Turkey’s Kurds. Hope versus fear

Date: 02/08/03

Will the Kurds of south-eastern Turkey become happier - as Turkish citizens?

THE Kurds of south-eastern Turkey, like their fellow citizens of all ethnic stripes across the country, have already experienced an enormous change, largely for the good, in the past few years. Partly that is thanks to a ceasefire since 1999 between the Turkish army and the insurgents of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, better known as the PKK but recently renamed the Kurdish Congress for Freedom and Democracy, or KADEK. Last year the lifting of the state of emergency that had prevailed in most of the south-east enabled many rural Kurds to travel freely to and from their villages: according to a human-rights campaigner in Diyarbakir, the Kurds' biggest city, nearly a quarter of the 3,400-plus Kurdish villages that were forcibly evacuated during the war have started to be resettled.

But several newer factors have raised the Kurds' morale. One is the new Turkish government's apparent determination to meet the European Union's human-rights criteria as a prerequisite for Turkey to start negotiating to join the club. The second is the consolidation of a quasi-independent federal Kurdish state across the border in northern Iraq. And the third is the prospect of an amnesty for many of the PKK guerrillas who have taken refuge in the mountains in the borderland of northern Iraq.

On the ground, however, the old fear and suspicion persist. Displaced Kurdish villagers on the edges of towns like Diyarbakir, where some 300,000 of them live in squalor with few jobs and almost no welfare to support them, have yet to enjoy better times. And human-rights campaigners, such as Sezgin Tanrikulu of the Diyarbakir Bar Association, say they have yet to see a new attitude among police and prosecutors who still, he says, harass and detain people deemed to stir up Kurdish sentiment. “Great new laws, zero implementation,” he says. “There's no control over local bosses...and there's been no change so far in the state's mentality.”

Moreover, conditions attached to the proposed amnesty mean that PKK insurgents thought to have committed acts of violence will not qualify for clemency. There has been no hint so far that Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader sentenced to death in 1999 (the term was commuted to life), will be freed any time soon.

They're still getting nabbed

Diyarbakir's mayor, Feridun Celik, who belongs to a pro-PKK political party which has recently changed its name from the People's Democratic Party (known as Hadep, which was banned) to the Democratic People's Party (known as Dehap), says that 600 of its people have been detained this year. But the fact that some 30 towns in the south-east have mayors who belong to the party shows that it is allowed a measure of power and freedom.

Politicians in Ankara, Turkey's capital, point out, correctly, that most Kurds are well assimilated into Turkish society and do not seek to express the Kurdish identity beloved of Dehap and the PKK. Many top Turks, including past prime and foreign ministers, are or were Kurds by blood.

Moreover, it is true that only a minority of Turkey's 14m-odd Kurds vote for Kurdish parties. Hadep (before it became Dehap) won 60% of the votes in the last election in Diyarbakir and got a quarter of them in the 20 eastern provinces peopled predominantly by Kurds. But across the country, at least three out of four Kurds voted for non-Kurdish parties, including, in growing numbers, the ruling Development and Justice Party.

But this, as Kurdish activists argue, does not justify the abuses of state power inflicted on those among the sizeable minority who have argued, non-violently, for Kurdish language and cultural rights. Last month, a famous singer was detained for a week for singing a provocative song - in Kurdish. And it is still illegal for a Kurd to register his child with a Kurdish name.

On paper, many of these restrictive laws have already changed. The recent removal of a catch-all article in the penal code now allows anyone to argue peacefully even for separatism, says a senior Turkish diplomat. “Today, the non-violent advocacy of Kurdistan is legal - in theory,” says Emin Sirin, an MP in the ruling party who is on parliament's foreign-affairs committee. “Turkey should regard Kurdistan as the United Kingdom regards Scotland,” says Faruk Demir, of the Centre for Advanced Strategy, a think-tank in Ankara. “Twenty years ago nobody officially even accepted the existence of a Kurdish identity or people,” marvels a leading broadcaster in Istanbul. Such relaxed public discussion of the Kurdish issue was rare even a few years ago.

So attitudes are changing - on both sides. Both the PKK/KADEK and Dehap, which tends to echo the fighters' latest views, insist that they now seek only cultural, linguistic and general human rights for Kurds. “Forget about federalism [within Turkey],” says Diyarbakir's Dehap mayor.

Maybe the militant minority among Turkey's Kurds, once they feel no longer treated as second-class citizens, will fit happily into a unitary Turkish state. But if peaceful and public discussion of such dangerous notions as a Greater Kurdistan becomes allowable, as it must do if Turkey is to come closer to joining the EU, who knows what a distant constitutional future might hold? That unanswered question is precisely what still rattles the Turks.

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