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PERVARI, Turkey -- Residents of this town nestled in
the cliffs of southeastern Turkey counted 86
military vehicles lurching deeper into the mountains
one day last month, with foot soldiers peering out.
Overhead, Cobra attack helicopters stuttered across
an epic blue sky laced by the contrails of F-16
warplanes.
The Turkish military was attacking a guerrilla army
in its alpine camp.
The combined-arms assault here, sweeping a remote
mountain stronghold by air and ground, was precisely
the kind of offensive that Turkey has spent most of
the last two years asking U.S. forces to mount in
northern Iraq -- against the same rebel group. The
Kurdistan Workers' Party, an armed group of Turkish
Kurds that the State Department calls a terrorist
group, maintains a large base in Iraq's Qandil
range, about 200 miles north of Baghdad.
Although the Bush administration has vowed
repeatedly to confront the PKK, as the guerrilla
force is known, its fighters have not only continued
to enjoy a haven in Iraq, they have begun returning
in force to Turkey. And with them come reminders of
a conflict that people here, after almost five years
of peace, had begun to believe was over.
"And now we can't leave our houses. We are fearing
again," said Metin Ozel, 43, who owns a service
station in Pervari. "You feel lonely. You feel
encircled. You feel stuck in the middle of nowhere
with all these things happening around you."
The new fighting has mostly been like the mid-April
assault on the PKK base near here, which the
military later said resulted in the deaths of three
soldiers and 24 guerrillas from a camp said to hold
350. In scope and intensity, it is several
magnitudes below the civil war that raged here in
the 1980s and '90s and claimed an estimated 30,000
lives, most of them civilians caught between
soldiers or paramilitary fighters and PKK
guerrillas.
But memories of that conflict are still raw, and the
prospect of renewed fighting is a matter of profound
concern here. Some Kurdish activists fret that a
return to arms would cost not only lives but also
the fragile gains that Kurds have won since the
fighting stopped.
"It looks like five years of a calm, peaceful
environment are turning into another conflict," said
Giyasettin Sehir, a playwright and activist in
Diyarbakir, a provincial capital crowded both by
displaced villagers and by the business travelers
who have returned with the peace. "I can say the
people definitely don't want armed struggle.
"Of course," he added, "there's a small minority in
the population who are emotional, especially at
funerals."
Sehir was sitting at a table in the Tigris and
Euphrates Cultural Center, a combination cafe,
performance space and rehearsal complex that
embodies the changes in Turkey's southeast. The
center exists for Diyarbakir residents to express
their Kurdish heritage -- the language, music and
customs that set them apart from the country's
Turkish majority.
Modern Turkey was founded on the notion of "Turkishness,"
a rigid concept that made no accommodation for
ethnic diversity. The country's estimated 14 million
Kurds, who trace their ancestry to the mountains
above the Mesopotamian plain rather than the steppes
of Central Asia, were called "mountain Turks." The
three letters that occur in the Kurdish alphabet but
not in Turkish -- x, w and q -- were officially
banned. Parents who gave their children Kurdish
names were prohibited from registering them.
The impulse to insist on an ethnic identity helped
give rise to the PKK, which mixed Kurdish
aspirations with Marxist dogma, overlaid by the
brutal cult of personality encouraged by the PKK
leader, Abdullah Ocalan.
The PKK's campaign for a Kurdish state in the
Turkish southeast erupted into warfare in 1984. The
conflict raged for 15 years, with both sides accused
of widespread atrocities. But when Ocalan was
captured in 1999, the PKK was paralyzed, called a
cease-fire and retreated to northern Iraq, which
Iraqi Kurds controlled under the protection of a
U.S.- and British-enforced "no-fly" zone.
In Turkey, the "Kurdish question" shifted tracks,
becoming bound up with Turkey's ardent desire to
join the European Union.
To bring its laws into line with E.U. norms on human
rights, Turkey eliminated the death penalty, sparing
Ocalan's life. Parliament voted to allow the
broadcast and private teaching of the Kurdish
language. The Tigris and Euphrates Center, which
three years ago was raided by Turkish police and
intelligence agents almost daily, went weeks without
an official visit.
"But the atmosphere is changing," said Sehir, who
served 10 years in prison for a bit of street
theater glorifying the PKK. "It's almost starting to
feel like the early '90s again."
The change began last June, when the PKK announced
it was dissatisfied with the pace of change inside
Turkey and with Ocalan's restricted access to his
attorneys. Small guerrilla bands sneaked back across
the heavily fortified Iraqi border. Reports of
skirmishes began appearing again in Turkish
newspapers.
In recent weeks, tensions have increased sharply.
The spark was a widely publicized street
demonstration in which a Kurdish teenager burned a
Turkish flag, fueling a surge of Turkish nationalism
that many Kurds fear will reverse momentum on legal
reforms.
Already, "there is a strong resistance within the
judiciary and the military against applying these
laws," said Mihdi Perincek, who represents the
Turkish Human Rights Association in the country's
southeast. The association, which works closely with
the E.U., had documented a reduction in reports of
torture, detentions and other abuses by Turkish
security forces last year. But the trend reversed
after the E.U. voted in December to give Turkey what
it wanted: a date to begin negotiations for
membership.
"So we see the government was trying to protect its
image until December 17," Perincek said, "and after
that the numbers jumped."
In February, for example, the association fielded
120 complaints of torture in Turkey's 22 eastern
provinces, more than one-third the total for all of
2004.
The U.S. refusal to move against the PKK in Iraq has
fueled not only anti-Americanism in Turkey but also
what opinion polls indicate is a core conviction
that Turkey must act on its own because it has no
reliable friends. In a recent speech, Turkey's top
general, Hilmi Ozkok, complained that putting the
PKK's "name on the list of terrorist organizations
does not have any meaning in practice."
"Failure to take action so far," Ozkok added, "is
thought-provoking."
U.S. officials insist they will get to the PKK
eventually. But with American troops overstretched
battling Arab insurgents in central Iraq, there is
scant appetite to mount an offensive in the
relatively quiescent north.
"We agree that, over time, we must deal with the
PKK," Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central
Command, said in the Turkish capital, Ankara, in
January.
Analysts estimate that 6,000 PKK guerrillas remain
in Iraq, while their numbers inside Turkey have
swelled to 2,000. Most are believed to be scattered
in caves and other mountain redoubts.
"It's not like we don't want this problem to be
solved," said Haci Senci, 44, a member of the
paramilitary "village guard" the government
recruited more than a decade ago to fight the PKK
and its supporters at the local level, a strategy
that pitted neighbor against neighbor.
"We've been on duty nonstop for 14 years," Senci
said, cradling a bare foot with his hand as he kept
watch outside a stone hut on the main road into
town, his AK-47 assault rifle within easy reach.
"The closer to the border you get, the more clashes.
When the nights get longer and the leaves grow, of
course there'll be more clashes."
In town, a bus driver who declined to give his name
looked into the mountains and then at his feet. "All
we know," he said, "is this is not good."
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