Turkey’s far-right MHP leader professes superlative love for Kurds

The leader of Turkey’s far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) on Monday accused James Jeffrey, the formertop U.S. official on Syria of falsely presenting him as the enemy of Kurds and said that nobody loved the ethnic minority more.

"The former U.S. Syria special envoy James Jeffrey tried to paint us like an enemy of Kurds,’’  Duvar news site cited Devlet Bahçeli as saying. "Neither Erbil, nor Washington or Brussels can love my Kurdish origin brothers and sisters as much as I do.’’

The statements by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s junior coalition partner follow remarks by Jeffrey earlier this month, accusing the MHP leader of pursuing a political agenda that has no place for Turkey’s Kurds, who account for some 15 percent of the country’s population. 

"Erdogan’s battle buddy, [Devlet] Bahceli, can be summed up in one sentence: The only thing that matters is the Turkish national agenda, and in that there’s no place for Kurds,’’ Jeffrey told Al Monitor in an interview published on Dec. 9.

Jeffrey went on to say that Erdoğan has had much better policies toward Kurds and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) than his predecessors and that he was “being hampered by the MHP.’’ 

Bahçeli on Friday called on the Turkish judiciary to shut down the country’s pro-Kurdish opposition party.

Turkish politics no longer has the capacity to tolerate the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the third largest group of the country’s parliament, Bahçeli said.

The Turkish government accuses the HDP of harbouring sympathies and acting in the interest of the PKK, an armed group that has been at war in Turkey for almost four decades, and has pursued a years-long crackdown on the group.