Turkey’s Kurds: Glimmerings of tolerance

Date: 13/12/03

The Kurds in south-eastern Turkey are tasting some new freedoms

AS TURKEY ploughs on with efforts to qualify to join the European Union, the effects of reforms enacted over the past year by the conservative government led by Tayyip Erdogan are being felt, sometimes in surprising ways, in the largely Kurdish south-east. A new porn video, Xashiki Kaliki (Grandad's Fantasies) is selling well: until recently, it would have been banned, not for its content but for being in the Kurdish language. More significantly, Turkey's 14m Kurds are able for the first time to learn their own dialects through a handful of privately run courses.

In the town of Batman, Aydin Unesi, a Kurdish-language teacher, says 200 students have enrolled since his school opened its doors last month. A giant sign reading “Kurdish language course”, painted in the previously banned Kurdish national colours, marks the building in Batman's central square. In October the local governor invited a Kurdish bard, Mahsun Kirmizigul, to perform before a crowd of 150,000 to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic. His opening number was in Kurdish.

Such examples of tolerance may, however, mislead. Mr Unesi's students have yet to begin their lessons. “That is because the authorities keep throwing up new bureaucratic hurdles,” he complains. First he was told to broaden doors to his classrooms and hang up more Turkish flags. Then he was told to build a fire escape “even though we have two of them and inspectors saw them.” Faced with such obstacles, not a single Kurdish-language course has held classes so far. The laws have changed, but the authoritarian mentality of local officials has not.

In Diyarbakir, the largest city in the south-east, Sezgin Tanrikulu, a human-rights lawyer, was taken to court by paramilitary police in May. His crime? Filing a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of villagers in the nearby town of Kulp, whose homes were torched by security forces in the early 1990s at the height of the separatist insurgency led by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). To the court's embarrassment Mr Tanrikulu's clients came to a hearing on October 17th to describe the horrors inflicted by the armed forces. If they are convicted, Mr Tanrikulu and three other lawyers may spend up to three years in jail.

When the PKK called off its fight for an independent Kurdish homeland after the capture of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999, the hope was that the government would invest in poor provinces such as Mus, where average income per head in 2000 was $725, compared with a national average of $2,941. Yet Bedrettin Karaboga, chairman of Gunsiad, the Kurdish industrialists' lobby group, says that “not a penny has come so far.” He reckons that 70% of factories in the region are idle and that eight out of ten locals are unemployed. No wonder, he says, that many of the suicide-bombers who attacked in Istanbul last month were ethnic Kurds.

The American-led occupation of Iraq, viscerally opposed by most Turks, has provided some relief for the Kurds. Around 3,500 Turkish lorries carrying food, fuel and other non-combat materiel for the Americans cross daily in and out of Iraq from the south-eastern province of Sirnak. The Americans have bought $150m-worth of Turkish goods since the end of the war, some of it from the south-east; more Turkish contracts worth some $400m are in the pipeline. But the Kurdish truck drivers who carry the stuff also see the freedom being enjoyed by their fellow Kurds in northern Iraq, who have been running their own affairs outside Baghdad's control for over a decade. Kurdish-language porn may no longer be enough to satisfy them.

The Kurds in South-Eastern Turkey are tasting some new freedoms.