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BUCUK TEPE, Turkey This is the edge of
tomorrow's Europe, at least if Turkey gets its way.
A desolate mud-built village, close to the Syrian
border, reduced to rubble by the Turkish Army when
it was battling the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers'
Party, or PKK, is slowly being repopulated by a
brave few.
The families are understandably nervous. The PKK has
recently restarted its insurgency, breaking a
five-year truce, angry with the government's slow
delivery on its promises to allow Kurdish in the
primary schools, full-scale broadcasting in Kurdish
and to invest in economic development. "This
violence is what we don't want," says one man,
living with his extended family under nothing more
than a homemade canopy.
Five minutes drive from the river Tigris, which
farther downstream watered the first of humankind's
civilizations, we engage in what seems an almost
surreal conversation. On the one hand, the
grandfather, who has fathered 12 children, explains
how they make a living with their herd of sheep out
of what appears to be stony, barren land without a
blade of green grass to be seen. On the other, he
says, although in their hearts they feel Asian they
want to enter the Europe Union. "Europe will give us
peace and give us Kurds our rights," he says. "And
give us food and jobs," one of his sons adds.
A few kilometers away is another larger, more
prosperous, village that escaped the war unscathed.
The villagers grow wheat and lentils, and although
they say the water is of poor quality, every house
has a television and half the men of the village, as
they converse with me in a large circle, show me
their cellphones. The refrain is the same, even from
the young men who hover standing at the back: "We
don't want to fight again. We Kurds want Europe to
accept Turkey. We feel deep in ourselves Asian, but
now we want to be European."
But how can modern Europe swallow all this? The
poverty, the ignorance (girls are rarely educated
out here), and now the renewed boiling of war. This
is not the civilization of contemporary Europe, and
probably not even of ancient Mesopotamia. This is
life almost, if not quite, at its most elementary
and unsparing.
The Turkish government is desperate to cement on
Oct. 3 the agreement to begin negotiations for entry
to the European Union, but as one senior official
told me, Ankara "seems never to miss a chance to
shoot itself in the foot." This year Turkey has
witnessed the police beating up women demonstrators
in Istanbul, the indictment of Turkey's best-known
novelist, Orhan Pamuk, for writing that the Armenian
accusations of Turkish genocide in the days of the
Ottoman Empire need to be looked at openly and, most
important, the bureaucratic go-slow on implementing
what was promised to the Kurds - thus providing the
kindling for a renewal of the insurgency.
Some of Turkey's liberal voices are driven to wonder
what is really going on behind the scenes. Inur
Cevik, who was once a prime minister's senior aide
and now publishes the English-language newspaper The
Anatolian, is described by one senior European
ambassador as someone who "is pretty damned true."
He told me that he is convinced that parts of the
army are conniving with the PKK to restart the
fighting in order to derail the Turkish approach to
Europe. But, for all the ineptness of the Turkish
government that gives rise to such conspiracy
theories, the likelihood is that these are rogue
elements.
Moreover, apart from the fact that the high command
of the Turkish Army is firmly pro-Europe, as their
mentor Ataturk would have expected them to be, the
PKK itself is also split on Europe, with some
elements appearing to realize that an anti-European
stance is not popular in this southeastern corner of
Turkey.
Neither, for all its romantic allure, is the PKK's
occasional talk of a united Kurdistan. Kurds are
impressed with the degree of political and economic
autonomy that the Iraqi Kurds have won during the
recent negotiations on the Iraqi constitution, but
they are also aware that it is a precarious autonomy
and that the government of that province is still,
despite elections, essentially feudal, dominated by
two families.
Most of Turkey's Kurds want to be European and are
neither seriously tempted by the PKK or a united
Kurdistan. But Turkey still doesn't know how to
bring its Kurds up to the starting line. And in
making this grave mistake it is probably delaying
the chances of Turkey of entering the Europe Union
as quickly as it wants to.
www.iht.com
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