The one-man regime and the new order at municipalities!

One of Mardin’s central sub-provinces, Artuklu, is one of the country’s and the region’s most important, finest and most historical centres. As this article was being penned, the people of the sub-province have been three days without water.

The reason for the water cut in the sub-province is the cutting off of electricity by the Dicle Electricity Distribution Company due to non-payment of amounts owed by the municipally affiliated Mardin Water and Sewerage Enterprise.

Well, whose doing do you think these debts could be?

They are the doing of the trustees known to you and whom President Erdoğan calls the “people’s servants.”

Even back in 2017, the Court of Account detected 196 improprieties in inspections it made at municipalities in thirteen provinces, three of them metropolitan, managed by trustees, and Mardin Aruklu Municipality was one of the municipalities that came to the fore in the Court of Account report in terms of corruption and improprieties. It was detected in the same report that the debt of these municipalities had risen by 85% in the trustees’ period.

Do you know how much debt the trustee left the HDP at Van Metropolitan Municipality, where it has retaken the municipality?

One and a half billion lira!

The debt trustees have left at Batman Municipality is 307, at Cizre Municipality 220, at Diyarbakır Yenişehir sub-province 178 and at Dersim Municipality 68 million lira.

When I visited him, Selçuk Mızraklı, Co-Mayor of Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality at which the total amount of debt the trustee left has yet to be determined, said the money sent to the municipality in the month before they took office was 43 million lira, but this money suddenly fell to 15 million after they took over – and the staff wage bill alone amounts to 11 million lira.

It will be recalled that Mızraklı made a public display of the way Diyarbakır Metropolitan Trustee Cumali Atilla, one of Erdoğan’s favourites from among the “people’s servants” trustees and who was thus made the AKP’s candidate on 31 March, had made himself a mini-palace in the guise of official chambers.

It is probably common knowledge where the trustees, who squander the people’s hundreds of millions of lira, take their example from when it comes to luxury and ostentation.

You have undoubtedly seen the reports that made it into the media about Kars Municipality, that was run in the previous period not by a trustee, but the small partner of the “one-man regime,” the MHP.

Kars Co-Mayor Ayhan Bilgen announced that seizure had been made at his official chambers for 338 million lira in debt left over from the MHP period and even chamber chairs had been seized.

And one more report: With these municipalities left unable to function due to debt, the number of official cars assigned to 124 administrators at Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, where the elections are being repeated under ruling party pressure, is a full 874.

This is precisely the new order the one-man regime has brought to municipalities: On the one hand, an opposition that even has it chairs in official chambers seized and, on the other, a ruling-party municipality at which hundreds of administrators are each assigned more than seven cars.

The question that must be asked here is: if the AKP or MHP were governing the municipalities of Artuklu where the electricity has been cut off or Kars where seizure is being conducted, could the municipality’s electricity be cut off or seizure be conducted?

This question could also be formulated as, “Why are these procedures being conducted after the HDP has taken the municipalities and not at the time of those who took on the debt?”

President Erdoğan actually answers this question with his “lame duck” comment he made after his party lost the main metropolitan municipalities.

The one-man regime is punishing the people in the places it lost on 31 March. It is forcing the people to do homage to it in order to obtain the most basic services.

This policy amounts to a continuation in a special form at Kurdish municipalities governed until yesterday by trustees of the policy of oppression and liquidation in the Kurdish problem. Those who never stop speaking of religion punish the people by depriving them of water in the month of Ramadan and try to set the people and HDP municipal administrators against one another.

Against this backdrop, what does Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu say?

“Let’s continue in the same way (with trustees) for the coming five years. I state most clearly that the HDP will retain no municipalities or such like there.”

Soylu is probably being ironic. For, it is not hard to imagine what trustees, who have spent the people’s funds as their own interests and those of regime-supporting circles dictate just in the two and a half years since usurping control and have left the municipalities in debt to the tune of billions of lira, would be capable of doing in five years. Against just such a backdrop, the HDP may heed Soylu’s words and refrain from retaking the municipalities!

With two months yet to pass since the local elections, there is no other way out apart from finding popular support and struggling along with the people to block the treatment the one-man regime wishes to mete out to municipalities under new circumstances under which it punishes and announces that it will punish those that do not do homage to it.