Turkey and the Kurds. Days of terror

Violent Kurdish terrorism returns to Turkey, with little solution in sight

IS IT a return to the bad old days? The question preys on the minds of Turks and Kurds alike, as violence escalates between Kurdish PKK rebels and the army in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish south-eastern provinces. On July 18th four Turkish soldiers were killed when the PKK detonated a bomb in Hakkari, right next to Iraq. They were the latest victims in a series of attacks that have claimed nearly 150 lives, including 37 civilians, since the PKK ended its truce on June 1st last year.

Turkey's deputy chief of the general staff, Ilker Basbug, promised this week that the violence was containable. The PKK no longer enjoys widespread support among Kurdish villagers, over a million of whom were forcibly evicted by the army during its scorched-earth campaign against the terrorists in the 1990s. Iran and Syria have stopped arming and hosting the PKK, in hopes of wooing Turkey. But the PKK has spread itself further into northern Iraq.

It also seems to have started hitting coastal resorts again, in hopes of wrecking Turkey's booming tourism industry. On July 16th five people, including an Irishwoman and a Briton, were killed in the Aegean resort of Kusadasi by a parcel bomb on a minibus. PKK leaders denied involvement, but British and Turkish investigators say that the attack bore all the hallmarks of a newly formed urban terrorist group, known as the Kurdistan Liberation Hawks.

Why has the PKK resumed its fighting, after renouncing violence in 1999 under orders from its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan? The peace enabled the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan to grant Turkey's 14m-odd Kurds unprecedented freedom. In the streets of Diyarbakir, Kurdish activists gather signatures supporting federalism, an act that would once have landed them in jail. The previously outlawed Kurdish language is being taught in private courses. Indeed, it is the dearth of pupils, not official harassment, that worries schools. “The same Kurdish nationalists, who encouraged our youths to lay down their lives so we could speak Kurdish, prefer to send their kids to ballet and English classes,” fumed the director of a Kurdish-language school in Batman that went bust this week.

The PKK's main motive for its renewed terror campaign is no longer to secure rights for the Kurds but to bully the government into offering an amnesty not only to PKK fighters but also to their leaders. Mr Erdogan has vowed not to bow to this demand. Even so, his pledge has not staunched mounting public fury against the Kurds. This week a group of vigilantes beat up lawyers and relatives of a 12-year-old Kurdish boy and his father, shot dead last November by security forces in Mardin. One official implicated in those killings was promoted soon afterwards. A mysterious group has been stencilling “the world should be Turkish” in bold red letters on walls in Ankara and Izmir. Some fret that enmity between ordinary Turks and Kurds, averted even during the worst days of PKK terrorism, could now take root, even in Istanbul and the west.

The contempt felt by most Turks for the country's biggest pro-Kurdish group, Dehap, is increasingly shared by European Union governments, as well as by Kurdish intellectuals. Dehap's failure to condemn the July 6th killing in Diyarbakir of Hikmet Fidan, a prominent Kurdish politician and fierce critic of Mr Ocalan's, has reinforced its image as a PKK stooge. Perhaps Dehap leaders were trying to avoid Mr Fidan's fate - police say he was killed by the PKK.

This is not to say that Ankara is blameless. Since coming to power almost three years ago, Mr Erdogan's government has, partly at the EU's behest, relaxed curbs on human rights, but it has not found a comprehensive answer to the Kurdish question. High unemployment in the south-east has led to a sharp rise in juvenile crime and prostitution. Mr Erdogan needs a formula to coax as many as 5,000 rebels out of their mountain strongholds. Previous amnesties, offered only to those willing to rat on their comrades, have failed.

Instead, Mr Erdogan is sounding increasingly bellicose. Last week he said that Turkey would send its troops into northern Iraq in pursuit of PKK terrorists, if need be. His threats (termed a last resort by General Basbug) prompted a stern response from the Iraqis and their American mentors. “Not a good idea,” commented Dan Fried, the American assistant secretary of state for Europe.

Yet the Americans have not explained why they have done so little to dislodge the rebels from Iraq. The official line is that defeating the PKK would take some 10,000 troops, which the Americans can ill afford when they are fighting the Sunni insurgency. The Turks counter that the Americans could at least track and capture a couple of PKK leaders, if only to show willing. But Pentagon officials, still smarting from Turkey's refusal in March 2003 to allow American troops to invade Iraq from its territory, are in no mood to oblige.

Turkey must resolve its Kurdish problems alone. And if decades of bloodshed have proved anything, it is that a purely military solution is no solution at all.

Violent Kurdish terrorism returns to Turkey, with little solution in sight.