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Introduction
In the December 1995 elections, the overtly pro-Kurdish party, the People's Democracy Party, Halkin Demokrasi Partisi (HADEP), finished well below the 10% national threshold necessary to get members elected to the Turkish Grand National Assembly. In its defeat and disappointment lay a silver lining of sorts: it had received more than a million votes in what unquestionably were exacting electoral circumstances. Moreover, its strong showing in the south-east provided the party with a degree of legitimacy, a fact not lost on other political formations in Turkey. Six months later, the party was in trouble again. At its convention in June 1996, someone brought down the Turkish flag and replaced it with a poster of the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. Soon thereafter, the party's leadership was hauled off to jail where they were to remain until 15 April 1997. In June 1997, harsh sentences were imposed on these leaders ranging from 4.5 to 6 years in prison which not only created a leadership crisis but more importantly opened the way for the state to ban the party altogether. But HADEP had always lived under the shadow of such an eventuality given the fact that its predecessors, HEP, OZDEP and DEP had succumbed to that same fate. HADEP, if closed down, is likely to give birth to another formation. More importantly, however, HADEP has emerged as a critical player in the Turkish electoral scene: it not only has succeeded in galvanizing at least a significant segment of the Kurdish population, but it is the only party capable of restraining the growth of the Islamist Welfare Party in Turkey's primarily Kurdish south-eastern provinces.
Background
Turkish Kurds had always figured prominently in mainstream Turkish parties ever since the formation of the republic. These Kurdish MPs represented a wide variety of political persuasions: some had been coopted while others had embraced the new Turkish identity. Still others joined these parties to provide benefits for their constituents and participate in the pork-barrel politics that is mandatory in any parliamentary system if districts are to receive services from the central government. These parliamentarians included die-hard Kurdish nationalists as well as opponents of any semblance of a nationalist Kurdish revival Functioning within the constitutional boundaries of the Turkish republic, these MPs almost...