|
Diyarbakir blues
6.6.2006
By Ian Traynor
|
|
|
|
Turkey faces increasing ethnic
conflict and the thwarting of its European ambitions
if it does not deal with its 'Kurdish problem'.
Turkey's road to Europe, a former Turkish prime
minister once famously said, passes through this
ancient, dusty city in the Middle East.
Diyarbakir may have more in common with Amman,
Damascus, or Erbil, not places ordinarily seen on a
map of Europe. But it is not difficult to see what
Mesut Yilmaz meant when linking Turkey's European
destiny to this city of around one million Kurds in
south-eastern Turkey.
For without some committed attempt to settle
Turkey's age-old Kurdish conflict, the country's
ambitions of being the first Muslim state to join
the EU look to remain just that - an ambition
perennially denied.
The mood in Diyarbakir - where I am posting from -
is one of sullen, pent-up frustration. The
population is almost entirely Kurdish. The only
ethnic Turks are likely to be policemen, spies,
military or civil servants.
Since the end of March when the city's youth went on
the rampage and were met by Turkish gunfire, tear
gas, and truncheons that left 10 dead, hundreds
injured, and hundreds arrested and beaten, the city
has been on edge, waiting for the guerrillas of the
Kurdistan Workers' party or PKK to ignite the next
explosion. Just a matter of time, after the worst
outbreak of violence here in more than a decade.
The gloom and anxiety is a far cry from the optimism
of recent years when two factors fed the notion that
after more than 20 years of conflict, Turkey's
modernisation and "Europeanisation" could hold the
key to a settlement.
The two factors were the Turkish transformation
signalled by the arrival in power in late 2002 of
the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his
Justice and Development party (AKP) and the
country's progress in heading for EU accession.
Erdogan, a former successful mayor of Istanbul,
seemed a different type of Turkish politician -
genuine, sincere, modest, and hugely popular.
More importantly, his conservative administration of
pragmatic Islamists betokened a clean break with the
republic's tradition of fiercely secularist and
authoritarian leaders, an addled elite whose early
reformist westernising zeal has slowly ossified into
nationalist, reactionary paralysis, turning parts of
the Ankara ruling class into a feather-bedded
nomenklatura of bureaucrats, military officers, and
judges determined to defend their privileges.
With Erdogan came a positive jolt to Turkey's
European prospects and a blizzard of reforms aimed
at facilitating integration.
"The process of Turkey's integration with the EU
created opportunities here up until last year," said
Hisyar Ozsoy, an anthropologist and aide to the
Kurdish mayor of Diyarbakir.
"We want a 100% that Turkey joins the EU," said
Sezgin Tanrikulu, a prominent Diyarbakir lawyer and
a Kurd. The EU would bring greater rights, greater
autonomy, a "democratic republic".
The air of promise was boosted last August when
Erdogan came to Diyarbakir and delivered an unusual
message for a Turkish leader. He admitted, to the
annoyance of much of the establishment in Ankara,
that Turkey had a "Kurdish problem" and said the
solution lay in greater democracy, greater rights,
greater social and economic development - in short
in Turkey's "Europeanisation".
But since then, very little has happened on the plus
side while plenty has occurred on the minus side to
indicate that both Turkish hardliners in the
security services and among the hard men of the PKK
have a vested interest in wrecking any chance of a
settlement. Perhaps they have too much to lose from
the peace.
Last November in the south-eastern town of Semdinli,
maverick Turkish gendarmes exploded a bomb in a
Kurdish bookshop, a provocation that was to be
blamed on the rebels aimed at fomenting trouble.
Turkish nationalists sued the novelist Orhan Pamuk
for "denigrating Turkishness" by talking about the
Kurdish conflict, resulting in an own goal for the
Erdogan government with the international attention
focused on Turkey's curbs on freedom of expression
when it put its best-known living writer on trial.
Since then there have clashes between the army and
the PKK almost on a daily basis, while Ankara has
dispatched tens of thousands of military
reinforcements to the region and to the border with
Kurd-controlled northern Iraq where the PKK
leadership meets and where it runs training camps.
The only concession to Kurdish demands for greater
rights has been to authorise the broadcasting in
Kurdish of censored television for 45 minutes a day.
No cartoons or children's programmes, Kurdish
officials point out, since Kurdish children in the
region have to grow up learning Turkish.
Many Kurds in the region voted for Erdogan in 2002
and many still credit him with good intentions being
stymied by powerful elements in the Turkish
establishment whose principal bugbears are "sharia
and separatism" and who see Erdogan as the stealthy
mastermind of a process that will end with Turkey
under Islamic law and the state being broken up.
But Kurdish leaders and liberal Turks are deeply
disappointed that Erdogan has not followed through
on the promise he showed in Diyarbakir last year.
"He can't deliver. He doesn't have a policy," said
Soli Ozel, an Istanbul political scientist. "And the
PKK suffocates all the others. We've created a
monolithic Kurdish political bloc and the government
doesn't really know how to handle it."
Another incident illustrates how the Erdogan
government has backed away from initial attempts to
engage on the Kurdish issue.
Back in 2004, Ibrahim Kaboglu, an Istanbul law
professor, was commissioned by the prime minister's
office to write a report on minority rights in
Turkey. He proposed greater language and cultural
freedoms for "Muslim non-Turks", code for the Kurds.
"That was when the doomsday started," he said. His
report was shredded, he was forced to resign, and
put on trial on charges of inciting hatred. After a
six-month trial he was acquitted last month.
"This government is not interested in human rights,"
he said bitterly. "And things are getting worse."
Cengiz Aktar, director of EU research at Bahcesehir
University in Istanbul, agrees that the Erdogan
government has "no genuine Kurdish policy", a
deficit directly feeding into the country's
worsening EU prospects.
"The PKK attacks are increasing, there is a
resurgence of terrorist actions and the government's
response is to bring in a special new anti-terrorism
law. Do we really need that? Stability in this
country is directly linked to the anchor of the EU
perspective. But things may yet get worse before
they get better."
One troubling aspect of the Kurdish conflict
concerns how it has changed since the "dirty war" of
the 1980s and 1990s. Back then the conflict was
essentially a battle between Kurdish guerrillas and
the Turkish state. Community relations between Kurds
and ethnic Turks were seldom affected.
But the war of the 1990s resulted in 1.5 million
Kurds in the south-eat being uprooted and dispersed
across the country. Many of them headed to the
cities of western Turkey where life is better and
job prospects rosier. There are now estimated to be
some 3 million Kurds in Istanbul alone.
As the battle lines are being redrawn, tensions are
increasing in western cities, leading some to
predict a new form of internecine conflict.
"My fear is that Kurdish nationalists and Turkish
nationalists are now interested in communal strife.
This is a new situation. It's very seriously grim
indeed," said Ozel.
The Turkish newspapers in recent weeks have reported
a series of local incidents, with Kurdish settlers
being pushed out of big western cities like Izmir on
the Aegean. The southern port city of Mersin, for
example, saw an influx of tens of thousands of Kurds
in the 1990s as a result of the Turkish army's
depopulation campaign in the east. The result in
Mersin is that slowly the Kurds are taking over
local government and administration, triggering
friction with the host community.
And the dispersal of the Kurds to the west has also
resulted in the establishment of a breakaway
militant organisation, the Kurdistan Freedom
Falcons, urban guerrillas concentrating on the
cities and the holiday resorts of the west, albeit
linked to the highland PKK rebels of the south-east.
While the gunmen of the PKK escalate their campaign,
the main Kurdish nationalist political party, the
DTP or Democratic Society party, is deliberately
kept out of the parliament in Ankara by an election
system that requires 10% of the national vote to
qualify for the assembly. This skewed system means
there are only two parties in the national
parliament, Erdogan's AKP and its main secularist
opposition, the CHP or Republican People's party.
The DTP, though, succeeds locally and is running
dozens of town halls across south-eastern Turkey.
The party, in turn, is regarded as close to the PKK.
One Istanbul liberal involved in meetings with
Kurdish activists says that when DTP officials show
up at meetings they are invariably escorted by PKK
minders.
In Diyarbakir, Ozsoy now says that for the Kurds of
Turkey, Erdogan's reforms were merely "cosmetic" and
that the dream of EU integration has turned out to
be a hollow fantasy.
Tanrikulu, the Kurdish lawyer who regularly condemns
PKK terrorism and violence - a risky proposition in
a city where many families have relatives in the PKK
- is angry and disappointed with the prime minister.
"I distinguish Erdogan from the other politicians.
He seemed to be genuine and different. But I wish he
had not come here and used the words he did. Because
he's not determined enough. And in the end, if you
don't have a programme, all the words are
meaningless. Any politician who dealt with the
Kurdish problem in this country has only lost."
With elections due in Turkey next year, Erdogan is
not interested in losing and is unlikely to risk any
further concessions to the Kurds for fear of
forfeiting votes and angering powerful elements in
the security establishment.
That suggests the situation can only get worse, and
with it Turkey's European prospects.
guardian co.uk
Southeastern Turkey:
North Kurdistan (
Kurdistan-Turkey) wikipedia
Top |
Kurd Net
does not take credit for and is not responsible for the content of news
information on this page
|
® 