Protesters with the "adalet" or "justice" march passed through the towns of Tavsancil and Gebze as they approached their end point in Istanbul, Turkey on 7 July 2017. Opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been walking from Turkey's capital, Ankara, to Istanbul in protest of ongoing purges and the jailing of elected officials. NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.On July 9, Turkey’s 25 day-long ‘Justice
March’, in which a procession
of thousands of Turkish citizens slowly made their way from Ankara to Istanbul,
came to an end in a peaceful mass rally.

Despite a heavy security presence and fears that the protest
might end in violence, it passed without a hitch. This was
no small feat. A year after an abortive July 2016 putsch, the country remains under
a state of emergency and, as a result, mass demonstrations are prohibited.

However, whether out of fear or some other inscrutable political
calculation, Turkey’s elected-despot Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, chose not to deploy
force to this act of public defiance.

Turkey’s Justice March is – or at least has the potential to be
– a transformative moment for the opposition with regards to Erdoğan and the
ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has dominated Turkish
political life since it rose to power in 2002.

In the aftermath of last years’ failed coup attempt, Erdogan’s
administration fired and/or imprisoned
thousands of public servants;
from military officers and judges to academics and high school teachers, they
are all paying the price. To many this response looks far more like a purge
than a legitimate response to a very real assault on Turkish democracy.

These aren’t the only steps being taken towards the deepening of
autocracy. In April, Erdoğan’s long held ambition to transform Turkey’s largely
ceremonial presidency into the locus executive power came to fruition. In an
ill-tempered and divisive plebiscite, Turks voted 51% to 48%
to adopt Erdoğan’s constitution alaturca.

Ruling from a newly constructed palace, which casts a menacing
shadow over the Turkish capital, Erdoğan’s position as Turkey’s de facto sultan
is unassailable.

Thus the apparent success of the Justice March has been, at the
very least, an important morale boost for Turkey’s opposition. But, the
specific controversy leading up to the march reveals one of the largest
barriers holding Turkey’s democratic forces back: the “Kurdish issue.”
   

The immediate trigger for the protest, which was called for by
the Republican People’s Party (CHP) – Turkey’s largest opposition party – was
the imprisonment of one of its parliamentary deputies, Enis Berberoğlu.

In June, a Turkish court convicted him on charges that he had
leaked images to the press of Turkish intelligence services supplying weapons
to Syrian rebels, sentencing him to 25
years in jail.

In response, CHP leader, Kemal
Kılıçdaroğlu, a former Turkish
bureaucrat whose physical appearance and understated public persona earned him
the moniker, Kemal
Gandhi, called for the public
to march in defiance of the sentence.

With many affected by the wave of arrests, the call struck a chord
with large segments of the Turkish public. In a piece for the New York Times, Kılıçdaroğlu does an excellent job of summarizing the state of
affairs that carried many 280 miles across the Anatolian steppe at the height
of summer.

Yet, conspicuously lacking from the CHP leader’s piece was any
direct reference to the plight of Turkey’s Kurdish minority. This absence is
all the more striking given that, since 2015, violence between Kurds
and the Turkish authorities claimed hundreds,
if not thousands, of lives, devastating towns and cities across Turkey’s
predominantly Kurdish southeast.

Indeed Erdoğan, who one time sanctioned talks
with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK), has over the last few years harnessed anti-Kurdish sentiment to help him
consolidate power.

However, this silence becomes more understandable when one
considers that the CHP, as well as many of its supporters, have often been
deeply suspicious of the Kurdish movement. While secular-nationalist Turks are
implacably opposed to Erdogan’s brand of Islamism, they, like the AKP, regard
Turkey’s Kurdish question in highly simplistic terms, either as a security
issue or one of economic
underdevelopment.

Hence, there is a degree of irony in the CHP’s search for
justice, considering their complicity in passing the very law that paved the
way for Berberoğlu’s prosecution. Historically, Turkey’s parliamentarians enjoyed special immunity
from prosecution, an important protection for opposition lawmakers given
Turkey’s history of authoritarianism.

However, in May 2016, a few months prior
to the failed coup, the Turkish parliament passed legislation, supported by the
CHP, to remove these protections. At the time, the target was the pro-Kurdish Peoples’
Democratic Party (HDP). This set the stage for a wave of mass arrests of
Kurdish activists, including HDP’s co-leaders, Figen Yüksekdağ and Selahattin
Demirtaş, who have been languishing in jail since November 2016.

In effect, Erdogan removed the HDP from Turkey’s political arena.
In doing so, he eliminated one of the main centres of political opposition, one
whose success had denied the AKP a parliamentary majority in the July 2015
elections. The failure of the CHP to support the HDP proved disastrous last
year; they are now alone facing a greatly empowered Erdoğan.

For the CHP, as well as Turkey’s opposition more generally,
overcoming the animosities with the Kurds is imperative. Erdoğan was,
in part, able to consolidate his electoral power-base by making strategic
concessions to Kurdish opinion. In fact, there was a time
when Erdoğan won praise
and plaudits for his relatively
progressive stance on Kurdish rights. That time may have long since passed. But
the Kurdish question remains vital for the future of Turkey’s democracy.

Should the CHP truly wish to shake the AKP's vice-like group in
Turkish body-politic, they must reach out to Turkey’s Kurds. For that, serious
self-reflection is critical. The CHP leadership, as well as secular-nationalist
Turks, have to ask themselves which they find more distasteful: Erdoğan’s
autocracy or concessions on Kurdish rights?