Turkey’s Kurdish HDP lawmaker Idris Baluken. Photo: Baluken’s FB
ANKARA,— Turkish police on Tuesday re-arrested a parliamentary group leader of the Kurdish opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in the Turkish capital, Ankara, as part of the crackdown against Turkey’s Kurdish political movement, state-run Anadolu Agency reported.
A court in Diyarbakir, southeastern Turkey, had issued an arrest warrant on Friday for Idris Baluken after he was released by a lower court on Jan. 30.
He had spent nearly three months in prison over links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party PKK.
Baluken was among at least a dozen of the party’s lawmakers detained in November 2016 after their parliamentary immunity was lifted.
The 1st High Criminal Court in Diyarbakir on Friday accepted a prosecution appeal against Baluken’s release.
He faces aggravated life imprisonment on charges of disrupting the unity of the state’s territorial integrity, membership of an armed terrorist group, spreading PKK propaganda and taking part in unauthorized meetings and marches.
In November 2016, 12 Kurdish HDP lawmakers, including the two co-leaders, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, were arrested on charges of links to the PKK which they deny.
Thousands of officials from the HDP and dozens of lawmaker have been detained since 2015.
The government accuses the HDP of having links to the PKK, a charge that the HDP denies.
The PKK took up arms in 1984 against the Turkish state, which still denies the constitutional existence of Kurds, to push for greater autonomy for the Kurdish minority who make up around 22.5 million of the country’s 79-million population.
A large Kurdish community in Turkey and worldwide openly sympathise with PKK rebels and Abdullah Ocalan, who founded the PKK group in 1974, and has a high symbolic value for most Kurds in Turkey and worldwide according to observers.
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