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A Turkish War of Religion: Kurdish
Activists Sense a Conspiracy
5.6.2012
By Piotr Zalewski / Diyarbakir, TIME |
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A Kurdish protester clashes with
Turkish police during Kurdish New Year "Newroz"
celebration in Istanbul on March 18, 2012.
Turkey which still denies the constitutional
existence of Kurds and refuses to recognize its
Kurdish population as a distinct minority. Kurds ask
for more cultural rights for ethnic Kurds who
constitute the greatest minority in Turkey,
numbering more than 20 million. Kurds call for
lifting the ban on education in Kurdish, paving the
way for an autonomous democrat Kurdish system within
Turkey. A large Turkey's Kurdish community openly sympathise with the Kurdish PKK rebels. Photo:
AFP/Getty.
June 5, 2012
DIYARBAKIR, The Kurdish region of Turkey,
— In a widely reported speech last month, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan spoke about Turkey's seemingly
perpetual problem with its largest ethnic minority,
the Kurds. He insisted on the indivisibility of the
country, describing it as "one nation, one state,
one flag and one religion." Erdogan, whose
Islamic-leaning Justice and Development Party (AKP)
has ruled Turkey since 2002, would later insist that
the religion reference was a slip of the tongue,
that he did not mean to bring up religion. Many
Kurdish activists drew a different conclusion. To
them, the misstatement spoke clearly to the AKP's
unspoken policy of using Islam to lure the Kurds
into abandoning their struggle for additional rights
and a measure of political autonomy. (Like most
Turks, including Erdogan himself, the majority of
Kurds are Sunni Muslims.)
Recently, the lightning rod for such suspicions has
been the Gulen movement, the controversial religious
group suspected of wielding considerable sway over
the Turkish government, business community, and the
media. (The movement takes its name from Fethullah
Gulen, a Pennsylvania-based Islamic preacher.) The
group, many Kurdish nationalists suspect, has been
part and parcel of a new government strategy to
pacify and assimilate the Kurds. "Someone comes here
and tries to teach our people religion," Ahmet Turk,
a prominent Kurdish politician, said back in 2010.
"And they say in the name of Islam, 'Yes, let us
help you improve your belief but forget about your
identity.'" Says Vahap Coskun, an assistant
professor at Diyarbakir's Dicle University,
"Together, the [Gulenists] and the government have
been using religion to attain the objective they
have in mind — to build the unity of the state."
The Gulen movement publicly eschews politics. Its
main objective in Turkey's Kurdish-majority
southeast, key Gulenists insist, is to focus on a
long-neglected issue: education. For the region's
Kurds, access to quality schooling has always been
scarce. A raging 30-year conflict between Kurdish
militants and the Turkish army has made things even
worse. The Gulenists — who run some of the best
university preparatory schools in the country — have
gone a considerable way to address governmental
neglect. As a Kurdish columnist at one of Turkey's
largest papers — himself a graduate of a Gulen
school — told me in Istanbul, "Most of the people
from the southeast, if they're here [in Istanbul]
and if they're successful, chances are that at some
point they went through the Gulen system."
In Diyarbakir, the biggest city in the
Kurdish-majority southeast, I visited with Ali
Pehlivan, the principal of Nil Elementary, one of 57
private schools operated by the Gulen movement in
the region. Pehlivan was beaming with pride. His
school, he told me, had recently placed 73rd
nationwide out of 18,000 primary schools — the first
time that a school from Diyarbakir had cracked the
country's top 100.
For all their success, schools like Pehlivan's
appear to have outworn their welcome among some
Kurds. On May 14, the day I arrived in Diyarbakir, a
homemade bomb exploded at a Gulen dormitory. At one
of the Gulen prep schools I visited the following
day, the headmaster, Bulent Ince, reported about 15
attacks against his school — ranging from Molotov
cocktails to broken windows — over the past three
years,www.ekurd.net
the most recent having occurred in early May. In
late April, another prep school in Cizre, a town
near the Iraqi border, was sprayed with gunfire.
Though no casualties were reported in any of these
attacks — most took place at night — there have been
allegations of targeted killings. Two years ago, an
imam close to the Gulen movement was killed in
Hakkari, about 250 miles east of Diyarbakir.
Most observers are certain the attacks are the work
of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a militant
group, or of its sympathizers. The PKK sees itself
as a champion of Kurdish rights and has waged war
against the Turkish army since 1984. To date, the
conflict has claimed 40,000 lives. The U.S. and the
E.U. have labeled the PKK a terrorist organization.
Contacted by phone, PKK spokesperson Roj Welat
denied his group's responsibility for the attacks.
He did insinuate, however, that the Gulen movement
and its institutions were legitimate targets. "As
long as there is a denial and annihilation policy
against the Kurdish people," he said, "every human
being has a right to defend themself whenever they
are under attack."
Fethullah Gulen's statements on the PKK have done
little to allay tensions between his group and the
Kurdish militants. In a speech last October, Gulen
lambasted the Turkish army for being "unable to
finish off a group of bandits in the mountains over
the last 30 years." The timing was less than
fortunate. Two months later, the military killed 34
Kurdish smugglers in a botched airstrike against
what it believed was a column of PKK fighters.
The biggest charge leveled against the Gulenists,
however, has little to do with their leader's
rhetoric. Since 2009, a series of police operations
against the so-called Union of Communities in
Kurdistan (KCK), alleged to be the PKK's urban arm,
has led to the arrest of several thousand Kurds.
Many in the Kurdish movement allege that Gulenists
inside the police and judiciary have been a driving
force behind the crackdown. The movement's aim,
Vahap Coskun suspects, is to imprison and intimidate
as many Kurdish activists and politicians as
possible — to the extent that even those opposed to
the PKK have landed behind bars. The Gulenists, he
says, "want to criminalize and marginalize the
Kurdish political movement as a whole."
To Emre Uslu, a columnist and terrorism expert, the
recent attacks are directly related the Gulen
movement's unprecedented expansion in the southeast.
Aside from schools, Gulenists now run popular prep
courses, business associations, and okuma saloni
(reading halls), which cater to underprivileged
students. These alone, says Uslu, attract
approximately 30,000 children each year. The PKK, he
says, "feels threatened by these numbers." The Gulen
movement, he adds, has become the PKK's "number one
enemy."
Ironically, individual Gulenists appear to have a
more accommodating approach toward the Kurdish issue
than successive Turkish governments. Cemal Usak, a
longtime associate of Gulen and the Vice President
of the Journalists and Writers Foundation, told me
in Istanbul that Turkish public opinion has failed
to distinguish between PKK violence and the Kurds'
legitimate struggle for social and cultural rights.
"Even if the terror comes to an end, the Kurdish
problem will remain because 80-90% of it has to do
with language and identity." In remarks that would
place him closer to the Kurdish movement than to the
Turkish political mainstream, Usak argued in favor
of introducing Kurdish courses at schools across all
of Turkey (the majority of the country's 12 million
to 15 million Kurds, having escaped poverty and war,
now live outside the southeast), restoring orginal
names of Kurdish towns and villages, and even, if
necessary, negotiating with the PKK.
At an informal meeting of local Gulenists in
Diyarbakir, Celal, a physiotherapist, struck an
apologetic tone when asked about the recent attacks
against the schools. "The attacks are not their
fault but ours," he said, referring to the
perpetrators. "Because we haven't explained
ourselves in the right way."
Copyright © respective author or news agency,
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