Turkey on Monday removed three mayors in the Kurdish-majority southeast on alleged terrorism charges, despite Ankara’s efforts to seek a rapprochement with the Kurdish community, Agence France-Presse reported.
In a sweep, the mayors of the southeastern cities of Mardin and Batman as well as Halfeti — a district in Şanlıurfa province — were removed from their positions and replaced with trustees, the interior ministry said.
All three belong to the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), the main pro-Kurdish party, and were elected in March’s local elections when opposition candidates won in numerous towns and cities, including İstanbul.
Ahmet Türk, 82, won the vote in Mardin, while Gülistan Sönük was mayor of Batman and Mehmet Karayılan represented Halfeti.
In a statement, the ministry outlined a series of allegations against them, from membership in an armed group to disseminating propaganda for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Since 1984, the PKK has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state that has killed thousand and is listed as a terror group by Turkey and its Western allies.
Kurds make up around 20 percent of Turkey’s overall population.
The DEM Party swiftly denounced the mayors’ removal 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,” it said in a statement on X.
Türk, a prominent Kurdish politician who was dismissed twice before, was in May sentenced to 10 years prison on charges of PKK membership for his alleged involvement in a series of deadly 2014 protests.
At the time, the HDP party — now DEM Party — called for protests over Ankara’s failure to send in troops to protect Kobani, a Kurdish city in northeastern Syria that was being overrun by the Islamic State (IS) group militants.
Writing on X, Türk promised not to give up.
“We will not step back from the fight for democracy, peace and freedom. We will not allow usurpation of the people’s will!”
In Batman and Şanlıurfa, the governors banned protests, as did the governor of Mardin.
“The government has lost control,” İstanbul’s powerful opposition mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu wrote on X.
“The right to elect only belongs to voters and cannot be transferred,” he said.
İmamoğlu, 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).
‘Political coup’
Their dismissal comes days after another mayor from the CHP was arrested for alleged PKK ties in an İstanbul district and replaced by a trustee.
Ahmet Özer, 64, mayor of Esenyurt district, was arrested on Wednesday.
Both the CHP and the DEM Party slammed his arrest, denouncing it as politically motivated.
The wave of dismissals came after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan expressed full support for efforts to reach out to Turkey’s Kurds, describing it as a “window of opportunity.”
Over the years, the Turkish government has removed dozens of elected Kurdish mayors in the southeast and replaced them with its own trustees.
Six months ago, the election authority removed the DEM Party’s elected mayor in the eastern city of Van and replaced him with the losing candidate from Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), sparking furious protests.
As a result of the backlash, the winning candidate was later reinstated.
Dozens of pro-Kurdish mayors from its predecessor parties have been removed from their posts on similar charges in the past.