Turkey's HDP warns government not to push country into civil war

The leader of Turkey’s main opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has warned the government in Ankara of the potential breakout of a civil war in the country.

Selahattin Demirtas, who is himself a member of Turkey’s Kurd community, said it is the people’s right to respond to those who attempt to burn their homes, businesses, and party building with “proportional” force.

“Everyone should use proportional means to defend themselves,” Demirtas said on Wednesday during a press conference in Turkey’s eastern province of Diyarbakir. “You have got to force them to regret what they do,” threatened Demirtas.

The co-chairman of the pro-Kurdish, left-wing political party accused Turkey’s ruling party of stoking violence in the country to drum up nationalists’ support ahead of an upcoming election.

Turkey is to hold snap elections on November 1 to choose a government after inconclusive polls held in June cancelled the AK Party’s decade-long rule in the parliament.

Demirtas said the pro-Kurdish opposition party was currently “facing a campaign of lynching” orchestrated by the AKP.

Demirtas’ comments came after a night of nationalist protests in the capital, Ankara, and elsewhere, during which several HDP offices and shops belonging to Kurds were set on fire.

“Tonight alone, 186 attacks were carried out. And our headquarters were targeted. This is definitely a planned attack that was orchestrated from one particular place,” said the HDP deputy chairman, Alp Altinors.

“The president and his staff at the palace are the ones behind these attacks,” Altinors argued.

Turkish nationalists see the HDP as the de facto political wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militant group fighting the Ankara government for autonomy.

The HDP denies such claims. However, it has voiced its opposition to waging war against Kurds.

Nationalist anger toward Kurds has increased following recent attacks on security forces and police officers by the PKK in Turkey’s southeast.

At least 14 police officers were killed in a roadside bomb attack in eastern Turkey’s Igdir Province earlier on Tuesday.

In a separate attack on the same day, at least three Turkish police officers were reportedly killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack by the PKK militants on their armored vehicle in the town of Cizre, the southeastern province of Sirnak.

Turkey has been engaged in one of its biggest security operations in the southern border region over the past weeks. The Turkish military has been conducting offensives against alleged positions of Takfiri Daesh terrorists in northern Syria as well as those of the PKK in northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey.

The security operations began in the wake of the deadly July 20 bomb attack in the southern Turkish town of Suruc, an ethnically Kurdish town located close to the Kurdish town of Kobani on the other side of the border in Syria, where over 30 people died. The Turkish government blamed Daesh for the bombing. On July 22, the PKK claimed responsibility for the killing of two Turkish police officers, saying they were cooperating with Daesh.

The PKK has been fighting for an autonomous Kurdish region inside Turkey since the 1980s. The conflict has left tens of thousands of people dead.

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