Will Turkey oust Kurdish deputies from parliament?
The events surrounding the Feb. 17 bombing in Ankara have sparked a furor against Kurdish members of Turkey’s parliament as many political forces threaten to shut them out of the political scene.
A female deputy of the Kurdish-dominated Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Tugba Hezer, is a heated topic of discussion in Turkey these days. She paid a controversial condolence visit to the family of Abdulbaki Somer, the suicide bomber who struck Ankara on Feb. 17 and killed 29 people, most of them military officers. Readers outside Turkey may find this strange, for what is normally debated at length is the attack itself and the organization and reasons behind it.
Senior government officials, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, have been lashing out at Hezer for days, triggering efforts to strip HDP lawmakers of their parliamentary immunity.
