One Kurd and several pro-Kurds elected to Danish parliament
COPENHAGEN, Denmark – The Social Democrat Yildiz Akdogan became the only Kurdish member to win a seat in the Danish parliament, after elections in which six other Danes with Kurdish roots were competing.
Expressing sorrow that the Social Democrat-led government of Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt lost the election to the center-right group led by the Liberal Venstre Party, Akdogan vowed to continue her fight.
She told Rudaw that, among the many issues she intends to support is lobbying on behalf of Yezidi Kurds who “have suffered a lot under Islamic State’s (ISIS) horrible acts,” including women abducted and sold as slaves by the extremist group.
“We should put pressure on the Arab countries where some of the kidnapped Yezidi women are believed to be living as slaves so they can be found and set back to their families,” said Akdogan, who like the six others who did not secure a seat has Kurdish roots in Turkey.
The incumbent Kurdish MP, Ozlem Cekic, did not make it back to parliament because her Socialist People’s Party received fewer votes.
What attracted attention in the Kurdish community in Denmark was that six ethnic Danes with very pro-Kurdish views from the left-wing Unity List (Enhedslisten) were elected.
Nikolaj Villumsen, Pelle Dragsted, Pernille Skipper, Soren Sondergaard, Eva Flyvholm and Rune Lund have all been outspoken supporters of the Kurds, who have their own large Diaspora community in Denmark.
Villumsen and Skipper have participated in celebrations for the Kurdish New Year, Newroz, in Turkey’s Diyarbakir and visited the village of Roboski, where 34 Kurdish civilians were killed by a Turkish air raid in 2011.
Sondergaard also participated in Newroz in Diyarbakir this year. In 1997 he wrote a book in Danish on Kurds in the Middle East and Europe.
Some Turks in Denmark had been offended by Unity List politicians participating in events where a picture of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) hung in the background. The PKK is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.
A boycott campaign on Facebook titled "No Votes for the Unity List from Turks” received many likes in a short time.
"Danes with Turkish backgrounds have taken a joint decision not to vote for The Unity List for the parliamentary election,” the campaign had said. “We are infuriated and deeply disappointed that a party that is part of a democracy openly chose to support the PKK," it added.
Skipper was re-elected despite the opposition to his party. He maintained that his party would work to remove the PKK from the EU terrorism list.
Referring to an ongoing but slow peace process between the PKK and the Turkish state since 2013 and the PKK’s fight against ISIS, she told Rudaw: “The PKK should not be on the terrorism list, both because they are involved in peace negotiations in Turkey and in light of the fact that the PKK is now in the frontline against ISIS.”
Regarding the Iraqi Kurdistan region’s declared pro-independence ambitions, she said that, “There are no doubts that the Kurdish independence struggle is a fight that the Unity List supports."
Until any declaration of independence, the party will support the Kurdistan region, said Dragsted, another elected MP.
"We will make sure that Denmark also in the future supports the Peshmerga in Kurdistan against ISIS,” said Dragsted.
Members of the Kurdish community – who number some 30,000 in Denmark – expressed disappointment that no more Kurds were elected. But they hoped that Denmark would continue to participate in the anti-ISIS coalition.
“In general, Danish politicians are sympathetic towards the Kurds. Denmark helps fight ISIS and hopefully they will continue doing so,” said Sultan Arslan, a Kurdish florist from Turkey in Copenhagen.