The Green Left Party held its grand congress in Ankara on Sunday with the participation of thousands. The party, which was renamed as the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party (Halkların Eşitlik ve Demokrasi Partisi, HEDEP), has elected Tülay Hatimoğulları Oruç and Tuncer Bakırhan as its new co-chairs. The party's council of eighty members was also renewed, as were the members of the disciplinary and arbitration committees.

Tülay Hatimoğulları

Tülay Hatimoğulları Oruç was born in 1977 in Samandağ in the southernmost province of Hatay. An economist by training, she comes from an Alawite family and has been politically active since her school days. During her studies at Anadolu University in Eskişehir, she was involved in campaigns to revive the Arabic language and culture in the settlement areas of the Alawite community. She is one of the co-founders of the Çağdaş Sanat Atölyesi (Contemporary Art Workshop), which has been the first address for Arabic-language teaching in theatre and music since 1995, and participated in the establishment of the Research Institute for Arab Peoples in the Middle East, which was founded in 2015.

Tülay Hatimoğulları Oruç has always been active in the feminist movement as well. In 2000, she was involved in the founding of the Istanbul Women's Academy Amargi, which has been instrumental in establishing relations between the women's organisations that emerged organisationally from the Kurdish women's movement in Turkey and other feminist organisations in the country through its "Projects for the Gathering of Women". In the following years, she also worked for the "Peace Council Turkey", a civil initiative working for a political solution to the Kurdish question.

Politically, Tülay Hatimoğulları Oruç is in the tradition of the socialist left. In 2011, she was a delegate at the founding of the HDK (Peoples' Democratic Congress), the organising body of hundreds of groups and political activists from which the HDP (Peoples' Democratic Party) emerged in 2012. She is a co-founder of the Socialist Reconstruction Party (SYKP), which is a component of the HDP, and was its co-chair between 2016 and 2018. In 2018, she resigned from this position after being elected to the Turkish National Assembly as the HDP's candidate for the Adana constituency. She was re-elected to parliament in the general election last May. She is in charge of the Peoples and Religious Communities Commission.

Tuncer Bakırhan

Tuncer Bakırhan is a Kurd. He was born in Kars in 1970 and graduated from Uludağ University in Bursa with a degree in economics. He became politicised in the course of state oppression in Kurdistan. He first became active in Kurdish politics at the age of nineteen, working at the communal level for the People's Labour Party (HEP), which was founded in 1990. The HEP is the original party whose successor the HDP represents today. In 1991, it succeeded in sending 22 Kurdish deputies to parliament in the parliamentary elections through a joint list with the "Social Democratic People's Party" (SHP). However, the HEP came under heavy attack from the very beginning. No sooner had it been founded than a wave of terrorist attacks began against the party and its members in Northern Kurdistan. The perpetrators: death squads of the Turkish state. In 1992, the HEP was banned.

Several successor parties to the HEP, including the Democracy Party (DEP), were also banned. In 1994, the People's Democracy Party (HADEP) was founded. Tuncer Bakırhan led the provincial association in Kars until this party was also banned. In the 2002 parliamentary election, he ran for the successor DEHAP. Although he won most of the votes, it was not enough for a seat in the National Assembly in the end, as DEHAP failed to meet the nationwide electoral threshold of ten percent. Bakırkan subsequently took over as party president. In 2005, he resigned from the post after DEHAP dissolved and decided to join the Democratic Society Party (DTP).

Tuncer Bakırhan spent several years in prison, the first time during the so-called KCK operations in 2013. The following year, he was elected mayor of his native town of Siirt for the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), which was founded after the DTP was banned. In November 2016, he was removed from office by order of the Ministry of Interior and arrested on terror charges along with numerous other politicians, including former HDP co-chairs Figen Yüksekdağ and Selahattin Demirtaş. He spent three years in pre-trial detention - unjustly, as the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2021 and ordered Turkey to pay compensation because the accusations against Bakırhan were clearly political in nature. In the meantime, the Turkish judiciary had sentenced him to almost eleven years in prison for alleged membership of the PKK. Bakırhan has been a member of the Turkish parliament since May.

HEDEP Party Council

Delegates in Ankara today elected the following members to the HEDEP Party Council: Aysel Batyar Önsel, Bahattin Karaman, Hülya Kavuk, Öztürk Türkdoğan, Berdan Öztürk, İbrahim Akın, Perihan Pakize Sinemillioğlu, Berkat Kar, İdil Uğurlu, Recep Demirci, Beybün Aslan, İlknur Birol, Sami Evren, Beyza Zeyno Bayramoğlu, Kemal Bülbül, Selçuk Odabaşı, Burcugül Çubuk, Kerem Fırtına, Selda İlgöz Kocayiğit, Bülent Uyguner, Livan Orman, Sema Koç, Cabbar Leygara, Lütfü Kaya, Semiha Şahin, Canan Çalağan, Mahfuz Güleryüz, Semra Kıratlı, Canan Kebenç Özkan, Mediha Yüksel, Senem Eriş, Cemile Turhallı Balsak, Mehmed Ali Yavuz, Serhat Eren, Derya Arslan, Mehmet Bozgeyik, Servin Kararkoç, Diyadin Fırat, Mehmet Rüştü Tiryaki, Several Ballıkaya Çelik, Ebrü Günay, Mehmet Saltoğlu, Sevtap Akdağ Karahalı, Edanur İbrahimoğlu, Melis Emine Tantan, Sezai Temelli, Elif Bulut, Metin Kılıç, Sinem Seven, Emirali Türkmen, Muhammed Ayten, Şakire Şeyda Ataş, Ender İmrek, Murat Gökdağ, Tayip Temel, Evgil Türker, Murad Mıhçı, Tülay Korkutan, Fatma Çelik, Musa Piroğlu, Umut Vedat Açar, Fatma Koçyiğit Öner, Naciye İskender, Ümit Küçükbayatlılı, Funda Buyruk, Nevroz Şanlı, Ünal Yusufoğlu, Haci Erdemir, Nuray Özdoğan, Vedat Çınar Altan, Halime Bayram, Onur Hamzaoğlu, Vezir Coşkun Parlak, Hatice Betül Çelebi, Ömer Görünmek, Yüksel Mutlu, Hatice Doğan, Hülya Ateş, Özlem Gündüz and Özcan Teker.

Members of the Disciplinary and Conciliation Committees

The elected members of the Disciplinary Committee are: Cumhur Ege, Garip Kandemir, Zeynep Nilgün Salmaner, Emine Akyazılı, Hüseyin Gözen, Eylem Arzu Kayaoğlu and Tülay Kılınç.

The elected members of the Conciliation Committee are: Aylin Hacaloğlu, Ayşe Erdem, Nevzat Onuk, Ayşe Elif Ela Hasanoğlu and Mehmet Salih Yıldız.