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BISMIL, TURKEY - Outside a post office in this
southeastern Turkish town ringed by cotton and wheat
fields, men and women jostle for position, eager to
read a list of names posted near the window. The
names are of poor families with school-age children
eligible for financial support from a World Bank
program, giving each $7-14 per child every month.
Sakir Yasarer, a father of three, says he couldn't
find his family's name on the list. "I'm very poor.
I'm in a very tough position," says Mr. Yasarer. His
children, he says, sometimes go to the dump to find
scrap metal or plastic to earn extra cash for the
family. "I need a factory job, something steady,
something I can go to everyday."
Yasarer's story is not unusual in Turkey's largely
Kurdish southeast, a region that lags behind the
rest of Turkey in virtually every economic
indicator.
Turkey's unemployment rate is about 10 percent, but
in the southeast the figure is closer to 60. And
while some cities in western Turkey, where much of
the country's industry is located, have per capita
incomes that rival parts of Europe, many cities in
the southeast have per capita incomes more in line
with parts of India.
Some economists attribute this gap to decades of
official neglect and the effects of the 15-year war
fought between the Turkish military and the
separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the
1980s and 1990s. A recent increase in PKK activity
after a lull of six years - some 120 Turkish
security personnel have been killed in the past year
- is causing concern that the southeast will again
be torn by violence, further damaging its fragile
economy.
"We worked very hard to put into people's minds the
idea of investing here," says Kurtbettin Arzu,
president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in
Diyarbakir, the political and cultural capital of
Turkey's Kurdish region. "If you had asked me six
months ago, I would have said things have improved,
but now we have started to go back."
In an apparent response to the growing PKK activity,
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited
Diyarbakir earlier this month. He declared that the
Kurdish problem would be solved through greater
democratization. But business leaders and officials
here insist that any effort aimed at settling the
Kurdish issue must go beyond political and cultural
rights to include economic development.
Despite a month-long cease-fire called for by the
PKK following Prime Minister Erdogan's speech,
violence in the region continues. In clashes last
week with PKK guerrillas in a remote part of Batman,
another southeast province, Turkish soldiers killed
three members of the Kurdish rebel group.
In Diyarbakir, where the population has tripled over
the past 15 years, fed by the arrival of hundreds of
thousands of villagers who had fled the fighting
between the PKK and the military, local officials
say poverty and unemployment have led to a host of
worrying trends, including prostitution and drug
use. The city of 1.2 million also has what some
estimate to be Turkey's largest population of street
children.
"The people in this region are asking why this
region has no factories. They look at other regions
and ask why they have state-sponsored industries and
irrigation," says Firat Anli, a district mayor in
Diyarbakir.
The government, with help from the European Union (EU)
and the UN Development Program, has set up several
offices throughout the southeast to assist local
businesses. But Bulent Yuce, a field officer with
the program, says economic growth here is kept in
check by deep-rooted problems that are difficult to
surmount. "Investors from the west [of Turkey] don't
think about investing here, not because of terror
but because of a lack of infrastructure, trained
personnel, and the distance from raw materials."
Many hope that Erdogan's recent visit to Diyarbakir
is an indication that his government will start
paying more attention to the southeast's economic
woes.
Istanbul-based political analyst Mehmet Ali Birand
says economic development is the key to turning back
a resurgent PKK. "You have to get people to work,
you have to give them hope.... They are normal
people who are thinking about jobs, about giving
their children an education. Once you give those
normal people something to do, the PKK cannot
survive."
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