Medya News 16/10/2020
Sarah Glynn
The long march for democracy and freedom recently completed its very first Scottish manifestation.
After three days on the road, walking the sixty miles from Dundee to Edinburgh, a small band of community activists were joined by local residents in a rally outside the Scottish Parliament. There, they drew attention to the arrests of Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) politicians, and to the continued detention and isolation of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan.
As a historic centre of enlightenment thinking, Edinburgh played a key role in the development of liberal democracy, so this seems a good time to ask how much democratic countries really do believe in democracy.
I am not talking here about the travesty taking place across the Atlantic, where, over a century ago, Mark Twain observed that ‘we have the best government that money can buy’. Nor do I want to look at the deliberate erosion of democratic checks and balances under UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, though the relative ease with which this is taking place itself speaks volumes. What these long marches in different parts of Europe have helped to throw a light on, is a mainstream political culture that has become so complacent in its democratic status that it no longer recognises what democracy means in practice.
For anyone who truly believes in democracy, support for the arrested politicians and activists of the HDP, and for ending the isolation of the man who could negotiate a peaceful future for Kurds in Turkey, should be a litmus test.
The most recent political arrests are the latest in a long line of crackdowns that, in the last five years, have seen some 16,000 HDP members detained and 5,000 imprisoned. Of the 65 municipalities won by the HDP in March 2019, 54 have had their elected mayors removed and replaced by a government-appointed trustee, or seen their election annulled. All democrats should be crying out in protest, both because that is the right thing to do, and because the world is connected, and attacks on democracy in one country can weaken democracy everywhere. So why is this issue being raised on the streets and squares outside our political institutions, rather than in the debating chambers? Why have mainstream political parties who profess allegiance to democracy, said so little about its blatant crushing in Turkey? Why does this get hardly a mention in our mainstream media?
Our politicians and media do, after all, get excited by some movements for democracy, even if their interest eventually moves on elsewhere. Belarus was probably not somewhere that many people thought much about until recently, but it is a familiar name now. The world watched orange-clad demonstrators in the Ukraine, and massed umbrellas in Hong Kong. So why not the HDP?
Sarah Glynn 