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EUROPEAN judges sent a powerful and disturbing
message to Ankara yesterday: mount a new trial of
the guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan, or wreck
Turkey’s attempt to join the EU.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled that the
trial of Ocalan, who has been kept virtually in
solitary confinement in an island prison since 1999,
was unfair.
Now the Turkish Government has to choose between
satisfying European demands and calming Turkish
public opinion, which has always regarded the
Kurdish rebel leader as a terrorist intent on
splitting the country.
The Government seems to be leaning towards a
retrial. “We must be as cold-blooded as possible,”
Cemil Cicek, the government spokesman, said. “This
is not the end of the world . . . our people must
not be concerned, they must trust the State and the
judiciary.”
The nervous undertone reflects a real fear that the
Strasbourg decision could trigger a nationalist
backlash against the EU. Popular support for the EU
in Turkey has dropped from 80 per cent last year to
below 60 per cent, and is falling fast. By contrast,
the Kurds are enthusiastic supporters — they see
Brussels and Strasbourg as a defender of their
minority rights.
Turks view the Kurds’ self-confidence with alarm.
Ocalan’s guerrilla group, the Kurdish Workers Party
(PKK), has skirmished with the Turkish Army again
from its mountain refuges across the border in
northern Iraq.
Ocalan was sentenced to death by a closed military
court in 1999, but Turkey spared his life by
abolishing capital punishment to meet EU demands.
Yesterday it seemed to Turks as if the informal
terms of the contract with Brussels were unravelling:
at EU behest Kurds have been given more rights,
while Strasbourg demands a more lenient treatment
for Ocalan and Kurdish rebels take up the gun again.
At the heart of the crisis is the overbearing
personality of Ocalan himself. The former Marxist
founded the PKK in 1978 to campaign for language
rights for the Kurdish minority in southeast Turkey.
There are 14 million Kurds in the country but modern
Turkey is founded on the principle of “Turkishness”,
which leaves almost no space for ethnic diversity.
Parents who gave their children Kurdish names were
prohibited from registering them. The three letters
that occur in the Kurdish alphabet but not in
Turkish — X, W and Q — were officially banned.
Ocalan made little headway until 1984, when he
transformed his group of radical farmers into an
armed force that attacked Turkish institutions,
embassies and tourist resorts.
The European Court of Justice said yesterday that he
was not tried by an “independent and impartial
tribunal”. The Council of Europe has still to
approve the ruling. But pressure was already on
Ankara to start preparing a new trial.
Accession talks are due in September and Turkey’s
position would be compromised if it ignored the
Strasbourg judgment. The Government of Recep Tayyip
Erdogan has now committed itself too deeply to EU
membership. To shun Strasbourg would put the whole
thrust of his government programme at risk.
The mood in Turkey is brittle. Kurds who set fire to
Turkish flags immediately trigger a fierce public
response. Increasingly, the Turkish Government is
portrayed as something of a patsy of Brussels.
Bookshops in Istanbul are full of titles such as A
Nation Awakes, an ultra-patriotic tract. Other books
attack the EU from Islamic or left-wing points of
view. When Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor,
visited Turkey this month, one newspaper caricatured
him as a Nazi. Editorials suggest that the EU is
helping the Kurds towards a division of Turkey,
flagging the way for a link up between the fertile
Turkish Kurdish regions and the oil-rich Kurdish
areas of northern Iraq.
The tension will be stoked by the Strasbourg ruling.
Even moderate Turkish intellectuals are worried that
the bloody times of the 1990s war against the Kurds
will return. Then, 30,000 people were killed. Over
the past month there have been skirmishes between
the PKK and the Turkish Army, with only a handful of
fatalities. Even so many fear it could mark the end
of a period of calm that came after Ocalan’s arrest.
The Kurdish leader occupies a cell in a completely
empty prison. Letters are, however, smuggled out to
the PKK. This has led the authorities to tighten his
access to lawyers, another cause for concern in
Strasbourg.
There are now some 6,000 PKK fighters in northern
Iraq and another 2,000 inside Turkey. The US State
Department has put the PKK on its terrorism list
but, already overstretched in Iraq, has not taken
any military action against the group. This has
fuelled anti-American sentiment which is now running
in parallel to hostility to the EU. Turkish generals
have been hinting that Turkey should take the matter
into its own hands. General Hilmi Ozkok said “The
American failure to take action so far is
thought-provoking.”
OCALAN’S PATH
Abdullah Ocalan dropped out from Ankara University
and split from the Turkish Left to found the PKK in
1978
Turkey blames Ocalan for the deaths of more than
30,000 people since 1984, when the PKK took up arms
in the cause of Kurdish separatism
Ocalan never fought, running his guerrilla campaign
from Syria. When Turkish troops massed on the border
in 1998, Ocalan fled. He was snatched by Turkish
agents in Kenya in 1999; he had been sheltered in
the Greek Embassy
His original appeal to the Strasbourg court was for
the death sentence to be lifted, but when Turkey
dropped that, he contested the conditions of his
arrest, trial and imprisonment
www.timesonline.co.uk
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