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Only 15 years old Kurdish girl is ready to
use her Kalashnikov against Turkey
26.5.2006
by Matthew McAllester - Reports from the PKK's Sinini
Camp
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The platoon of Kurdish
fighters stood to attention in three lines, staring
straight ahead in the direction of their homeland
and their target — Turkey.
The country that hopes to get into the European
Union was only a few miles away from this rebel
training camp, across snowy peaks melting with the
arrival of spring.
At the end of the first line was a girl, a recent
recruit like many in the platoon. She blushed and
giggled when asked how old she was.
“Fifteen,” she said, giving her name as Zilan. A
grenade hung from her belt, a Kalashnikov rifle at
her side.
Weren’t her parents worried about her? “They’re glad
I am here,” she replied, a little irritated at not
being treated like an adult. “They are proud.”
This is the newly invigorated, growing PKK, the
Turkish Government’s worst nightmare as it tries to
persuade the EU that Turkey is a peaceful,
increasingly democratic country worthy of becoming
the first Muslim nation in the EU.
The Kurdish guerrilla group, listed as a terrorist
organisation by the EU and United States, has in
recent months been waging an increasingly brutal war
with the Turkish military, reigniting an ethnic
conflict at Europe’s gateway to Iran and Iraq. With
a nuclear crisis developing in Iran, and a costly
three-year war showing no signs of abatement in
Iraq, the PKK’s renewed conflict could further
destabilise the region. |
Zilan, 15, may not be big enough for her uniform but
she is ready to use her Kalashnikov against Turkey.
Her parents, she says, are proud of her
Photo:The Times |
“This is one of our top priorities,” James Jeffrey,
the US State Department’s Iraq co-ordinator, said in
Washington this week.
Earlier this month the conflict drew in Iran, which
the PKK claims has been shelling and attacking its
bases in northern Iraq, perhaps on behalf of Turkey.
It has threatened to retaliate inside Iran.
In Turkey, with the shoot-outs in the Kurdish
southeast have come bombings in Istanbul, a suicide
attack in the east, riots and echoes of the “dirty
war” that the state waged in the 1990s against
Kurds. A PKK splinter group claimed responsibility
for the huge fire that engulfed the cargo section of
Istanbul’s airport on Wednesday.
Just when Turkish ministers want to talk up their
country’s improved human rights record, strong
economy and bright future, Turkey’s news channels
and its people are obsessed with a war everyone
thought was over.
In the 1980s and 1990s that war cost 35,000 lives.
In its new incarnation, people on both sides die or
are injured every week. On May 4 a bomb exploded in
the mostly Kurdish city of Hakkari as a military
vehicle protecting a school bus went past: 21
people, including 11 children, were injured.
“Yes, it will go worse — for the terrorists,” said
Yasar Yakis, a former Foreign Minister who heads the
Turkish parliament’s EU harmonisation committee. “I
don’t see that a country of 73 million inhabitants
and an Army of 800,000 will surrender to a handful
of terrorists.”
Murad Karialan, co-president of the PKK, insisted
that it was merely defending itself against attacks
from the Turkish Army. “It’s not part of the PKK’s
strategy to continue armed struggle,” he said,
speaking from a base in northern Iraq where the US
Army, consumed with fighting insurgents, has so far
left them alone. “The Kurdish people have the right
to defend themselves against Turkish army attacks.”
The PKK called off its four-year unilateral
ceasefire in June 2004 but it was only six months
ago that the conflict began to escalate.
On November 9 a man came to the door of a small
bookstore in Semdinli, which sits in a steep valley
close to where Turkey meets Iran and Iraq. He threw
two grenades into the store, which was owned by a
man who had spent 15 years in Turkish prisons for
his pro-Kurdish activities, and ran.
The grenades killed one man. But the owner, Seferi
Yilmaz, 44, was uninjured and rushed out in pursuit.
Local Kurds captured the attacker and two other men
waiting for him in a car near by.
Two turned out to be Turkish paramilitary
intelligence officers. The third was a former PKK
member turned informer. In the car boot the crowd
found more weapons, maps and lists of possible
targets.
Soon after, Turkey’s General Yasar Buyukanit, tipped
to become chief of staff this year, said that he
knew the attacker and that he was “a good guy”.
The officers’ trial started this month with the
prosecution claiming that the men formed a covert,
illegal hit squad targeting suspected PKK members.
The attack and General Buyukanit’s remarks caused a
huge scandal, exposing a fundamental fault line in
Turkish society.
The Turkish Government and the EU are trying to
wrest away some of the military’s huge power. Many
suspect that the military wants to stoke the
conflict with the PKK to make itself seem
indispensable.
The Semdinli incident seemed to suggest that this
was more than a conspiracy theory.
Then on March 3, the elderly parents of prominent
Kurdish exiles were found garrotted in their home in
Dogancay.
Medeni Ferho, one son, would be arrested if he came
back to Turkey. So during his parents’ funeral he
spoke to a fellow mourner via mobile phone from
Belgium.
“They can’t frighten us with this kind of thing,”
shouted out the mourner to the sombre crowd,
repeating Ferho’s words. There was no doubt who
Ferho meant by “they”.
Whether the murder was carried out by the security
forces or not did not matter much politically. The
hundreds of mourners — and thousands of other Kurds
— were convinced that this was another brutal
escalation by the Turkish “deep State”, as the
military and other non-elected parts of the Turkish
state are known. Perhaps most troubling for those
who see Turkey as a country to be welcomed into the
EU is that even in the tourist magnet of Istanbul,
Kurdish terrorist bombings are on the rise. Late
last year a supermarket and an internet café were
bombed by a splinter group of the PKK, and the PKK
is recruiting in the city.
In an apartment building in a slum 30 minutes’ drive
from the centre of Istanbul, the parents of one
recent recruit spoke for the first time about the
decision that their 23-year-old daughter Aisha made
a year ago. Zemzeme Arvas sat nervously on her couch
next to her husband, Hamza, a construction worker.
Like their daughter, they nurse a burning resentment
against Turkey. In 1994, at the peak of the war
between the PKK and the Army, the military burned
down their village of Peyndas, the family said.
Aisha never forgot — or was never allowed to forget
— about the home that her family, like thousands of
displaced Kurds, had to leave behind in flames, her
parents said.
She was politically active as a teenager and after
one demonstration she and her cousin, Silan Arvas,
20, were imprisoned. After they were released, her
parents said, they began talking to a PKK recruiter
in Istanbul.
Just over a year ago they went southeast and from
there they crossed into northern Iraq. Zemzeme never
expects to see her daughter again. “If they want to
join (the PKK), I am proud,” she said of her seven
children. Such statements are enough to get people
arrested in Turkey.
“No parents would like their children to go and get
involved in clashes,” she said. “But my head is
upwards, as we say here. As soon as she went there
was a risk she would die. But we lose martyrs every
day.”
MILITANT KURDS
Founded by Abdullah Ocalan in 1974
Took the name Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in 1978
Began fighting in 1984 for a separate homeland in
ethnic Kurdish areas straddling Turkey’s borders
with Iran, Iraq and Syria
Kurds account for about 20 per cent of Turkey’s
population. Turkey has tried to suppress their
cultural identity and until 1991 banned the Kurdish
language
The EU and US class the PKK as a terrorist group.
Its armed struggle included bombings, kidnappings
and assassinations, and cost 35,000 lives
In 1999 Ocalan was captured. He urged the PKK to
continue the struggle politically. It subsequently
announced a ceasefire
It ended the ceasefire in June 2004 and is accused
of bombings in tourist areas
Turkey claims the PKK earns $40 million annually
from drug trafficking and receives a similar amount
from Kurdish expatriates
It has about 5,000 troops, with 3,500 in (Kurdistan)
northern Iraq
timesonline co.uk
Southeastern Turkey: North Kurdistan (
Kurdistan-Turkey)
Northern Iraq: South Kurdistan (Kurdistan-Iraq)
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