Turkish PM cancels meeting with pro-Kurdish HDP party, accuses it of “appealing to clashes” Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has canceled a scheduled meeting with the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which was aimed at discussing future constitutional reform.
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Russian Federation imposed sanctions on Turkey after the incident, while Ankara is now also considering taking counter measures.
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Demirtas held closed-door talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Turkish forces and PKK engage in intense clashes
The three-decade conflict between Turkish security forces and the PKK rebels have claimed the lives of more than 30,000 people. Turkey and Russia have been at odds since Ankara downed a Russian jet last month saying it violated its airspace.
“Russian news agencies covering the meeting quoted Demirtas saying, ‘We criticized the actions of the [Turkish] government when the Russian plane was shot down”.
Earlier, Moscow’s envoy in Ankara, Andrei Karlov said that Turkey should meet three conditions for normalization of relations with Russian Federation.
Stratfor, a private USA global intelligence think tank, said that by receiving Demirtas “Moscow has found a pressure point in the form of the Kurds”. “Demirtas wants to show Erdogan that the Kurds are a political force which can not be pushed aside at election-time, or crushed in the streets”.
“Let alone the fundamental right to life, if the prime minister visits us without recognizing the people’s right to breathe and their right to bury their loved ones, then he will only be offered to drink a cup of tea and then leave”, HDP Ankara deputy Sırrı Süreyya Önder told reporters, referring to Davutoğlu’s meeting with the HDP’s co-leaders.
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Kurdish politicians have accused Ankara of focusing military efforts on Kurdish militia in Iraq and Syria and failing to take up the fight with Islamic State. Recalling the Kurds’ intention to seek autonomy in northern Syria, the paper noted that “to this end, Russian Federation insisted last week on the need to give the Democratic Union Party, the Syrian Kurdish party associated with the [banned] Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a seat at the negotiating table alongside other Syrian opposition groups”.
