Turkey detains pro-Kurdish lawmakers, car
bomb kills at least eight
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[November 04, 2016]
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - A car
bomb killed eight people and wounded more than 100 in southeastern
Turkey's largest city on Friday, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said,
hours after police detained the leaders of the mostly Kurdish region's
biggest political party.
The blast struck near a police station in Diyarbakir where some of the
party leaders were being held in a terrorism probe. It tore the facades
off buildings and firefighters were searching for people trapped by
debris.
A spokesman for the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP),
parliament's second-biggest opposition grouping, said the detention of
its two leaders and at least nine other lawmakers risked triggering
civil war.
Yildirim told reporters that elected officials who incite and encourage
terrorism must face legal proceedings and that they were detained
because they had refused to give testimony.
The arrests will heighten concern among Western allies about a deepening
crackdown on dissent under President Tayyip Erdogan and about political
stability in Turkey, a NATO member and a buffer between Europe and the
conflicts in Syria and Iraq.
The arrests, which drew swift condemnation from the European Union, come
as Turkey has detained or suspended more than 110,000 officials in the
wake of a failed July coup. Turkey is considering reintroducing the
death penalty, and earlier this week journalists from a leading
opposition newspaper were detained.
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"Very bad news from Turkey. Again. Now HDP members of parliament are
being detained," the European Parliament's Turkey rapporteur, Kati Piri,
said on Twitter of a country that is seeking membership of the EU.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said she was "extremely
worried" by the arrests and had called a meeting of EU ambassadors in
Ankara.
Southeastern Turkey has been rocked by political turmoil and violence
for more than a year after the collapse of a ceasefire with the
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group, which has waged a
three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy.
SOCIAL MEDIA BLOCKED
Access was blocked to social media, including Twitter, Whatsapp, YouTube
and Facebook, an internet monitoring group said, and a reporting ban was
imposed on coverage of the blast. Asked about the measures, Yildirim
said the situation would go back to normal "once the danger is removed".
The lira hit a new low against the dollar of 3.14 after the arrests,
while the cost of insuring Turkish government debt against default hit
its highest in over a month.
"The reports of increased crackdown and talk of the reintroduction of
the death penalty raises concerns about the future trajectory of FDI
flows and even EU accession," said Manik Narain, an emerging markets
strategist at UBS in London.
Erdogan and the ruling AK Party accuse the HDP of links to the PKK,
which is deemed a terrorist organization by the United States and the
European Union. The HDP, which won more than 5 million votes in the last
general election a year ago, denies direct links.
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A damaged vehicle is seen after a blast in the Kurdish-dominated
southeastern city of Diyarbakir, Turkey, November 4, 2016.
REUTERS/Sertac Kayar
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The government introduced a nationwide state of emergency after a
failed military coup on July 15 which gave it broad powers to round
up suspects linked to the putsch. More than 110,000 civil servants,
soldiers, police, judges and other officials have been suspended or
detained, as have journalists.
The authorities have also used the emergency powers to round up
pro-Kurdish opposition activists and politicians, including
Diyarbakir's joint mayors, who were detained late last month, and
has closed all major Kurdish media outlets.
"JUDICIAL THEATER"Police raided the Ankara house of Figen Yuksekdag,
HDP co-chairwoman, and Selahattin Demirtas, the party's other
leader, in Diyarbakir. A court official said the prosecutor was
seeking the formal arrest of Demirtas and that both he and Yuksekdag
were in court after police questioning.
"I will not hesitate to be held accountable in front of a fair and
impartial judiciary. There is nothing I cannot answer for," Demirtas
said in a statement to the prosecutor, which was shared by HDP
lawmaker Besime Konca.
"But I refuse to be an actor in this judicial theater just because
it was ordered by Erdogan, whose own political past is suspicious,"
he said.
In a statement on Twitter, still accessible in Turkey through
virtual private networks (VPN), the HDP called for the international
community "to react against the Erdogan regime's coup", while party
spokesman Ayhan Bilgen described the detentions as an attempt to
provoke a civil war.
Police also raided and searched the party's head office in central
Ankara. Police cars and armed vehicles had closed the entrances to
the street of the HDP headquarters.
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A group of protesters chanting slogans tried to reach the party
offices, but were stopped by police before they could enter the
street, a Reuters witness said.
The HDP is the third-largest party in the 550-seat Turkish
parliament, with 59 seats. Parliamentarians in Turkey normally enjoy
immunity from prosecution, but the immunity of many lawmakers,
including HDP deputies, was lifted earlier this year.
(Reporting by Ece Toksabay, Ayla Jean Yackley, Humeyra Pamuk, Daren
Butler, Tuvan Gumrukcu, Gulsen Solaker; writing by Nick Tattersall;
editing by Peter Graff)
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