ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - Turkey's pro-Kurdish People's Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party) on Tuesday condemned Ankara’s recent arrest operations targeting different groups across the country, including a major crackdown on LGBT+ activists, asserting that the ongoing peace process in the country cannot progress while the state is “narrowing the democratic space” and engaging in “repression”.

Turkish authorities on Sunday raided a number of gay bars and the homes of LGBT+ activists across twelve provinces to target “prostitution and obscenity,” arresting at least 63 people amid a government-led campaign entitled “My Family is Safe” that Ankara says seeks to protect “family values.” On Monday, several websites and social media accounts allegedly linked with queer individuals and organizations were shut down by the authorities.

Despite same-sex relations not being illegal in the country, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has previously described LGBT+ individuals as “perverts”, while Human Rights Watch warned in October that leaks revealed a draft law intending to criminalize the promotion or expression of “attitudes and behavior contrary to biological sex and general morality,” and impose sentences of up to four years for those found in breach.

“The detention of politicians and human rights defenders, the targeting of people due to their different lifestyles and gender identities; the imposition of access barriers to the press and oppositional social media accounts—these disregard the freedoms of expression, thought, and organization. These practices yield nothing but heightened societal tensions,” wrote DEM Party Co-Chair Tuncer Bakirhan on X.

“In such a historic period when Türkiye is discussing peace and a democratic resolution, it is unacceptable that every day another segment of society is targeted; that the voices of politicians, human rights defenders, journalists, writers, and academics are being sought to be silenced,” the DEM Party said in a statement.

The pro-Kurdish party, which has served as a vital intermediary between Ankara and imprisoned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan to secure the latter organization's dissolution and the commencement of a peace process, further highlighted Monday's restrictions imposed on “human rights defenders” and the Tuesday arrest of Socialist Refoundation Party (SYKP) leader Mertcan Titiz as “exacerbating the picture.”

“We remind those in power once again: Conducting the Peace and Democratic Society Process [the title given to Turkey's peace process with the PKK] by talking about peace on one hand while narrowing the democratic space on the other will not be convincing or confidence-building in the eyes of society.”

“The language of peace cannot stand side by side with the practice of repression,” the statement concluded. 

Democratic backsliding has long been deemed a feature of Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party's (AK Party) government, drawing repeated condemnations from the European Union and international watchdogs.

Nacho Sanchez Amor, the European Parliament's rapporteur on Turkey, accused Ankara of “weaponizing” so-called family values to persecute LGBT+ people, calling the Sunday raids a “shocking escalation in the repression.”

"Families are protected by helping them make ends meet, fighting gender violence & forced child marriage, & upholding the Constitution," he wrote on X. “Not by attacking a minority to distract from other issues.”