On November 4, Turkish authorities removed the elected Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party co-mayors of Mardin, Batman, and Halfeti districts and replaced them with “trustees” loyal to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). To date, a total of four DEM municipalities that the pro-Kurdish DEM Party won in this year’s local elections have been taken over by the central government in this way, depriving 362,684 voters of their chosen elected representation. Reports suggest that 37 remaining DEM municipalities may be next.

The mass disenfranchisement of millions of predominantly Kurdish voters at the local level became one of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s signature policies after his government abandoned negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 2015. It has dire consequences for the pro-Kurdish political movement’s efforts to end that conflict and build the foundations of a just, equal, and democratic peace.

With the prospect of new peace talks back on the agenda in Turkey, pro-Kurdish politicians are calling on the international community to understand what is at stake as they defend their unique concept of local democracy.

Preventing Peace

On October 10, news broke of alleged talks between the Turkish government and Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned founder and leader of the PKK. Far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahceli subsequently called for Ocalan appear before the Turkish Parliament to “end terrorism” and disband his organization altogether.

On October 23, Ocalan was allowed to meet with his relatives, his first contact with the outside world in nearly four years. His nephew, DEM MP Omer Ocalan, shared a message from the meeting. Since then, though, Ocalan has not been able to meet with his family or lawyers or pass on any further messages.

Bahceli’s maximalist demands alone are almost certainly unacceptable for Ocalan and the movement he leads. Many observers believe that the PKK’s disarmament would constitute the final stage of any serious peace initiative. It would have to follow Turkish state reforms that would reassure PKK decision-makers and the Kurdish communities that support armed struggle that peaceful avenues for politics were open.

Municipalities constitute some of the few spaces where Kurdish communities can practice limited self-governance. Since the early 2000s, pro-Kurdish parties have used them to test some of the policies that they see as part of a solution to the Kurdish issue at the national level, like participatory democracy, the recognition of non-Turkish languages and cultures, and truth and justice initiatives.

Attacking municipalities is unlikely to make the government’s weak offer any more appealing to Kurds. To the contrary, Kurdish Peace Institute data suggests that municipal districts where pro-Kurdish mayors were removed saw more political violence than districts where Erdogan’s government respected election outcomes. A recent Spectrum House poll found that 79% of Kurdish voters believed the appointments would make the Kurdish issue harder to solve.

“Strong local democracies are the core of our paradigm. Municipalities and municipal councils allow equal and fair representation of women and minorities. Through equality and shared power, it is possible to ensure societal peace and then regional peace,” explained Ceylan Akca, Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) MP for Diyarbakir.

“These attacks further prove that the ruling bloc has no intention of initiating a peace process. Instead, they hope and aim for a full, unconditional surrender of the Kurdish people,” Akca said.

Excluding Women

Violence and discrimination against Kurdish women are central to Turkey’s militarized approach to the Kurdish issue. Trustee appointments fit the trend. One recent study found that 132 women lost political office when trustees replaced elected pro-Kurdish co-mayors after the 2014 and 2019 elections. Trustee administrations shut down women’s shelters, child-care programs for working mothers, and women’s cooperatives and ended other pro-equality policies. .

Gulistan Sonuk, the deposed DEM Party mayor of Batman, ran against an Erdogan-backed Islamist with links to Turkish Hezbollah, a now-defunct Sunni jihadist paramilitary responsible for murders and disappearances of Kurdish nationalist activists in the 1990s and early 2000s. She won with a resounding sixty-five percent of the vote. Men and women celebrated her victory with chants of “jin, jiyan, azadi,” or “woman, life, freedom.”

“Since the government could not establish itself in our region, it carried out a campaign against us using these gangs. But the people of Batman still have a very fresh memory of what they [Turkish Hezbollah] did in the past. Women, especially, supported our party and frustrated what this government was trying to do,” Sonuk told the Kurdish Peace Institute.

“The government could not accept that, in a province like Batman, which is considered conservative, a young woman like me could win the highest vote share in Turkey and bring their candidate down,” she continued.

Sonuk believes that trustee appointments will once again destroy what Kurdish women have built. “When trustees were appointed in the past, they first interfered with women’s institutions. The first institutions to be closed down were women’s institutions. They know that this struggle is a women’s struggle and they know that women will stand up to their ideology and their injustices at any cost,” she said.

This, too, is a threat to any future peace agreement. The involvement of women and women’s organizations makes peace agreements more durable. By disempowering the Kurdish women’s movement at the local level and criminalizing women’s participation, Erdogan’s government is removing key actors for peace from the political scene.

Crushing Coexistence

Trustee appointments also threaten religious freedom. Erdogan’s government has stepped up the persecution of non-Muslim minorities in Turkey and allied with fringe fundamentalists in Kurdish regions.

By contrast, the pro-Kurdish political movement’s local governance model promotes coexistence between all ethnic and religious groups. Pro-Kurdish mayors worked to revive minority languages and empower Christians, Yezidis, Alevis and other persecuted religious communities.

When Abdullah Demirbas became mayor of Diyarbakir’s Sur district in 2004, he restored churches and Alevi and Yezidi houses of worship, offered municipal services and publications in Kurdish, Armenian, and Aramaic, and challenged the state-sponsored denial of the Armenian Genocide and other atrocities against non-Muslims. “Everything that we want for Kurds, we also want for all other peoples in our region,” Demirbas told the Kurdish Peace Institute.

The pro-Kurdish political movement saw the Sur municipality as an example. Other municipalities went on to take similar steps. For Erdogan’s government, tolerance was a threat: Demirbas was removed from office and arrested multiple times in a precursor to the trustee system.

“Kurds made it known what they want in these elections. They said, we will elect our mayors and municipal councils of our own free will. But the Turkish state doesn’t want this, so once again, they imposed trustees,” Demirbas said.

“The trustee perspective is ‘We don’t want religious freedom, multilingualism, pluralism, and equality between peoples.’ What is it that they want? They want to impose one language, one identity, one religion.”

This, too, endangers prospects for a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish issue. Religious intolerance has helped Erdogan consolidate power and purse aggressive policies in Iraq and Syria. Religious freedom and justice for persecuted minorities, on the other hand, are fundamental for democratic change in Turkey. Trustee appointments target some of the only political forces in Turkey modeling this change.

A New Way Forward?

Eda Duzgun, the DEM Party’s co-representative to Europe, told the Kurdish Peace Institute that destroying local democracy will not bring Erdogan the results that he wants.

“The Turkish state denies Kurds the right to elected representation so that it can deny that there is a Kurdish question or even a Kurdish identity. But all of this denial is the source of the conflict in the first place,” Duzgun said.

“For example, the government has appointed a trustee to Mardin Metropolitan Municipality three times now. When people there next have a chance to elect their local government, they will have spent twelve of the preceding fifteen years under unelected rule. When they protest this, they are beaten and imprisoned. The state itself is telling Kurds not to believe in democratic politics, but we insist on it” she explained.

Despite everything, Duzgun maintained, the DEM Party is unbowed in its struggle for a more peaceful and equal Turkey. Municipalities under threat of trustee appointments are still hard at work serving their constituents and putting their pluralist values into practice. Hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets to protest trustee appointments and call on the Turkish government to begin peace talks with Abdullah Ocalan. That may signal to Erdogan and his allies that targeting municipalities may make Kurdish actors less likely to negotiate, not more.

“Kurds are serious about peace and democracy. If the state is, too, they can release Ocalan and start real negotiations,” Duzgun said. “This is what our people demand.”

(Photo: Medine Mamedoglu on X)