 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello, welcome to People's Dispatch and Globetrotter. Events in Turkey have shaken the world. Once again, the president of Turkey has decided that the best way forward is by banning a political party or at least trying to. We're trying to make sense of what's happening in Turkey, a major country that straddles both Asia and Europe. We're very fortunate today to have with us Ertugrul Kuchu from the very important post of the honorary president of the People's Democratic Party, the HDP. The HDP, of course, is the party that is being put under the gun in Turkey. Ertugrul, welcome to People's Dispatch and Globetrotter. So could you just tell us a little bit about the mood in Turkey? The president has in three years, I think, or two years has thrown out three heads of the central bank. The Turkish government has decided to walk away from, well, it's called the Istanbul convention, the convention against violence against women. And then, of course, once more, many times since 1990, but once more, the Turkish state has attempted to ban the political formation of both the Kurdish society, but also of the Turkish left. What's going on in Turkey? Give us a sense of the mood, please. Yeah, we can speak about a permanent crisis that Turkey is passing through. There are very short instances of a kind of an equilibrium or stabilization in the modern Turkish history of the last 50 years, as far as I know. The remaining is a permanent crisis. This stems from two points. One of them is where between the state and society, Turkish state does not fit Turkish society. Ethnic, multi-class, multi-gender, multinational, multi-everything society inherited from the former Ottoman Empire, but the government or the state is either a single party state of the Turkish nationalists or a single party state of the Islam. So this creates and reproduces a second economic crisis, which is now aggravated by the COVID-19 crisis that the Turkish government cannot handle. Now, all these superimposed and creating a lot of burdens for the Tayyip Erdogan regime to exist, because the country is very deeply polarized, 50 percent against 50 percent and HTP is in the middle. Whichever side HTP stands, this side is going to win and HTP is now tending for the last 20 years with the opposition. Indeed, we call ourselves as the third pole, not belonging to either camps of polarization, but the situation of a crisis which pushes Tayyip Erdogan to progress in the direction of establishing a fascist dictatorship. HTP is now seeking to set up a broad democratic front, including all anti-presidential forces in Turkey. Therefore, this makes HTP the most important figure in the sense in terms of a political lineup of forces. And the other side of the picture is that HTP is based on the democratic momentum produced by the Kurdish liberation struggle. This is a challenge both for the nation state and also for the single party state, which is based on Turkish Islamism. Therefore, HTP is the first, although it's the third power in Turkey, it is the first power to be eradicated by the Tayyip Erdogan regime. Therefore, HTP comprises everything that the ruling party is hating and looking to annihilate. It's a women's party, it's a Kurdish party, it's a workers' party, it's an intellectual party, it's the party of the others, and it's the party of Kurds and otherwise. All elements which have been excluded from the official society by either the Islamic elite or the Turkish elite. Therefore, this is why HTP is that heavily targeted and why the crisis is revolving around the annihilating HTP. But since Turkey is also carrying with itself the heritage of 100 years of democratic struggles, it's not as easy as to crush everything that you can do in Afghanistan. Turkey is not Afghanistan, but Turkey is not Italy either. Therefore, we have a very complex society and in this complexity, we can both retain in a degree our legitimacy and legality, but on the other hand, we are becoming the basic sufferers of the creeping fascism in Turkey to make a very long story short. Well, you know, you have of course been involved in Turkish politics since, well, at least 1968, you know, you're one of the generation of 1968, you're a veteran of the Turkish left, but you've also of course been involved in those emancipatory struggles of the Kurdish people. One of the interesting things, I mean, you're the honorary president of the HTP, but the HTP which was formed formally in 2012 didn't emerge out of nowhere, it emerged out of over a decade of the attempt of both the Kurdish emancipatory struggles and the Turkish left to create legitimate democratic platforms. It's very interesting at all that there are so many parties, they keep appearing with the name Democratic in them, starting with the HTP in 1990, you know, the Democratic Labour Party and so on. They keep getting banned, you know, 1998 set up, ban 93, set up 95, ban 96, set up 96, ban 98, you know, etc., etc. Oz depth, depth. I mean, one after the other, this attempt to create to found an emancipatory project, both of the Kurdish people and of the Turkish left constantly getting banned, you yourself were a member of the Grand National Assembly, you won a seat from the beautiful city of Izmir, you know, you've been part of the attempt to democratize Turkish society and yet as you say, the HTP right now is what the Turkish state is trying to erase. I just want some more on this, on this, this reason why the attempt to found a democratic project that unites the Turkish left and the Kurdish emancipatory forces is so threatening, you know, the Turkish state. Yeah, this is directly related by the raison d'etat of the Turkish statism. In this, this is a nation state built by the state itself. Indeed, when the Anatolia was a rescued from occupation in 1920s, after the liberation war fought against the imperialist occupation, it was the last piece of land remaining from this huge Ottoman Empire. And this land was filled with the people of the various dissents, Turks could be the majority, but there were also the Kurds and the Armenian genocide was just five years behind and the Pontus genocide was two years behind and the Turkishness was something to be because the Ottoman emperors didn't call themselves Turks, they were Ottomans and Turks were the ordinary people and these were not the, you know, the absolute majority, they were the majority, but non-Turks, Christians, Jews, Elohim, Kurds, a monthly background of people were living in this space. In order to bring about a nation state out of this heritage from Ottoman Empire, first the National Assembly, who fought the Liberation War, looked for local democracies in 1921. The first constitution was referring to local democracies, but those were the days of the, you know, light of the Soviet revolution radiated across Turkey. So this much of freedom for the emerging bourgeoisie was too much. So we should have a compact nation state without that much of, you know, local power. Therefore the central power should be united around the Turkishness or the Turkism inherited from the Ottoman times, the leading party of İttihad, Terahti, Unity and Progress Party. And the mentality for those that ages nationality was translated into Turkish realities and finally we had a one-party nation state over this monthly background. So in order to keep all the others under control, Turks should also be left with the substandard democracy. So autocracy or monopartism or one-party regime for the Kurds and annihilation, liquidation, assimilation for the Kurds and the others. You cannot have a democratic state on this base. This is, this is the major reason modernization from above creates those results. This somehow we can compare this with the modernization of Germany with blood and iron. That's the Allaturka way of German modernization in Turkey which left no space for oppressed classes, oppressed nations, oppressed genders to come out in an independent way. Therefore a state excluding civil society, there is no space for consent at this point, just a blunt force. Only after 1950s, after the end of the Second World War, when the world changed into a liberal democracies and communism, the polarization in the world pushed Turkey to liberal democracies. So you couldn't stay with, remain with a single party. There should be multi-party situation and the situation change and from this crack evolves all the democratic tendencies of Turkey in the last 50 years. And all the progress that the European democracies made in 500 years, Turkey is trying to make in 50 years. So this is a very rapid replay of the democratic struggles of the 19th century, in the 21st century, if this is somehow descriptive of what we have been through. That's a very interesting perspective, this perspective of the compressed time frame in which Turkey is trying to advance a democratic process. I want to come directly at all to the sensible issue. In 1978, in the middle of quite harsh repression of Turkey's southwest, some young people created the Kurdish Workers' Party, the PKK. The PKK has of course had a long-standing problem for the Turkish state. There's been periodic wars, attacks on the southwest and so on. The leader of the PKK has been in prison outside Istanbul for a very long time. Abdullah Oklan has been in prison for a long time and so on. Consistently, since 1990, these formations of the Turkish left and Kurdish emancipation keep getting banned because they are accused of associating with the PKK, the Kurdish Workers' Party, which is itself banned. This is exactly what one of the leaders of the HDP has been sitting in jail since November 2016. Salah Hattin has been in jail now for good god, I mean so many years, accused of again associating with the PKK, egging the PKK on during the Kobani riots of 2014 and so on and so forth. The attack on the HDP is saying that, well, you are a front for the PKK. What is your position on this? Why is there this constant attempt to make this linkage, particularly given the fact that the Turkish state has wanted to negotiate with Oklan, has wanted to negotiate with the PKK. In fact, once the arms struggle to disappear, why is there this attack? Why not open up the political space for a conversation? I want to start with the result and come back to the effects. The result is related to the story that I tried to tell for the previous question. Under those circumstances, opening up a democratic space for all those elements who have been neglected or oppressed during the previous 50 years or 100 years, means the end of the supremacy of Turkishness. So, after then, you cannot have a state based on one ethnicity. You cannot have a state based on one belief or a privileged belief. You cannot have a state based on one class. Everything should be democratized. This means, you know, sharing power with the people and particularly sharing, Turks sharing power with Kurds. This means leaving your Eastern borders to the patriotism of Kurds. Leaving your basic, major waters because Tigris and the Euphrates are the major waters in the Middle East and they are born in Turkey and they are of the Kurdish land. So, you know, all the riches and all the strategic advantages that you have, you should share them with the consent of the Kurds. So, for a Turkish status, this is the end of the world because the world was a Turkish state and now you are sharing it with someone else, with someone that you had fought for decades to annihilate, to assimilate, to destroy what they have emerged and re-emerged throughout the centuries because you keep only a part of them in your country. They are also existing in Iraq, they are also existing in Syria and also in Iran. Then you come back to a point that the Kurdish issue is not only a local issue, but it is also international. So, for the Turkish statism, there are times that to, you know, tell the ongoing conflict, some openings for concessions starts, but from these concessions the Kurds appear with their full right for self-determination. So, the Turkish state decides, okay, only we can make self-determination in Turkey, others not. So, then comes the closure period or the separation period. But they now come back to the first part of the question. The Kurdish struggle in 1970s gained a new character. Previously, the state operation was reacted by insurrections of the peasantry and they were immediately killed and unregulated and a pogrom or even a local genocide power. But this time, a young generation of revolutionaries inspired by the Turkish revolution of 1968 decided to start a modern warfare of a guerrilla struggle based on Kurdish peoples' rights and liberties and organizing them as a modern power around the modern ideology. This was like a dream for the former generation of Kurds and the Turks, but a person, a Jalan, he looked like a lunatic at the first moment. This couldn't happen, but he there and he gained at the end the, you know, the attachment and then the nefs of a young generation of revolutionaries and they started this war and this is the basic element which revitalized the understanding of Kurds of themselves that we are a different ethnicity, we have rights, we have to gain them, we have right to self-determination and we can do this only together with the other democratic forces. Formerly, the Kurdish uprising were local ones and they had no connection whatsoever with the other elements of the Turkish society, but with the modernization, a growing working class and the emigration from the Kurdish lands to the metropolitan hubs of industry and commerce created a huge Kurdish intelligentsia, which is in very close cooperation with Turkish left and this created the historical destiny that the Kurdish and Turkish struggles could, you know, merge together. HDB is the realization of this, it's not a standard Kurdish legal party which blurred out those, you know, rare instances of liberal periods, but this is a decisive attempt by the Kurds themselves to self-determine their destiny in Turkey restructuring the Turkish state based on local democracies, a kind of reference to 1921 constitution. Therefore, this attempt changed a lot of things and therefore it's difficult for the Turkish state now to ban it once and at all and close it very immediately. They cannot do it because through this process also the ruling AKP also gained some, you know, consent from the Kurdish public during this negotiation process across the Kurdish society. So therefore a very, you know, an abrupt change of everything, might lose them everything that they gained through the, you know, Muslim Kurdish population that they gained some consent. It's somehow complicated, but the issue is that now we have something very much different, both for the Turkish left for the Kurdish left, Kurdish nationalism, Turkish statehood, this attempt, this, you know, determination for gaining full citizens rights and the national rights by restructuring Turkey. Therefore not setting up a secessionist moment, but an intact moment for reintegration. This has changed all the elements of the play that we had witnessed in the previous decades. This is the present situation and of course this makes the Kurdish issue an international one and this now puts forward the international task also for the Turkish left. So you cannot see the issue inside the Turkish boundaries. It's a regional and international issue. So if you are an international force, you should act accordingly. That is how the left inside HDP is now handling the issues. And this is also a short answer for a century story. It's very illuminating how in the middle of a political crisis where your political party is seeking to be banned, you take the long perspective a hundred years this year of Turkey's experiment with local democracy, you're looking ahead saying we cannot be defeated. Ertugrul Kukçu, honorary president of the People's Democratic Party, HDP in Turkey. Thank you so much for joining us at People's Dispatch and Globetrotter. Thank you for inviting, it was a pleasure.