I
N THE 1980s, when Basak Demirtas was just five, the police came for her father. Four years ago, her children watched their father being arrested in their turn. “I didn’t think my daughters would have to experience the same thing,” she says. But the lot of the Kurds is slow to change.
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Selahattin Demirtas, her arrested husband, was at the time of his imprisonment the leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (
HDP), the strongest democratic voice of Turkey’s Kurds. He remains behind bars on trumped-up charges, along with thousands of other Kurdish politicians and activists. Turkish prosecutors recently applied to the country’s top court to have the
Beyond the elite: Taking protest and public opinion seriously in the Kurdistan Region
February 24, 2021 Share
In early December 2020, at least eight people were killed and hundreds of others were injured during violent protests in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) sparked by deteriorating economic conditions and the government’s failure to pay public sector salaries. Seven of the dead, including a 13-year-old boy, were killed when security forces opened fire on demonstrators. The offices of parties from across the political spectrum were torched in towns outside the major cities and in Sulaimaniya. The government arrested protest organizers and shut down a television station that was covering the demonstrations. Freedom of expression in the KRI was dealt another blow on Feb. 16, when a court in Erbil sentenced five independent journalists and activists to six years in prison on charges of “endangering the national security of the Kurdistan Region.” Critics argued that
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