The Turkish government passed a bill last week to release some 90,000 inmates, including mob bosses, racketeers, and looters, to reduce the risk of a COVID-19 outbreak in its crowded prisons. Yet President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will be keeping political prisoners behind bars, including former presidential candidate Selahattin Demirtas of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), and scores of other HDP lawmakers, mayors, and party officials.
Erdogan has a track record of exploiting crises to expand his power, and is refusing to let the pandemic disrupt his campaign to deprive Turkey’s 15 million Kurds of their constitutional rights.
Erdogan’s assault on Kurdish rights continues even as Turkey has overtaken China, reporting more than 110,000 cases as of April 27, the seventh highest number of infections in the world. So far, Erdogan seems more concerned about protecting his political interests than containing the pandemic. Following suit with his fellow authoritarians, Erdogan has kept a tight lid on coronavirus news, arresting over 400 individuals for their social media posts for “attempting to stir unrest,” interrogating reporters for “inciting the public to panic,” and even filing a criminal complaint against the anchor of Fox TV’s Turkish subsidiary for “spreading lies and manipulating the public on social media.”
