his party has the will and initiative to stop bloodshed in the country. They acted as an intermediary in the release of the eight abducted soldiers. DTP members have been criticized after some party members met with PKK leaders when they went to northern Iraq to negotiate the release of Turkish soldiers. The DTP members did not sing Turkey's national anthem during the opening of a party conference. The Democratic Society Party claimed that the 10% threshold of the national vote required in order to be represented in the Grand Assembly was aimed at disqualifying it from the parliament. However, many other parties failed to cross this threshold in the 2002 election. The Democratic Society Party decided to have its candidates run as Independents. On 13 May DTP announced that if they wanted to, they could lock up the elections by putting in five to ten thousand independent candidates. The next day in a statement, the Supreme Election Committee () responded to DTP's threat by stating that there was no issue and that they would simply use "larger envelopes". 20 DTP affiliates running as independents were elected to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey: Batman: Ayla Akat Ata, Bengi Yıldız Bitlis: Mehmet Nezir Karabaş Diyarbakır: Aysel Tuğluk, Selahattin Demirtaş, Gültan Kışanak Hakkâri: Hamit Geylani Iğdır: Pervin Buldan Istanbul: Sebahat Tuncel Mardin: Ahmet Türk, Emine Ayna Muş: Sırrı Sakık, Nuri Yaman Siirt: Osman Özçelik Şanlıurfa: İbrahim Binici Şırnak: Sevahir Bayındır, Hasip Kaplan Tunceli: Şerafettin Halis Van: Fatma Kurtulan, Özdal Uçer İstanbul deputy, Sebahat Tuncel, was under arrest when elected and being tried on charges of being a member of the PKK. Hamit Geylani could not join the DTP parliamentarian group due to a former verdict of the Constitutional Court. Akın Birdal joined DTP to enable the party reach the 20 deputy threshold to form a parliamentary group. Eight of the elected deputies from the party were women. The female deputies (including İstanbul deputy Sebahat Tuncel) are: 2009 local elections After the 2009 local elections the DTP had mayors in eight provincial capitals: At the time of 2009 local elections, DTP had mayors in 54 municipalities: One minor municipality in each of the provinces of Adıyaman, Aydın, Iğdır, Kars, Konya and Van. 43 of them in seven provinces in Southeastern Turkey are densely inhabited by Kurds, including the mainly Kurdish inhabited city of Diyarbakır, where the mayor is Osman Baydemir from the