The election campaign for the local elections in Turkey and Northern Kurdistan has ushered in. It was to be expected that the AKP would resort to unfair means, especially in the strongholds of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).

Most recently, the AKP had 259 elected village headmen removed from office. In Başkale district of Van, where HDP had received a record 98% of votes in elections, the government resorts to various methods to make sure the HDP doesn’t get this rate in the upcoming elections. For this reason, Başkale was chosen as a kind of pilot area for the election campaign of the Turkish ruling party. Here the election campaign is operated with all available means of the state.

The election campaign is a mixture of persuasion, threats and legal consequences. Efforts by the state organs in this pilot area include the following points:

Governor of Van and District Governor of Başkale staff will try to convince the people,

Those who don’t change their minds will face pressures from the military forces and village guards (local men armed by the state to fight against the Kurds).

If people continue to support the HDP, then the judiciary will intervene and break the will of the people through a wave of arrests and repression.

Arrests already began in some villages

In the village of Elbes (Özpınar) in Başkale, where 90 percent of the residents voted for the HDP, people are already feeling repression because they are not relinquishing their support for the HDP. In this village, some of the villagers have been taken into custody three times in a week. The detention operations are carried out against the names reported by the village guards. Reports suggest that soldiers threatened the people during arrests, saying “this is just the beginning”.

Turkish military helicopters circle over the villages.