I Am Running for President in Turkey. From My Prison Cell
10/04/2018
Turkey will vote in presidential and parliamentary elections on June 24. I am one of six candidates running for president. I am running from my prison cell.
I am writing from a maximum-security prison in Edirne, a city in northwestern Turkey, near the border with Bulgaria. I was arrested one year and eight months ago while I was a member of the Turkish parliament and the co-chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, known as the H.D.P., for which six million people voted in the last election.
My jailers chose to imprison me here because Edirne is far from my home, family andfriends in the southeastern Kurdish region of the country. My cellmate is, like me, an elected member of the parliament.
For the past few months, we have been hearing the nearly unremitting noise of construction. A large new prison is being built next door. A state of emergency was imposed on Turkey after the failed coup attempt in 2016, and existing prisons are stretched beyond their limits. The right to free expression and assembly has been cast aside, and the number of ordinary people incarcerated is growing by the day.
The Turkish government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogans Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P., has turned its back on universal democratic values and pushed the country to the brink of political and economic crisis.
With the exception of President Erdogan, all of my fellow candidates have declared that I should be freed. They cast aside ideological differences and came to my defense because they know the government is holding me for its own political gain and not for any crime I committed. They understand that if I were free, Mr. Erdogans chances of winning the elections would be far slimmer. They recognize that no matter who wins, the imprisonment of a presidential candidate casts a pall over the legitimacy of the elections.
I am among the tens of thousands of dissidents who have been targeted by punitive measures normalized under the state of e