CHP wants to make a new start with Kurds

Murat Yetkin murat.yetkin@hdn.com.tr “I am happy with the meeting. I want to see this step as the start of dialogue between us” said Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of Turkey’s social democratic main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), while sipping his after-dinner tea following a four-hour-long conference in Diyarbakır on June 20.

It was now time for a chat over a couple of tulip-shaped glasses of tea.

The representatives of around 60 groups, not only from Diyarbakır but from all predominantly-Kurdish provinces of east and southeast Turkey, were there in the restaurant of the hotel hosting the meeting. It was organized by the Diyarbakır-based think-tank the Tigris Communal Research Center (DİTAM) at a very critical time, when Kurdish politics play a crucial role in both Turkish foreign policy in the civil war struck southern neighbors of Syria and Iraq and in the domestic scene as the country heads to a first round of presidential elections on Aug. 10.

The representatives of mostly Kurdish NGOs grilled the opposition leader over his party’s policies on the Kurdish problem. Kılıçdaroğlu listened to them calmly, took notes, and answered them one by one.

During the dinner, jokes were made around the table about what would happen if just a quarter of the questions - which often contained harsh criticism - were asked to Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan, who has demonstrated before that there is a limit to his patience.

Not everyone was sitting around the same dinner table of course, but those reflecting the pulse of the region were there.

One of them, Cabbar Leygara, is a lawyer and a well-known Kurdish activist in Diyarbakır, and was...