ISTANBUL — Turkey’s senior election board on Monday disqualified 12 pro-Kurdish politicians from running for Parliament in the coming election on the grounds that they are legally unfit to be candidates. The unexpected move is likely to anger Kurds in the country’s restive southeast who have been seeking further representation.
The board’s decision, reported by the semi-official Anatolian News Agency, could effectively block the prospects for any additional Kurdish representatives to be elected when the parliamentary voting occurs in mid-June. Turkey’s Kurdish minority has 20 representatives in the 540-seat Parliament and has been agitating for more.
Some of the politicians who were declared ineligible had been approved by the same electoral board when they ran for office in the 2007 election. The board attributed the discrepancy to its lack of complete information about them four years ago, including a lack of awareness that some had criminal records.
The board’s action, however, was widely viewed among Kurds as an underhanded tactic to disenfranchise them.
“This is a political decision that prevents participation of Kurds in democratic politics,” Ahmet Turk, a banned Kurdish politician and former member of a Kurdish political party closed down by the Constitutional Court in 2009, said on NTV, a private television network. “Despite all our democratic efforts, politics has been blocked for Kurds.”
The board’s action was also likely to face criticism in the European Union, which has been evaluating whether to grant Turkey the full membership it has long sought. European Union officials have advocated that Turkey promote greater participation of Kurds in domestic politics. Continued