THE police in Diyarbakir came for Ziya Pir and his colleagues from Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) on November 4th, in the black of night. Detained on vague terrorism charges, they were taken to a police station; Mr Pir and several others were then transferred to a courthouse. As dawn broke, a car bomb went off outside the police station, killing 11 people, mostly civilians. An offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) took credit. The attackers “must have known that there were people being detained inside the building,” says Mr Pir. He and his colleagues narrowly escaped death at the hands of a group they are accused of supporting.
The HDP is the latest casualty of the snowballing purges ordered by Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the aftermath of the failed coup on July 15th. Over 36,000 people have been arrested and 100,000 sacked, most of them from state jobs. Mr Erdogan has imposed emergency rule and put Turkish politics in a stranglehold. Ten HDP deputies, including its co-chairs Figen Yuksekdag and Selahattin Demirtas, a former candidate for president, have been arrested. Police have raided...Continue reading
from Europe http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21709991-president-erdogan-keeps-purging-turkey-locks-up-dissidents?fsrc=rss
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