Evaluating Huda-Par’s Lack of Success within Kurdish Politics

Following the declaration of the municipal election results on March 31, 2024, Zekeriya Yapıcıoğlu, the head of the Free Cause Party, known by their Turkish abbreviation of “HÜDA PAR” (Hür Dava Partisi) which can be translated as “Party of God” delivered a statement acknowledging that his party’s performance in the municipal election fell short of expectations. Nonetheless, he found no positive points to highlight other than an increase in the number of votes over the previous elections.

For historical context, Huda-Par, founded in 2012, has its roots in the now officially defunct Hezbollah, an extremist Kurdish Islamist group from the 1990s with no connections to the party in Lebanon of the same name. That party is often referred to as “Kurdish Hizbullah” (with altered spelling) and is very controversial, based on the fact that the Turkish deep state deployed them as a death squad against elements of the secular Kurdish left, in particular the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). Now, because some former members of Hizbullah are in Huda-Par and the Huda-Par party leader refuses to call Hizbullah’s murderous behavior “terrorism” (despite the fact that the Turkish state even lists them as a terrorist organization), most Kurdish groups are saying that current-day Huda-Par is just a rebranded continuation of Hizbullah.

Current Elections

As for this latest election, Yapıcıoğlu’s party as Huda-Par won 253,000 votes in various provinces. He stated that his party did not win any significant towns but increased its vote share. However, it is difficult to locate serialized data for Huda-Par from prior local and parliamentary elections. In comparison to the 2018 parliamentary general election, Huda-Par received 155,539 votes.

It is worth noting that comparing municipal and parliamentary election figures is an unsuitable indicator for tracking political party performance trends, as the nature of the elections is different. A more appropriate approach would be to compare the current municipal elections to the nearest previous municipal elections.

Zakaria Yapıcıoğlu did not mention his party’s minor victory in Kayapınar (also known locally and historically as Ainkaf) in the Gercüş district, southwest of Batman Province, during his electoral speech. The community has a total of 2,300 people. Huda-Par garnered 777 votes, representing 57% of the total votes cast. In contrast, the candidate for Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) received 544 votes, while the candidate for the New Welfare Party received 10.

Analyzing the votes of the village of Ainkaf is essential since it shows how national and clan backgrounds influence voting patterns. The settlement is dominated by the Habezbeni clan. The clan is divided into two factions: those who claim Kurdish ancestry and those who claim descent from the Arab tribe of Banu Abs. The Arabic origin tale of the clan’s heritage is unusual because Abs is a tribe only known from Antara ibn Shaddad’s legends and is not related to the Quraysh or the Prophet Muhammad’s family (Ahl Al-Bayt). Generally, Altan Tan, a former HDP politician, tends to emphasize the clan’s Arabic ancestry in a remark from his book ‘From Torabedin to the Wilderness’ that circulates on the clan’s Facebook groups, however, it is unclear whether Altan Tan himself is from this clan.

In any case, the identity of ‘Habezbeni – Bani Abs’ is ambiguous. It is common for communities under significant security pressure throughout history to seek to escape their identity if that identity is a source of insecurity. Over the hundred years since the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Kurdish identity has become a living burden for much of the Kurdish population. Initially, the authorities provided a ‘lifeline’ to the families of sheikhs and clerics who trace their origins to the Arabs or the ‘Ahl al-Bayt’ (descendants of the same clan as the Prophet Muhammad).

One of the Habezbeni historical clan leaders in Kayapınar, Ezzeddin Agha, was in contact with the Hverkan tribal leader, Aliki Butti (who was assassinated in 1919) and it is rumored that they agreed to establish a Kurdish state. However, the Habezbeni Agha later backed out. Of course, tribes inflate their history because Aliki Batti was not a politician and his movement, which consisted of running from place to place, had no political significance.

Nonetheless, these legends are significant in identifying the Kurdish part of the clan, as opposed to the section that considers itself Bani Abs, perhaps because some of them believe that this Arab tribe is tied to legendary glory. This is because Arabism in Turkey has historically been obedient to the Turkish central authority and compliant with voluntary Turkification, and this assumption needs investigation and research to know the limits of rebellion and submission in local communities. Perhaps the most prominent of which are those communities that trace their ancestry to Arab origin and have built a wall of aversion to Kurdish nationalist currents throughout the life of the Turkish Republic, despite the fact that their ancestors were among the leaders of the Kurdish revolutions at the end of the Ottoman era.

In any case, the town was originally Syriac, called Ainkaf, and had a Christian population until the pogroms of 1915, when it was inhabited by the Habezbeni people. Understanding the social structure of the Batman town of Kayapınar, as opposed to the Kayapınar district in Amed province, can help define the Huda-Par Party’s political lines and answer a key question in political science: where does the party’s advocacy end?

The majority of Habezbeni Kurds voted for Huda-Par, while Habezbeni Arabs supported the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Kurds in the town voted primarily on their kinship with Kurdish-Islamic candidate Samir Ozhan, a former AKP member. As a result, these votes do not indicate any clear pro-Huda-Par ideological leaning. In the Gercüş district, which includes the town of Kayapınar, where the AKP won the central municipality with 1,360 votes, just 54 votes behind the Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM), the Felicity Party (SP) obtained 706 votes. Huda-Par for their part, obtained 208 votes, and the New Welfare Party (NWP) 74 votes.

It is noteworthy that party vote maps generally correspond to national origins and religious ideologies. The DEM party received the votes of the majority of Kurds in Gercüş, while a tiny minority supported Huda-Par. In the meantime, the Justice and Development Party and the Felicity Party split the votes of people who identify as Arabs and Turks. Along with the obvious national connections, there is always a Kurdish minority that votes for Turkish parties and one that refuses to vote. However, the share of the Kurdish minority that supports Turkish parties remains small, both numerically and proportionally.

Northern Kurdistan (southeastern Turkey) is not entirely Kurdish, as many Kurds outside the region believe, nor is it comparable to Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, where the ratio of non-Kurds is scarcely more than 5%. In Northern Kurdistan, there are big and major provinces where the Kurdish population is less than 40%, and certain major cities, like Sert, are at least 35% Arab. As a result, the electoral votes are close between Kurdish and Turkish parties, but this does not imply that 27% of Kurds in Sert voted for Turkish parties, as the Justice and Development Party (AKP) claimed.

Huda-Par earned fewer than 3% of the votes. Despite being an Islamist party, Huda-Par was unable to garner Arab votes and received little support from Kurmanji-speaking voters. Given the mixed voting districts, Huda-Par has no place among the Arab, Turkish, Circassian, and Azeri minorities of Northern Kurdistan; hence, Turkish parties continue to expand their influence in Kurdish areas based on non-Kurmanji votes. In this sense, Kurmanji must be distinguished from the Sunni Zazaki-speaking Kurdish group, which continues to vote overwhelmingly for Islamist parties. However, Huda-Par has no presence in this constituency, because the same constituency defines Huda-Par as a Sunni Kurmanji Islamist party.

It is unlikely that the party will succeed in breaking this electoral vicious circle. The authority’s support for Huda-Par is likely programmed to reduce DEM’s vote, which it has never succeeded in doing. On the contrary, Huda-Par has only been able to increase its votes among the Islamist “Kurmanjs” (of that Kurdish dialect) who used to vote for the AKP, a clear example being in Diyarbakir (Amed), in which they received 53,000 votes, or 7%, and took this share from the AKP, along with the New Welfare Party, without affecting DEM’s dominance in North Kurdistan’s largest province.

The election in the Varto district of Muş serves as a significant electoral sample for identifying the Sunni Kurmanji Islamist party. In this district, the Zaza Alevi majority cast their votes for the DEM party (60%), while the Sunni Arab minority supported the AKP (22%). In the Hasköy district of Muş, the Huda-Par party did not field a candidate, even though the electorate in this region is predominantly Islamist. The district is mainly composed of Arab and Turkmen residents, leading to a division of votes among the Turkish parties.

In the city of Muş itself, the ratio of Arabs and Turks is around 40 percent, which is close to the percentage obtained by all Turkish parties in the last elections in the city, although the Kurmanji bloc around the DEM party led to its victory in the municipality with 42 percent. The Huda-Par party received only 5 percent.

The election map in Bedlis reflects a similar quandary over Huda-Par’s restricted identity as a Sunni Kurmanji-speaking party. Mutki district has a two-thirds Sunni Kurdish Zazi majority, with the remaining one-third Arabs and Azeris. The DEM and Huda-Par parties didn’t run any candidates. While DEM’s move is logical given that voters in Mutki have historically favored Islamist parties, what prevents Huda-Par from competing in a non-Kurmanji Muslim electoral arena?

The Khizan district in Bitlis has a Sunni Zazi plurality, followed by a Kurmanji majority of at least one-third. The AKP won the municipality, and the Turkish parties (AKP, Felicity, New Welfare, Future, and Good) obtained a total of 60% of the votes in Khizan district, whereas the Kurmanji votes went almost exclusively to the DEM party (25%). The CHP received 12% of the Alevi Zazaki-speaking vote. At this venue, there is no Huda-Par party.

In summary, the Huda-Par Party does not appear in any electoral arena except for the Sunni Kurmanji votes. The only arena in which it competed was Batman, where it received 15% of the votes compared to 66% for the DEM party. Although Huda-Par considers Batman its historical stronghold, from which it conducted terrorist operations in the 1990s against the Kurdish nationalist movement with the support and coverage of the state apparatus, its electoral presence remains limited.

According to Kaypınar’s model and electoral vote map, Huda-Par is an Islamist party in the Kurmanji community, with limited opportunities for its ideology due to limited support from the DEM party, the central party in Northern Kurdistan, and the Kurmanji electoral bloc. Without expanding into new arenas, Huda-Par may remain a small party with limited success in municipal elections.

Huda-Par positioned itself as an Islamist party that transcended traditional social networks, including family networks based on clan and location, resulting in the party’s stagnation and failure to form alternative loyalty networks. The trend of “winning hearts and minds” based on political Islam ideology did not work for Huda-Par, despite the AKP authority’s support for the party and the coalition that Huda-Par joined in the 2023 parliamentary and presidential elections, which won four parliamentary seats thanks to AKP votes.

As a result, the party has adopted a new strategy that contradicts its proclaimed ideology: attempting to strengthen tribal relationships. Like the Ramanli (Kurmanji) family. Elders of this clan in Batman and its surrounding areas stated that they were splitting away from the AKP and joining Huda-Par. The party nominated one of the clan’s members to run for the Batman municipality, where he received 15% of the vote.

However, many questions remain as to whether Huda-Par’s structuring of its electoral space and practically confining it to Kurmanj-speaking Kurds is a method agreed upon with the “state-power” to compete with the HDP in the past (since 2014) and the DEM in the present in the Kurdish arena. This raises additional issues about why Huda-Par has not modified its political stance to become a generic party that attracts Islamist votes in all Turkish arenas, whether Kurds, Turks, or others, and why it insists on remaining in the Kurmanji arena?

This function raises questions about whether the state’s backing for the party is contingent on it being active only outside the general Islamist arena. If so, this would mean that Huda-Par’s Kurdish-only rhetoric is a commitment to this tacit understanding that it is not a democratic Islamist party but only a Kurdish-Kurmanji Islamist party.

Huda-Par has been practically proven incapable of competing in the arena of wider Kurdish votes, and the only change in the vote map is that he minimized the pro-AKP Kurdish vote, especially in Diyarbakır, where they received about 53,000 votes. When compared to previous election rounds, it is clear that these votes came from “Kurmanj” who used to vote for the AKP, but most of them changed their political orientation after the Turkish occupation of Afrin in 2018.

In any case, Turkish parties will continue to have a share in the electoral landscape of the Kurdish provinces through non-Kurdish population enclaves (Arabs, Turkmen, Circassians, and Tatars), which constitute a significant percentage exceeding 35% in some provinces (such as Bidlis, Ağrı, Kars, Muş, Mardin, and Şırnak). Some districts in these provinces are devoid of Kurds. The Huda-Par party is left with the task of working to become the third party in Northern Kurdistan, which is the maximum it might achieve, following the DEM party and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) or any ruling party that may replace the AKP and gain the votes of non-Kurdish groups in the Kurdish provinces.