Continued rule of AKP may lead to civil war, HDP co-leader says

The continued rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) endangers the existence of Turkey as a country and will lead to a chaos, the co-chair of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtaş, has said.

Turkey needs the rule of the HDP in order to be able to attain peace and serenity, Demirtaş said on Dec. 17, delivering a speech at a convention of the HDP in the Eastern Anatolian province of Iğdır.

"Turkey will not go on this way anymore; it cannot go on like this. Believe me, if the AKP government rules this country for another four years, then something called Turkey may not exist anymore," he said, using remarkably combative language.

"It will fall to pieces amid the danger of a very big civil war and very big chaos. If we cannot build true peace and join hands, then they will turn [the country] into Syria. They will turn it into a country like Syria where people slaughter each other every day. You have seen what ISIL [the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant] has done, what the Taliban has done in Pakistan just yesterday [Dec. 16]," Demirtaş said, referring to a recent Taliban attack on a school in which Taliban gunmen massacred more than 100 children in Peshawar.

"We will not let this understanding, which massacres people day and night and without considering whether they are children, to settle and gain power in this country," he said.

The AKP has been in power since 2002, winning three consecutive parliamentary elections in 2002, 2007 and 2011. The next parliamentary election is scheduled to take place in June 2015.

The HDP is a key stakeholder in a government-led, though stalled, peace process aimed at ending the three-decade-old conflict between the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)...