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As
Turkey looks west, its future will likely be decided
in its strife-torn southeast
There's an unsettling feeling of isolation that
comes with losing your cellphone signal in Turkey.
Here, the mobile phone is a symbol of progress and,
of course, the West. There are few places where one
doesn't work in this country, a European Union
hopeful, and when it happens, something is amiss.
Mine stopped functioning on a road in southeastern
Turkey, the impoverished and predominantly Kurdish
region. It was a reminder that I had entered an area
where the rules are different. In the western part,
the nation envisioned by Kemal Atatürk, the father
of modern Turkey, has come into existence: Turkish
cities like Istanbul and Izmir are unquestionably
European and the standard-bearers for Turkey's EU
membership bid. The vision in the southeast, on the
other hand, has gone a bit cross-eyed.
The southeast is a war zone, with military
checkpoints, armed camps, lines of soldiers
patrolling the mountain passes. But it's also here,
amid the destitute villages, that the future of 70
million Turks may be decided. This is Turkey's dirty
little secret, tucked away in the deep valleys and
gorges of the snow-capped Zagros mountains, the
natural boundary dividing Iran and Iraq from their
westward-looking neighbour. The downtrodden area is
home to one of the least understood conflicts in the
world, pitting Turkish forces against the Kurdistan
Worker's Party (PKK), the main Kurdish militia
group, in a war that's left nearly 30,000 dead and
up to three million people, mostly civilians and
predominantly Kurds, displaced. But as former
Turkish prime minister Mesut Yilmaz stressed in a
1999 speech, referring to the southeast's unofficial
capital, "the road to the EU passes through
Diyarbakir."
Human rights groups have for years struggled to draw
the world's attention to the region -- alleging that
Kurds have been systematically oppressed. And now
the spotlight is on. The EU has demanded that the
Turkish government address its problems with human
rights and minorities, giving the country's 13
million Kurds reason to hope. "The government will
not be able to continue to act the way it has in the
southeast if it wants to join Europe," says Nazim
Berk, 47, a subsistence farmer in the mud-splattered
village of Ortakoy. "We demand a normal life, and we
hope the EU can give us that." Recent reconciliatory
overtures, granting Kurds language and cultural
rights, are only a first step, he says. His main
concerns now are the lack of economic opportunity
and the intrusive military, which he claims
continues to use intimidation and torture to keep
the Kurds in line.
Human rights groups agree. Emin Yuksel, a
33-year-old doctor working with the Human Rights
Foundation of Turkey in Diyarbakir, says that while
the Turkish government has made substantial progress
on paper, a culture of impunity still exists within
the lower ranks of the military and police services.
In 2004, the foundation, which deals exclusively
with torture victims, registered 19 new cases, all
Kurds. "The old prejudices are much harder to root
out," Yuksel admits.
What the Kurds face is a cultural bias deeply
imbedded in the Turkish psyche. Modern Turkey was
born out of the chaos following the First World War,
when Atatürk's movement fought a successful war not
only against the remnants of the disintegrating
Ottoman government, but also Greek forces that had
occupied the western part of the country. Turkey's
national pride flows from that era, but the
establishment of a secular state also wiped out any
hopes the Kurds had for a nation of their own. The
memory of impending national disintegration is still
too fresh for many Turks to accept the idea that
ethnic diversity can exist within a national
framework. Says Selahattin Demirtas, director of the
Human Rights Association, another group in
Diyarbakir: "This paranoia must be gotten over, this
idea that any Kurd who talks about more rights and
freedoms is really talking about independence."
Militarism is the result. In Ortakoy, soldiers are
everywhere, outnumbering villagers two to one, some
residents say. When I first arrived, I was greeted
by heavy artillery fire so powerful that my car
shook. The villagers shrugged off the noise as
routine. "It happens every day at 4 p.m.," one
explained. "It's the military's warning to the PKK
in the mountains that they're waiting for them." The
salvoes aside, there has been relative calm in the
southeast since the PKK called a unilateral truce
after the capture of its leader Abdullah Ocalan in
1999. Last spring, the PKK's political wing, now
calling itself Kongra-Gel, did cancel the ceasefire,
citing the Turkish military's intransigence. But
although fighting resumed, it is at a significantly
lower level than in previous years.
The PKK is not the military's only concern. Just
over the mountains, in Kurdish-controlled Iraq,
Kurds are rallying with a renewed sense of
opportunity. The Iraq war has been a boon for them
and their calls for independence. A December 2004
petition signed by 1.7 million Iraqi Kurds and
delivered to UN headquarters in New York City
demanded a referendum on the issue. Turkish
authorities have repeatedly said they will oppose
any such move, fearing the emergence of a Kurdish
nation could further incite their own Kurdish
population to rebellion.
Those concerns may be justified. Kurds, often called
the largest stateless ethnic group in the world,
have all suffered oppression, whether in Iran,
Syria, Turkey or Iraq. This common experience binds
them more securely than national affiliation. In the
area of Iraq controlled by Masoud Barzani's
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) -- which, united
with another Kurd party, won 75 of 275 assembly
seats in the recent Iraqi election -- there is
sympathy for the PKK. In fact, for many former
fighters from the Turkish side of the border, the
KDP has become a second family. Before the Iraq war,
guerrillas coming down out of the mountains were
encouraged to join the KDP peshmerga, the Iraqi
militia that fought on behalf of Kurdish interests
during Saddam's rule. Although the practice was
reportedly stopped after the invasion, a close
affiliation between the two groups still exists. "We
welcome any PKK who decide they want to leave the
movement," said one KDP official in Dohuk, a town
straddling the Turkish border. "They are fellow
Kurds and we will do what we can to help them
reintegrate into normal society."
This close relationship is worrying for Turkish
authorities. The U.S. has promised it will
eventually root out PKK guerrillas hiding in Iraq.
But with the current situation still out of control,
U.S. commanders say they are stretched too thin to
do anything for the time being. In a Jan. 3 meeting
with Turkish foreign minister Abdullah Gul, former
U.S. deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage
proposed three-way talks between the U.S., Turkey
and Iraq to work out a plan to deal with the more
than 5,000 fighters ensconced in mountain camps on
both sides of the border. But will Iraqi Kurds
support a U.S. offensive against fellow Kurds? In
the mountains around Dohuk, Iraqi border guards, all
former peshmerga fighters, admit they often come
across PKK camps while on patrol. "We sometimes have
tea together," one guard said.
Turkey itself has little room to manoeuvre, in part
because of its EU membership bid. For human rights
groups, those negotiations provide added leverage to
their demands for fundamental reforms, and the
conflict with the PKK tops their agenda. "The first
thing the government of Turkey needs to do," says
Demirtas, "is call a general amnesty." Without a
negotiated peace, he argues, the Kurdish question
threatens the very future of the country. "How can
there be development," he adds, "when one-fifth of
the country is a military zone?"
Back in Ortakoy, Berk echoes the same opinion,
though his words are more ominous. "We've heard
promises before," he says. "What we need is real
change in our lives." Without it, he adds, "we will
have no choice but to go into the mountains to
fight." If recent indications are any sign, it may
not come to that. The Turkish government seems to be
listening -- it has no choice.
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