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The
Kurdish problem is everybody's problem, but above
all mine," said Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbekir
last week.
"We will solve all problems through democracy," he
added - and went on to admit that the national
Government, dominated by the Turkish-speaking
majority, had long mistreated the Kurds, who make up
a fifth of the country's people.
The rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which
resumed its separatist war in south-eastern Turkey
last year after a five-year ceasefire, responded
immediately by suspending all attacks for a month.
Can it be as simple as that? Well, no, but the words
must be said. Kurds suffered more than anyone in the
PKK's separatist revolt from 1984 to 1999, which
killed 37,000 people.
Most of them don't insist on a separate state; they
just want respect for their language and culture in
a country that once denied their very existence.
But Erdogan had to convince them he was truly
committed to righting past injustices, so they
needed a public apology.
The trick now will be to turn the PKK's one-month
unilateral ceasefire into a permanent peace. That
mainly depends on Erdogan persuading Turkish public
opinion and his own armed forces to let the PKK
participate peacefully in legal, democratic
politics.
The situation is similar in Indonesia, where the
separatist rebels in Aceh province signed a peace
deal with the Government on August 15 after a
29-year war that killed at least 15,000 people.
What opened the door to peace was the tsunami last
December that gave both sides a new perspective, but
the words still had to be said there, too.
They were spoken first by the rebels of the Free
Aceh Movement (GAM), who announced last February
that they would finally drop their demand for
independence if the Indonesian state would live up
to its long-neglected promises of local autonomy for
Aceh.
The new Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono, had already been making conciliatory
noises, so Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari's
Crisis Management Initiative offered mediation and,
after five rounds of negotiations in Helsinki, they
came up with a peace deal that may work.
GAM's 3000 fighters will disarm under amnesty, while
its leaders will re-emerge as a legitimate political
party. The local government will get a high degree
of autonomy, including 70 per cent of the income
generated by the province's rich oil and gas
resources, and Jakarta will withdraw more than half
of its 53,000 troops and police from Aceh. And
everyone will live grumpily ever after.
Even the most embittered conflicts over language,
religion and ethnicity are soluble if there is
enough patience and goodwill.
The past month has seen another case where a peace
settlement that almost fell apart was saved, at
least for the moment, by people who simply refused
to lose their heads or to jostle for political
position. The Sudan peace deal is still holding,
despite the unexpected death in a helicopter crash
of its main architect, John Garang.
It's enough to restore your faith in the concept of
enlightened self-interest.
Once conflicts topple into organised violence, the
rules of war generally force people to behave like
intransigent fools. That doesn't mean they really
are, and given a chance they can behave sensibly.
Democracy often gives them that chance.
Look around: rational behaviour abounds. Not just in
Turkey and Indonesia and Sudan.
Sub-Comandante Marcos has just led his Zapatista
rebels out of the Chiapas jungle with a view to
influencing Mexico's next election. The IRA's
spokesman, "P. O'Neill", declared last month that
the IRA "has formally ordered an end to the armed
campaign. All IRA units have been ordered to dump
arms."
And the incentive, every time, is the prospect that
the rebels can achieve the more important of their
goals through democratic political action.
* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent
journalist.
www.nzherald.co.nz
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