Photo: REUTERS
The doctored video, screened by Erdogan at a campaign rally, comprises spliced footage of Kemal Kilicdaroglu and Kurdish militants. Turkey’s opposition leader accused his rival President Recep Tayyip Erodgan of being a “fabricator” after he cited a doctored video to allege opposition links to an outlawed militant Kurdish group ahead of a runoff election on Sunday.
The doctored video, screened by Erdogan at a May 7 rally, comprises spliced footage of Kemal Kilicdaroglu and Kurdish militants from a video released online 10 months prior in which they cheer for their own commander.
In an interview with state broadcaster TRT on Monday, Erdogan repeated the allegation and referred to the doctored video despite having been criticized by the opposition for showing it earlier in his campaign. The incumbent leader once again accused Kilicdaroglu of cooperating with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) – deemed a terror group by Turkey and its Western allies, and which has been waging a nearly 40-year insurgency in which more than 40,000 people have been killed.
"Kilicdaroglu shot videos with terrorists in Qandil," Erdogan said, referring to a PKK base in Iraq's Qandil mountains. "Doctored or not, they shot videos with those in Qandil, and PKK members showed their support to Kilicdaroglu with videos.”
Seeking to tap nationalist sentiment, Erdogan has repeatedly suggested links between the PKK and the opposition, without providing evidence.
Responding in a Tweet, Kilicdaroglu said: "I am tired of being slandered, but he is not tired of slandering me."
Opponents of Erdogan see the accusations as a symptom of a media landscape tilted heavily in the president’s favor after a decade of transformation, imprisonment of journalists, and closures of critical outlets. Reporters Without Borders ranks Turkey 165th out of 180 countries for press freedoms.
Kilicdaroglu further declared Erdogan a "fraudulent (video) fabricator,” and scores of influential social media users also expressed their anger.
