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Erdogan vs. The Kurds
19.7.2012
By Aliza Marcus - The National Interest |
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Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Photo:
Reuters
July 19, 2012
Pity Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
It seems he just can’t get the Kurdish issue right.
In early June, when Erdogan visited Diyarbakir, the
unofficial capital of Turkey’s Kurdish southeast,
shops closed in protest. A few weeks later, when he
announced that schools would be allowed to offer
elective Kurdish language classes, opposition
Kurdish politicians accused him of denying their
identity by refusing mother-tongue education for
Kurds. Even Kurdish Islamists aren’t fans. “Turks
and Kurds fought together to create the state, but
somehow, we were then left behind,” said Kurdish
lawyer Huseyin Yilmaz, who heads the
Hezbollah-rooted Mustazaf-Der association (no
relation to Hezbollah in Lebanon). “We have our own
language, our own identity. We have something we
want.”
Erdogan’s unpopularity among Kurds is hardly a
surprise. Since his Justice and Development Party (AKP)
won an unprecedented third parliamentary majority in
June of last year, Erdogan appears to have abandoned
the democratic-reform plans that initially gained
him respect from Kurds and the backing of Turkish
liberals. The prime minister’s campaign pledge to
overhaul the constitution—drawn up by the 1980–1983
military junta—is moribund. Kurdish politicians in
Ankara from the main political parties say any
package he produces is unlikely to answer Kurdish
demands that their identity and language be
recognized in the constitution. And instead of
changing restrictive penal-code laws used for
decades to repress Kurdish identity and muzzle
demands, he’s now using them to silence those who
question his policies or advocate for change.
Almost four hundred officials from the Kurdish Peace
and Democracy Party (BDP) party are in prison, among
them thirty-six elected mayors and thirteen deputy
mayors, along with six hundred-plus Kurdish
civil-society activists, including human-rights
workers, trade unionists and people who did no more
than attend their meetings. Many have been held in
prison for upwards of three years while the trials
progress. Charges center on alleged membership in
the Union of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK), which
prosecutors say was set up by the PKK rebel force to
control the Kurdish southeast. The evidence against
defendants, including press conferences they called
and legal briefs they wrote, is shoddy even by
Turkey’s notoriously lax judicial standards.
Meanwhile, the number of journalists jailed—the
majority of them Kurds—has skyrocketed to a level
not seen since the 1990s, when a broad antiterror
law made writing about the Kurdish insurgency a
crime. And more than seven hundred university
students are in prison, the highest number since the
1980 military coup, many charged with aiding the PKK
rebel group through its urban KCK political wing.
The evidence, again, usually rests on nonviolent
acts or speeches promoting Kurdish identity or
criticizing government policies, including the cost
of tuition. While the space for legal Kurdish
politics narrows, the PKK shows no signs of
weakness; in June, rebels killed some twenty Turkish
soldiers, including eight in an assault on a
fortified Turkish outpost close to the border with
Iraq.
Erdogan denies that he’s backed off from his reform
agenda and frequently cites the changes he has made
in his terms in office: he opened a twenty-four-hour
state-run Kurdish television channel; allowed
graduate Kurdish-language programs at university;
opened the way for elective Kurdish-language classes
in primary and secondary schools; and made it
possible for families to speak to their imprisoned
children in Kurdish. The bottleneck isn’t him, he
claims, it’s the Kurds. He notes that the BDP, which
won thirty-six seats in last year’s national
parliamentary elections, won’t join him in
condemning PKK “terrorist” attacks and won’t
acknowledge the Kurdish reforms he’s done. He also
accuses them of not being able to even go to the
toilet unless the PKK first “loosens the strings.”
Erdogan’s not wholly wrong. The BDP won’t take his
side. It’s not because they are afraid of the PKK or
because they are spiteful. It’s because, from the
perspective of many Kurds, the PKK’s fight is still
legitimate given the judicial assault on democratic
activism and the lack of a formal peace process. At
the same time, Erdogan’s reforms may be new for
Turks,www.ekurd.net
but for Kurds, these changes are either irrelevant
to main concerns or twenty years behind the demand
curve. Take Kurdish-language television: a nice
idea, which is why pro-PKK activists in Europe
started their own satellite programming in 1995. The
graduate programs in Kurdish-language studies were
not poorly received, it’s just that with so many
students and some professors in prison, it’s hard to
know who will teach the classes—or take them.
Elective Kurdish-language courses might be a good
idea for Turkish students, but Kurds want their
children to learn in their own language, not learn
about it. And allowing families to speak Kurdish to
their children on visiting day in prison is great.
But letting them out of prison would be even better.
It’s not that Kurds aren’t clear what they want.
It’s more like Turks don’t want to hear it. In a
public statement last year, leading Kurdish
political parties and organizations demanded
“democratic autonomy” and a realistic plan for
ending the PKK’s war and demobilizing the some eight
thousand rebels whose home base is in the remote
Kandil mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. In a June
interview with the liberal Turkish daily Taraf, BDP
cochairman Selahattin Demirtas laid out a framework
for getting to the solution: Halt the arrests of
Kurdish officials and activists, and release them
from prison; ease conditions for imprisoned PKK
leader Abdullah Ocalan, who hasn’t had any visits,
including from his lawyers, in almost a year; and
create a mechanism for dialogue.
Erdogan’s Intransigence
Unfortunately, like those who ruled before him,
Erdogan’s having a hard time accepting Kurdish
nationalism and the popular hold the PKK exerts over
Kurdish opinion. As a result, he remains wedded to
the idea that if he can do away with the PKK and
outspoken Kurdish activists, he can find someone who
will be perfectly content with the changes he’s made
to date. But that’s not a way to make peace. If he
wants to end the fighting, he has to talk to those
who have the guns. And if he wants a political
settlement with the Kurds, he needs to negotiate
with their political party. Anything short of that
is just wasting time.
It’s popular to suggest that Erdogan wants a deal,
but he has to move slowly because of the nationalist
wing in his party and within his voting base. Yet
convincing the Turkish public may not be as hard as
it seems. When word leaked out about secret talks
between the PKK and the head of Turkey’s national
intelligence agency, MIT, last year, Erdogan’s
government didn’t fall, and his ratings in the polls
didn’t drop. When Erdogan announced the new
Kurdish-language reform package, the most amazing
thing was the lack of reaction among AKP voters.
Erdogan’s strength is that he has won the support of
the Turkish public—again, again and again. His
weakness is that he still hasn’t decided how to use
this political capital to solve Turkey’s most
fundamental problem.
The Kurdish issue isn’t a matter of selling
something to the voters. It’s a matter of selling it
to Erdogan.
Aliza Marcus is a writer in Washington, DC, and
the author of Blood and Belief: The PKK and the
Kurdish Fight for Independence.
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