Turkey on Monday sacked three mayors in the Kurdish-majority southeast on alleged “terrorism” charges, despite Ankara’s apparent desire to seek a rapprochement with the Kurdish community.
In a sweep, the mayors of the cities of Mardin and Batman as well as the Halfeti district in Sanliurfa province were all removed and replaced with government-appointed trustees, the interior ministry said.
All three belong to DEM, the main pro-Kurdish party, and were elected in March’s local elections, when opposition candidates won in numerous towns and cities, including Istanbul.
Among those removed were Ahmet Turk, Mardin’s 82-year-old mayor, along with Batman mayor Gulistan Sonuk and Mehmet Karayilan in Halfeti.
The ministry outlined a string of allegations against them, from membership in an armed group to disseminating propaganda for the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Since 1984, the PKK has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state in which more than 40,000 people have died. It is blacklisted as a “terror” group by Turkey and its Western allies.
Kurds make up around 20 percent of Turkey’s overall population.
DEM swiftly denounced the move as “a major attack on the Kurdish people’s right to vote and be elected”.
“The government has adopted the habit of snatching what it couldn’t win through elections through using the judiciary, the police and the trustee system,” a DEM statement said.
Turk, a prominent Kurdish politician who was dismissed twice before, was in May sentenced to 10 years jail for alleged PKK membership over his involvement in a series of 2014 protests.
He was serving as mayor pending the outcome of an appeal.
At the time, the opposition HDP — now DEM — called for protests over Ankara’s failure to send in troops to protect Kobane, a Kurdish-majority city in northeastern Syria which was being overrun by the Islamic State (IS) group militants.
– ‘No step back’ –
In Batman and Sanliurfa, the governors banned protests, as did the governor of Mardin.
But Mardin’s newly-deposed octogenarian mayor defied the ban, and urged people to rally outside the town hall in a video posted on X.
“We must all raise our voices against this unlawfulness, this anti-democratic functioning which defies the will of the people,” Turk said.
The local governor also banned demos in the Kurdish majority city of Diyarbakir until Wednesday but around 2,000 people protested at the mayors’ removal and replacement by state officials, an AFP journalist reported.
“Go away, trustee!” they shouted. “If there’s a trustee, there will be no negotiation.”
– ‘The voters’ right’ –
In Batman, police raided the offices of a local newspaper and arrested its reporter for covering the backlash over the mayors’ removal, the MLSA rights group said.
There were also protests in the eastern city of Van, local media reported.
Writing on X, Istanbul’s powerful opposition mayor Ekrem Imamoglu said the government had “lost control”.
“The right to elect belongs only to voters and cannot be transferred,” he said.
Imamoglu, a key figure in the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) who is likely to run as a candidate in the 2028 presidential election, said he would convene an emergency meeting of the Turkish Union of Municipalities (UMT).
The latest dismissals came just days after another CHP mayor was arrested for alleged PKK ties in an Istanbul district and replaced by a trustee.
Ahmet Ozer, 64, mayor of Esenyurt district, was arrested on Wednesday.
Both the CHP and DEM condemned his arrest as politically motivated, with DEM calling it a “political coup”.
The wave of dismissals came after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed full support for efforts to reach out to Turkey’s Kurds, describing it as a “window of opportunity”.
But he said the appeal was not directed at “terror barons” in Iraq and Syria.
Over the years, the Turkish government has removed dozens of elected Kurdish mayors in the southeast and replaced them with its own trustees.
In April, the election authority removed DEM’s elected mayor in Van and replaced him with the losing candidate from Erdogan’s AKP party, sparking furious protests.
As a result of the backlash, the winning candidate was later reinstated.
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