President Tayyip Erdogan said this week that the campaign against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants, who have waged a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy, was now Turkey’s largest ever and that the removal of civil servants linked to them was a key part of the fight. “If mayors and town councilors finance terrorism by transferring public funds allocated to them to serve the people., they lose their democratic legitimacy”.
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Thousands of people have died since a ceasefire and peace talks between the PKK and Turkish government broke down in July 2015.
The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), whose mayors were principally affected, condemned the move as “coup by trustees”.
In the latest move, the government on Sunday replaced 24 pro-Kurdish mayors with government appointees over alleged ties to the PKK.
“It is the binding duty in front of our nation to finish off the organisation called Daesh (IS) in Syria and ensure it is unable to carry out actions inside our country”, Erdogan said in a televised message for the upcoming Eid al-Adha Islamic holiday.
The U.S. Embassy in Ankara posted a statement on its website and Twitter that it is concerned by reports of clashes in southeastern Turkey, following the government decision to remove the mayors.
“This illegal and arbitrary stance will result in the deepening of current problems in Kurdish cities, and the Kurdish issue becoming unresolvable”, it said in a statement.
The mayors represent a small fraction of people fired or arrested since the July 15 coup attempt that killed at least 240 people and 40 coup plotters.
The mayors of the cities of Batman and Hakkari in the southeast have also been replaced.
Meanwhile, the Turkish Nobel-winning writer Orhan Pamuk has said Turkey is becoming a “regime of terror”.
“They said the failed coup shouldn’t be used as a pretext for a “[Joe] McCarthy-style witch hunt”, referring to the Wisconsin senator who led an anti-communism crusade in the 1950s.
More than 81,000 people working for Turkey’s institutions and security forces, including judges, teachers, police and journalists, were fired just after the failed coup.
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Information for this article was contributed by staff members of The Associated Press.
