intense,” state-run Anadolu Agency cited Erdogan as telling reporters on Tuesday. “New files may arrive anytime, because everything is in plain sight. Everything they do constitutes a crime.”

The president’s statements follow HDP’s fourth congress in Ankara on Feb. 23. The chief prosecutor in the Turkish capital has launched a terrorism investigation into the event, on the ground it became a staging ground for propaganda of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. The violent, separatist group has battled the Turkish military for more than 30 years and is labeled a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the U.S.

Erdogan went after the HDP after it passed the threshold to enter parliament in the June 2015 election. Selahattin Demirtas, the former HDP chairman who challenged Erdogan in the 2018 presidential vote, has been in prison since November 2016, one of seven party legislators now incarcerated, according to an HDP document.

A total of 11 party lawmakers and 84 mayors have been removed from their jobs. HDP now has 61 members of parliament, making it Turkey’s second biggest opposition party.

To contact the reporter on this story: Taylan Bilgic in Istanbul at tbilgic2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Onur Ant at oant@bloomberg.net, Amy Teibel, Paul Abelsky

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