Turkey’s premier calls off meeting with HDP leader
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has called off a planned meeting with the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), accusing it of supporting violence in the country.
The prime minister said on Saturday that the HDP’s politics is rooted in violence.
Ankara is engaged in a major military operation in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast against militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Davutoglu was set to meet the leaders of all the three opposition parties to talk about planned constitutional reforms in Turkey. His meeting with the HDP leader was to be held on December 30.
“Recent statements by HDP officials reflect a politics that benefits from violence and tension. There is no longer any point in sharing the same table with this attitude,” Davutoglu’s office said in a statement.
Turkey’s campaign against the PKK does not cover the southeastern region only. The military has also been conducting offensives against the positions of the group in northern Iraq.
On July 20, a bomb attack in the southern Kurdish-majority town of Suruc claimed more than 30 lives. The Turkish government blamed it on the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group. After the bombing, the PKK, accusing the government of supporting Daesh, engaged in a series of supposed reprisal attacks against Turkish police and security forces, in turn prompting the Turkish military operations.
The army said on Saturday that over 200 Kurdish militants have been killed in the offensives during the past two weeks.
The HDP has been accused of backing the PKK, which has been fighting for an autonomous Kurdish region inside Turkey since the 1980s.
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