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Why Turkey's Kurds matter by Jonathan
Power
1.11.2005
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After five years of calm, the Kurdish insurgency
in Turkey seems to be rekindling. But the government
must not return to the heavy-handed methods of its
predecessors. With EU membership now a real
prospect, the best way to defuse the conflict is by
reform
Insurgencies may not die, but at least, like old
soldiers, they usually fade away. Well, that seemed
to be the case with the Kurdistan Workers’ party,
the PKK. For the best part of five years there has
been a truce in Turkey’s bitter and savage civil
war. Ever since in 1999 the PKK’s jailed leader,
Abdullah Öcalan, appeared to acknowledge that the
central government was bent on introducing the
reforms he had fought for, there has been peace in
the southeast. But quietly this year the insurgency
has been rekindled and nothing that Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done—including, in August,
a speech in Diyarbakir, the Kurdish “capital,” close
to the border with Syria, in which he promised
swifter delivery of the reforms—seems to have had
the effect of sidelining the PKK again.
The Kurdish “problem” goes back to the collapse of
the Ottoman empire, and probably further. The rugged
mountains where Turkey, Iraq and Iran meet have been
called Kurdistan since the early 13th century, and
the Kurds’ roots can be traced back at least 2,000
years. Most of the world's 20m Kurds live in the
region, although well over a million have emigrated
to Istanbul, Baghdad, Tehran and Beirut, often
assimilating well with the local people, and there
are another million overseas. In Turkey, such Kurds
are in prominent positions in many walks of life and
a Kurd was prime minister not so long ago.
But just as the Kurds of Istanbul appear cut off
from the political attitudes of the rural Kurds of
southeast Turkey, so too the Kurds of Iraq, Turkey,
Iran, Syria, Russia and Lebanon might as well be six
different peoples. Of course, when Saddam Hussein
made his notorious effort to bomb Iraq's northern
Kurds in the wake of the ending of the first Gulf
war, they poured across the mountains into Turkey
and the Turkish Kurds helped them. And today, after
the Iraqi Kurds have entrenched their autonomy in
the new Iraqi constitution—and probably entrenched
their hold on the northern oil fields—there is a lot
of buzz on the Turkish side of the mountains about
building a new, united Kurdistan. But most of the
time Kurdish leaders from these countries do not
meet, do not talk, and often speak different
languages. Even in the remote villages of the stony
landscape of the southeast, villagers preferred to
talk to a visiting reporter about their urge for
Turkey to be part of Europe than for a link up with
their Asian brethren.
When the Ottoman empire collapsed, a casualty of the
first world war, undermined by British arms and
intrigue, most of its subject peoples knew what they
wanted. Greeks, Arab, Armenians, Jews and
Palestinians all demanded their own homelands,
claiming a right to nationhood, in one case within
God-given borders. The Kurds, distinct but
indistinct, lacked the resolve that comes from
possessing a single ethnic origin, religion,
language or leadership, and thus were relegated to
the sidelines of the nationalist drama. The
opportunity passed them by, and has passed them by
ever since.
Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, thought that
it would be relatively easy to make a Faustian
bargain with the Turkish Kurds, offering them full
and complete citizenship in exchange for demanding
they give up their language, traditions and
identity.
But many Kurds never sat easy with this arrangement.
From the beginning they resented the banning of the
use of the Kurdish language in schools and law
courts. Their first major revolt broke out in 1925
and was brutally repressed.
In the time since the PKK emerged in the early
1980s, spearheading a new revolt, the best estimates
suggest that the war between the Kurdish dissidents
and the central government led to the destruction of
over 2,000 villages and the creation of over 2m
refugees. As Human Rights Watch commented in 1996,
it was a continuous story of “torture, village
destruction, disappearances, unlawful deaths and
detention and murder.”
Yet it was not so simple as this potted history
suggests. In Turkey’s 1996 general election, the
Kurdish People’s Democracy party was for the first
time allowed to contest the election without
harassment. Nevertheless, out of the 6-7m potential
Kurdish votes, it received only 1.2m. It seems that
the Kurds in the larger cities voted principally for
the mainstream parties and there was a significant
rejection of Kurdish nationalism, even of the
democratic variety, much less than that of the PKK,
then at the height of its powers.
The message for the PKK was that the cause it
solicited and the means it chose to use were not
widely shared, and certainly not in the towns. For
the authorities there was also a message: that they
exaggerated the potency of the PKK and misled the
public on why they had to be so unsparing and tough
on those Kurds that did rebel.
Neither side absorbed the message, and the war went
on for another four years until Öcalan’s capture in
January 1999, when a Turkish commando team tracked
him down to Kenya and snatched him to trial and
prison in Turkey. He called off the war and, thanks
to EU pressure, escaped the death penalty.
The quid pro quo for a truce—the introduction of
reforms—began well. Kurdish nationalists were
allowed to administer the main cities in the
ethically Kurdish area. The mayor of Diyarbakir,
Osman Baydemir, is one of them and is accused by
Ankara of effectively organising a boycott of the
rally at which the prime minister spoke in August.
But Baydemir has his reasons, and his views are
widely shared. Ankara has not delivered on the other
expected reforms and, despite the renewed promises
of the August speech, nothing substantial appears to
be happening. Whilst it is true that
Kurdish-language newspapers are now widely on sale,
Kurdish-spoken broadcasting is limited to an hour or
so a day. Kurdish music on the radio is more common,
but even on local radio stations plays second fiddle
to Turkish or western music. There has been no
effort to introduce Kurdish in primary education and
what Kurdish teaching has been allowed has been
limited to private academies catering to adults.
(These have been poorly attended; these days young
adults prefer to learn English.) There is a
noticeable absence of effort to economically develop
this poor backwater of Turkey.
Very few Kurds want to see the war starting up
again. But it has—under the baton of Öcalan’s
brother. Not enough Kurdish leaders or intellectuals
are speaking out against the PKK. Their disgust with
the government appears to outweigh their abhorrence
of the PKK’s methods.
Few I talked to in the southeast seem convinced that
this revived PKK insurgency will simply fizzle out.
It’s complicated by the lure of the EU. Most Kurds
want Turkey to get into Europe as fast as it can.
They know that the EU, besides offering jobs and
investment, also offers copper-bottomed minority
rights, and once in the bosom of Europe their
position will be secured for all time. They also
know that PKK activity might scare off the EU. The
PKK is well aware of this sentiment and is treading
cautiously. So are the government and the army,
conscious that Europe is watching, and aware from
their sad experience that the heavy-handed tactics
of earlier years inflamed the insurgency and
alienated the population. This time the army appears
not to be throwing its weight around.
Now that Turkey’s negotiations to become a member of
the EU formally began on 3rd October, the EU needs
to make clear that progress will not be fast if the
Kurdish problem is allowed to smoulder. Ankara needs
to get its shoulder to the wheel and deliver on its
promised reforms. Then the likelihood is that the
PKK will quickly lose momentum.
The Erdogan government has its heart in the right
place. But the Turkish bureaucracy is another
matter. Europe must kick Erdogan and he must start
to kick his bureaucracy.
www.prospect-magazine.co.uk
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