Muş HDP co-chair Nergiz sent to prison

HDP politician Belma Nergiz was arrested in Muş on Wednesday. On Friday, a Turkish court in the northern Kurdish province ordered the co-chairperson of the HDP Muş provincial organisation to be sent to prison. The politician is accused of membership in a terrorist organization. So far, no information is available on the background to the investigation against her.

Belma Nergiz was only elected co-chair of the HDP Mûş organisation on 16 July. She was arrested last Wednesday. Early in the morning, anti-terrorist units of the Turkish police stormed Nergiz’s apartment and searched it. Security forces then carried out a search of the party headquarters in the presence of the politician. Nergiz had to spend the 48-hour police detention in the anti-terror department of the police headquarters in Mûş.

With the unilateral termination of the ceasefire between the AKP regime and the Kurdish freedom movement in 2015, an unprecedented campaign of political extermination against the opposition began. The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and its sister party DBP (Party of Democratic Regions) were at the center of these attacks. Well over 23,000 HDP / DBP members have been arrested since then, at least half of whom ended up in prison on dubious terrorist charges.