The wrongs and rights of minorities: Turkey has yet to face up to its diversity

Turkey has yet to face up to its diversity

THE country has moved some way towards meeting the Copenhagen criteria for EU membership. It has abolished the death penalty, saving the life of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the PKK, an outlawed Kurdish organisation responsible for a guerrilla war through much of the 1990s. It has revised the penal code (previously unchanged since 1926) and reinforced the rights of women. It has introduced a new law allowing broadcasting in any language, including Kurdish. And it has brought to an end the random searches that used to be common, particularly in the east. Now nobody can be searched without a court order.

The government has also introduced an official policy of zero tolerance towards torture, for which its police and security forces became infamous in the West in 1978 with the release of “Midnight Express”, Alan Parker's film about a young American imprisoned on drugs charges. The punishment for torture has been increased, and sentences may no longer be deferred or converted into fines, as often happened in the past.

But changing the law is one thing, changing habits is another. A villager in the east who gets searched by the state police may still not dare demand to see a court order. The police forces, it is said, are being retrained, but the Turkish Human Rights Foundation (TIHV) says that of 918 people treated at its centres in 2004, 337 claimed they had been tortured. The comparable figures for 2003 were 925 and 340. The TIHV says that even in 2004, “torture was applied systematically by police, gendarmerie and special units in interrogation centres.” It claims that 21 people died in “extra-judicial killings” during the year.

In its October 2004 report on Turkish accession, the European Commission emphasised the need for further “strengthening and full implementation of provisions related to the respect of fundamental freedoms and protection of human rights, including women's rights, trade-union rights, minority rights and problems faced by non-Muslim religious communities.”

Institutionalised intolerance

From its very beginnings the republic has been confused about minorities. In his book, “Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds”, Stephen Kinzer, a New York Times journalist, wrote: “Something about the concept of diversity frightens Turkey's ruling elite.” Officially the state recognises only three minorities: those mentioned in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, signed after Ataturk's army had thrown out the occupying forces left over from the first world war. The treaty specifically protects the rights of the Armenian, Greek and Jewish communities in the country.

In the early years of the republic there were Kurds in parliament, and the deputy speaker was an Alevi (a religious minority of which more later). But after Kurdish uprisings in 1925 and 1937 were brutally suppressed, the republic went into denial about its cultural diversity. The word “minority” came to refer only to the Lausanne trio, who were non-Muslims and indeed were increasingly perceived as non-Turks. If you are a member of a minority in Turkey today you are, almost by definition, seen as not fully Turkish.

The Kemalists' narrow brand of nationalism has helped to suppress the country's sensitivity to minorities. At Anit Kabir, one of the huge murals in the museum below Ataturk's tomb depicts the Greek army marching through occupied Anatolia in 1919, with a soldier on horseback about to bayonet a beautiful Turkish girl. In the background is a Greek cleric brandishing a cross and inciting the soldiers. The picture caption explains (in English): “During these massacres the fact that clerics played a provoking role has been proven by historical evidence.” As anti-clerical as Ataturk was (whatever the faith), it is hard to believe that he would have approved of such a message.

Turkey has also found it difficult to face up to the Armenians' persistent allegation that the massacres of 1915, in the maelstrom of the first world war, were genocide. Gunduz Aktan, the head of an Ankara think-tank and a former Turkish ambassador in Athens, dismisses the claims as “Holocaust envy”.

The most troublesome minority in recent years has been the biggest of them all, the Kurds. Where minorities are concerned, size does matter. The Armenians, Greeks and Jews in Turkey today number in the tens of thousands; the Kurds up to 15m. In the 15-year guerrilla war in the east between the Turkish army and security forces and Mr Ocalan's PKK, some 35,000 civilians and troops were killed. Many more villagers were displaced (some say perhaps a million), terrorised out of their homes, often by fellow Kurds, and forced to move to cities far away. But nobody really knows what proportion of the Kurds the PKK stands for.

The more extreme Kurds say they want their own homeland - “Kurdistan”, a word that provokes shivers in Ankara - to embrace their people living in Iran and Iraq as well as in Turkey. The more moderate Turkish Kurds want to be allowed to speak their own language, to be taught it in school, and to hear it broadcast - all of which they are slowly and grudgingly being granted. DEHAP's party congress this year was attended by Mr Ocalan's sister and Feleknas Uca, a German member of the European Parliament. Both addressed the meeting in Kurdish. The Kurds' cause has received extensive publicity abroad. Leyla Zana, a member of the Turkish parliament imprisoned for ten years for speaking in Kurdish in the parliament building, was released last year after intense pressure from abroad. The Kurdish Human Rights Project, a London-based charity, has been effective in bringing Kurdish cases to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Among them are thousands of claims for compensation for loss of property as a result of the military incursion against the PKK in the 1990s. Such cases, however, can be heard in Strasbourg only if domestic laws offer no prospect of compensation, and Turkey recently passed a law “on damages incurred from terrorism and combating terrorism”. The governor of Tunceli, a town close to mountains where the PKK was particularly active, said recently that 6,200 people in his province had applied for compensation under the new law.

The government is also making modest attempts to help Kurds who were forcibly removed from their villages to return home. Incidents in the east are now few and far between, even though last summer the PKK, renamed Kongra-Gel, ended a ceasefire called after Mr Ocalan was arrested in Kenya in 1999. The organisation said the government had reneged on a promised amnesty to its members.

Dark forces

So has the Kurdish problem been more or less resolved? Not if you listen to the many Turks who believe in conspiracy theories. Such theories thrive in a society that still thinks transparency in public affairs is an oxymoron. After the tsunami disaster in Asia on December 26th last year, the American embassy in Ankara felt obliged to issue an official denial of colourful Turkish newspaper reports that the wave had been caused by American underwater nuclear explosions designed to kill large numbers of Muslims.

The conspiracy theory about the Kurds goes something like this: Mr Ocalan, although held in solitary confinement on a remote island in the Sea of Marmara, still controls the larger part of the organisation through visits from his brother, his sister and a lawyer. Since his captors are said to be able to control what messages he conveys in return for supplying him with cigarettes and other favours, why would he end the ceasefire unless dark forces wished to resurrect the Kurdish uprising? And why ever would they want to do that? In order to undermine the EU negotiations by reigniting civil war in the east, concludes the theory.

This may not be as absurd as it sounds. There are powerful groups inside Turkey who see no advantage in joining the EU, and many Turks believe in the presence of dark forces inside the state. Anyone who doubts the idea of an etat profond, a deep state - a combination of military officers, secret-service agents, politicians and businessmen that pull invisible strings - is silenced with one word: “Susurluk”. This is the name of a town in western Turkey where in 1996 a Mercedes car crashed into a lorry, killing three of its four occupants. These proved to be an eerily ill-assorted bunch: a notorious gangster, sought by Interpol, and his mistress; a Kurdish MP and clan chief suspected of renting out his private army to the Turkish authorities in their fight against the PKK; and a top-ranking police officer who had been director of the country's main police academy. What they were doing together that night may never be known - the sole survivor, the clan chief, claims to remember nothing - but it is sure to fuel Turkish conspiracy theories for years to come.

An unsung minority

There is another large minority in Turkey that has received nothing like as much attention as the Kurds. Most Turks are Sunni Muslims, whereas most Arabs are Shiites. But there is a group called the Alevi who have lived in Anatolia for many centuries and who are not Sunni.

Their main prophet, like the Shiites', is not Mohammed but his son-in-law, Ali. Most of them maintain that their religion is separate from Islam, and that it is a purely Anatolian faith based on Shaman and Zoroastrian beliefs going back 6,000 years. Christian, Jewish and Islamic influences were added later, though the Alevi accept that the Islamic influence is the strongest.

Their number is uncertain, because no census in Turkey has asked about religious affiliation since the early 1920s. At that time the Alevi accounted for about 35% of the then population of 13m. Today the best estimate is that they make up about a fifth of a population that has grown to 70m, their share whittled down by the success of the republic's policy of “ignore them and hope they will assimilate”.

Many of the Alevi are also Kurds. The most predominantly Alevi town is Tunceli, once a PKK stronghold and a place notably short of mosques. The Alevi are not keen on them because Ali, their prophet, was murdered in one. Their houses of prayer are called cemevi.

In the cities they tend to practise their religion in private. Kazim Genc, an Alevi human-rights lawyer, says he discourages his daughter from mentioning her faith because Sunni Muslims think Alevi rites include sexual orgies and incest. Of the AK Party's 367 members of parliament, not one has admitted to being an Alevi.

The current government treats the Alevi as merely a cultural group, not a religious minority. That way it can sidestep its legal obligation to set aside space in towns and cities for religious communities' “places of worship”. When in May 2004 a group of Alevi in the Istanbul district of Kartal asked for land to be allocated for a cemevi, the local governor said they were Muslims and Kartal had enough mosques already. Indeed it has: almost 700 of them. But there is only one cemevi. The Alevi have taken the case to an Istanbul court and are awaiting a hearing.

Another case has gone all the way to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, a journey that the Kurds have taken with some success. It involves a student who is trying to establish his right to stay away from compulsory religious classes in school on the ground that they teach only Sunni Islam. The authorities may have to learn to come to terms with yet more scary diversity.

Article is part of an Economist survey on Turkey.

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