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Turkey: Children of the repression
5.6.2006
By Ian Traynor in Diyarbakir, Turkey
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Turkish Kurd teenagers turn to the PKK after
enduring years of brutality
Monday June 5, 2006
Sevder is seething. Growing up in poverty and
squalor, he has seen schoolmates shot dead by
Turkish security forces and had to put up with the
vulgar taunts of Turkish policemen towards his
mother and sisters. His grudges have been nourished
by endless tales of family and friends burnt out of
their villages in the hills and decanted into the
slums of Diyarbakir.
"We've had enough," says the 17-year-old Kurd,
wearing a Ronaldinho Brazil T-shirt and crouching in
the heat and dirt of the teeming city, a couple of
hours from the Iraqi and Syrian borders.
Sevder and his friends are part of a new wave of
militancy among young Turkish Kurds. "There is a
different generation now in Diyarbakir," says Sezgin
Tanrikulu, a lawyer. "These youths are aged 14 to
20. They've grown up in this place feeling they
don't belong. We can't communicate with them."
Hisyar Ozsoy, an anthropologist and expert on
Kurdish politics, says: "There is something new
here. These are the children of serhildan [the
Kurdish word for intifada or uprising]."
Turkey's long war with its repressed minority of
Kurds, who comprise up to 20% of the population of
73 million, runs in cycles. After dying down seven
years ago, it is now spiralling into a new and
threatening phase.
Subversive nationalist elements within the Turkish
security apparatus appear to be exploiting the
conflict to try to destabilise the country and at
the same time Kurdish warlords, clan leaders and
political elites are also stirring up trouble in
internal power struggles.
Meanwhile the successes of Kurdish autonomy in
neighbouring northern Iraq are exerting a magnetic
attraction on the Kurds of south-eastern Turkey
eager to share in the freedoms enjoyed across the
border.
For Sevder and his friends Cevat and Sinan, their
debut as street fighters in a new youth-led intifada
came two months ago during three days of disaster in
Diyarbakir that left 10 dead, hundreds injured,
hundreds more arrested and beaten and plenty of
scores to be settled.
The rioting erupted during the funerals of four of
14 Kurdish guerrillas ambushed and killed by Turkish
security forces. The guerrillas, from the Kurdistan
Workers' party (PKK) that is considered a terrorist
organisation by Turkey, Europe and the US, have a
tight grip on this city of one million people,
rewarding loyalty, punishing "traitors" and
enforcing discipline.
"Of course, we all support the PKK," says Cevat, 17.
"Every family here has someone in the PKK. "
The rioting in March and the brutal response of the
Turkish security forces have worked as an effective
recruitment drive for the PKK. "We're fed up of the
discrimination. It doesn't have to be like this,"
says Cevat. "But every time they do something like
this, more people go into the mountains."
"Going into the mountains" is a common phrase in
Diyarbakir. It means going to join the PKK fighters,
thought to number around 5,000, in their bases in
nearby northern Iraq.
At least 100 local youths have gone into the
mountains in the past month, says Mr Ozsoy. "Guys I
know have just disappeared. They're like ghosts. You
would see them in the cafes and now they're not
here."
Selamettin Ata, a 44-year-old grocer whose
seven-year-old son, Enes, was shot dead by Turkish
police on March 30, said at least 90% of the city
sympathised with the PKK. Enes had told his father
he was going to visit his aunt 200 metres away. He
became curious about the protests and went to take a
look - only to receive a bullet in the heart. Enes
was the youngest of the 10 civilians to be killed
during a 48-hour period. The oldest was 78. Five of
the dead were teenagers, one of whom died from a
cracked skull. Another 500 people were wounded.
The clashes were the worst experienced here in more
than a decade. Their consequences and the general
poverty in a city simmering with pent-up frustration
help to explain why a youth-led intifada could
explode with greater force at any time.
During and after the trouble, 180 under-18s were
detained. According to a report from the Diyarbakir
bar association based on witness statements and
medical reports, all of them were subjected to
severe abuse in detention.
"Mistreatment and illegal torture was applied. The
unlawful behaviour of the police lent a new
dimension to the situation," the report says.
The teenagers said they had been repeatedly beaten,
threatened with death and rape, stripped naked,
immersed in cold water, subjected to high pressure
hosing and had cigarettes stubbed out on their
bodies.
Three-quarters of the detainees were originally from
hill villages surrounding Diyarbakir, their
militancy a legacy of the dirty war that peaked in
the early 1990s in this region when the Turkish army
used a scorched earth policy to depopulate thousands
of Kurdish villages in the mountains.
As a result 1.5 million Kurds were displaced,
pouring into cities such as Diyarbakir, which has
tripled in size in little more than a decade.
Unemployment is almost 70% and there are estimated
to be 28,000 children spending most of their lives
on the streets - 700 of them scratching a living
from combing the city's rubbish dumps.
The Turks emptied the mountain villages partly to
try to destroy the rural base of the guerrillas.
Instead, they have created an urban guerrilla
movement.
Faced with this crisis, the Turkish government of
Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to be at a loss. Mr
Erdogan has won plaudits for coming to Diyarbakir
twice during the past year, signalling a policy
shift towards conciliation and concession. But he
has not followed up the promises and the Kurdish
political leadership is disenchanted.
The Democratic Society party (DTP), the main Kurdish
nationalist party generally seen as the PKK's
political wing or the Kurds' Sinn Féin, runs 56 town
halls across south-eastern Turkey. But the real
power in the region is wielded by the Turkish
military and Ankara bureaucrats dispatched as
regional governors.
The Turkish electoral system is structured to keep
the Kurdish nationalists out of parliament in
Ankara. A party needs 10% of the national vote to
enter parliament. The DTP, which gained 45% of the
vote across much of the south-east in the last
election in 2002, cannot obtain 10% nationally.
In the absence of political channels, the men of
violence on both sides hold sway. The children of
Diyarbakir are growing up to swell the ranks of the
"terrorists".
In the centre of Diyarbakir hangs a red and white
banner draped across a main road. "Happy is he who
is a Turk," it reads, a mockery to Selamettin Ata
mourning the death of his son. "I'm not allowed to
say I'm a Kurd and be proud of it," he says.
Backstory
Kurds, a 30 million-strong mountain and tribal
people of Sunni Muslims, are divided between
northern Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, which has the
biggest community, of up to 15 million - the exact
figure is not known. After a long history of
uprising and brutal suppression through the 20th
century, the current Turkish-Kurdish conflict
erupted in 1984, with Abdullah Ocalan, the
charismatic guerrilla leader of the Kurdistan
Workers' party, leading the rebellion.
A long dirty war followed, with Turkish death squads
and ruthless Kurdish guerrillas sowing terror.
Thousands of Kurdish villages in the south-east were
torched and 1.5 million Kurds uprooted before the
Kurds called a ceasefire in 1999 after Ocalan,
Turkey's enemy number one, was arrested and
incarcerated. The war resumed in 2004 when the
rebels called off their truce. The conflict is
currently escalating. In 20 years , it has resulted
in around 40,000 deaths
guardian co.uk
Southeastern Turkey:
North Kurdistan (
Kurdistan-Turkey) wikipedia
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