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More
than 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles) from the the
conference centre in Brussels where Turkey's
European destiny was hammered out on Friday sits the
city of Kars, in the far north-east of the country.
From Kars you can see Turkey's borders with Armenia
and Georgia, frontiers which, if negotiations are
successful, will form the eastern edge of the
European Union a decade from now.
Kars is a miserable place. Once it was rich; its
broad boulevards and the few remaining grand Russian
and Armenian traders' houses are a reminder of days
when the city was a prized possession of the Russian
empire and trade brought wealth and style.
Until the Sixties, says Erol Huryurt, owner of the
city newspaper that bears his name, there was money;
he remembers the Azeri opera and a Viennese
orchestra coming to town.
'When I was a child,' says Huryurt, 'I used to go
round distributing the paper. The shop owners wore
suits, they were so clean cut and polite. They knew
how to behave. Now it's all changed.'
A page from one of the earliest copies of the paper
(circulation just 400) hangs on his office wall next
to the 150-year-old printing press that cranked out
every copy of the paper until last year.
Beneath the lead story advising readers about the
latest machinations of the President Dwight
Eisenhower about half a century ago is an article
telling of a ball to be held in the city centre.
'All the night will be full of surprises,' the paper
says.
The only surprise you find in Kars in the evenings
now is if there is anyone on the streets. By night
the centre is deserted. Many of the streets are
pitch black, lighting being a luxury the city cannot
afford. In the day Kars has a worn-out feeling, with
shabby shops selling dusty merchandise, unemployed
men gathering at street corners like unwanted
rubbish.
Like much of Turkey, Kars looks to the EU to sort
out its problems. Residents hope the country's
membership will bludgeon their government into
reopening the border with Armenia, closed since
1993, believing trade will again flow from Armenia
and the Caucasus beyond.
The city has received attention recently because it
is the setting for the most recent book, Snow, by
Turkey's renowned novelist, Orhan Pamuk. Appearing
at one of the Turkey-EU conferences that have become
a feature of Istanbul life in the past year, Pamuk
stirred a sleepy audience to wild applause with
ringing praise for the change Turkey has undergone
in the past few years.
'The EU must understand its powers of
transformation. Had we discussed the issues we have
talked about today six or seven years ago we'd have
been condemned as traitors. The hope of joining the
EU can change a country,' said the author, who has
best informed the outside world about Turkey's
struggles to understand itself.
'We are changing, we are leaving an identity. We are
stepping outside our muddy shoes.'
Turkey's political transformation, on paper at
least, has been breathtaking in speed and scale.
Less than a decade ago the military, which had
launched three coups since 1960, eased the Islamist
government out of power. Turkey was a byword for
human rights abuse and systematic torture.
In just four years there has been a
near-revolutionary change in the judicial and
constitutional infrastructure. The death penalty has
been abolished, civil and criminal codes overhauled.
Education and broadcasting in Kurdish, a language
embraced by up to a fifth of the population, has
been legalised. Penalties for torture have been
raised and the military pushed out of positions of
influence.
What happens in parliament in Ankara is one thing.
Change on the ground is another, however. Across the
country's troubled south-east, which bore the brunt
of the Kurdish insurrection of the Eighties and
Nineties and the state's brutal response to it,
security forces are on high alert. Kongra-Gel, the
Kurdish paramilitary group once called the PKK, has
renounced its five-year ceasefire. Human rights
groups say more than 400 people have died since the
summer.
There are signs the security forces have learnt some
lessons from the days when their heavy-handed
response to the PKK fed the Kurdish resistance.
Hundreds of thousands - maybe millions - of Kurds
were forced from their homes. It was a brutal
operation, often conducted at the end of a tank
barrel. Villages were burnt, crops destroyed,
animals slaughtered.
Tunceli, an eastern province, was once criss-crossed
with military checkpoints; journalists sneaked in
past the security forces to where around 2,000
paramilitaries hid and operated from the Munzur
mountains. Now most checkpoints have gone but on one
of the roads out of the province's capital one still
observes military comings and goings. But a sign
apologises to travellers for any inconvenience and
wishes drivers a safe journey.
It's good public relations, but the Kurdish conflict
is not entirely banished. In Mardin province last
month a lorry driver, Ahmet Kaymaz, and his 12
-year-old son Ugur were shot dead by the security
forces outside their home. Eleven bullets were
pumped into the boy's back. The authorities said
they were terrorists. Ugur was wearing his slippers.
Shooting first, and asking questions much later, is
a habit that dies hard.
Yet Turkey's painful political transformation is as
nothing compared with what is to come. Over the next
decade Turkey will have to put the the EU's 80,000
page rule book, into law.
Regulations on everything from food hygiene to child
labour and bidding for local authority contracts
will have to change. Heather Grabbe, at the office
of the EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn, says
the new central European members believe spending on
EU compliance has cost them between three and four
per cent of their gross domestic product.
Turkey, juggling a mountain of debt, has no money to
spare. And the private sector will feel the pain
too.
As night falls on Gaziantep, a south-eastern city
near the Syrian border, a belt of blackness hovers
around the city. It looks almost romantic; but it is
industrial pollution.
The pollution reaches into the city centre where the
air has a gritty, slightly soupy quality. Once
Turkey starts implementing EU pollution standards,
this will have to go. But, wondered one EU diplomat,
what will be reaction when factories start to close
because they cannot or will not pay to clean up
their act?
Wander through Gaziantep's streets, and at every
turn you see things that must change. The butchers
who smoke as they cut meat on premises devoid of
refrigeration are in for a rude shock.
'It will,' says Cengiz Candar, a former adviser to
the late President Turgut Ozal, 'be a very difficult
process. It will be difficult to swallow, and if it
is swallowed it will be very difficult to digest.'
Candar believes next year will see a rise in support
for nationalist parties, as Turks vent their spleen
on an EU demanding everything and giving little
back.
Just a few minutes drive from the relatively
prosperous centre of Gaziantep lies the
neighbourhood of Beydile, a classic Turkish shanty
town. Breeze-block houses are thrown up at night to
avoid building regulations, and the electricity,
much of it purloined from power lines, comes and
goes.
Families with seven or eight children are common:
the people of Beydile fled from further east to
escape the troubles of the Kurdish insurrection. But
they brought with them the rural poverty they fled.
Many speak of Europe as if it were a pot of gold;
many also express hope that their children might
escape to the sunlit uplands of the EU. It is
difficult to see what their barely educated children
would do there, except live in a different kind of
poverty, devoid of the community that just about
keeps things together in Gaziantep.
Not all of Turkey is like this; but too much of it
is for European tastes. The country, says David
Judson, the American-born editor of the Turkish
financial newspaper Referans, is sharply divided.
'If western Turkey were integrating with the EU
you'd be talking about a country with a per capita
income roughly approaching that of Greece. When you
add in the eastern Turkey, parts of which resemble
Afghanistan, you are dealing with a whole different
set of issues.'
The bitter wrangle over the recognition of Cyprus
cast a shadow over Turkey's triumph in Brussels;
just three years ago such a result would have been
inconceivable. 'This was a critical point in
history,' says Kemal Koprulu, a member of one of
Turkey's most pro-EU think-tanks.
Stirring stuff. But it feels a long way from the
checkpoints of Tunceli, the shanty towns of
Gaziantep and the lonely streets of Kars. Turkey and
the EU have taken a leap into the dark; never has
the EU taken on a challenge the size of Turkey; and
never in a candidate have expectations been so high.
The threat of disappointment, even disaster, will be
a constant companion on Turkey's long journey.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk
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