Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2003, page 25

Talking Turkey

 

After a Year in Office, Turkey’s Moderate Islamist Government Deserves Some Credit

 

By Jon Gorvett

In the year since its November 2002 election victory, Turkey’s moderate Islamist government has come a long way. While still deeply suspect in the eyes of the country’s secular establishment—and a source of some anxiety in its financial markets—the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has done much to allay concerns in certain Western capitals.

Much of this has been thanks to its pursuit of reforms aimed at bringing the country into line with European Union legislation. This is a vital process if Turkey is ever to realize its long-held ambition of EU membership.

While its record on reform is impressive on paper, however, there is still concern among human rights activists that much of what has been legislated has not been translated into action on the ground.

A case in point occurred mid-October in Diyarbakir, the capital of Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast. It concerned a group of villagers from two districts who, back in 2002, had approached a group of lawyers in the city.

Claiming that their villages—Ziyaret and Uluocak in the district of Lice—and a field near the village of Caglayan in the district of Kulp had been burned down by Turkish soldiers in 1993 and 1994, they wanted the lawyers to open a case for compensation in the local courts. This was duly done, with extensive testimony submitted, along with damage reports from the provincial public works department apparently confirming the villagers’ claims.

The destruction of the villages took place at a time when the Turkish army was engaged in a major war with separatist rebels of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), who were fighting to establish an independent Kurdish state. The villages’ destruction is not in doubt, as a recent Turkish parliamentary Human Rights Commission report details them among some 3428 settlements forcibly evacuated and subsequently destroyed by security forces in the southeastern region since 1993.

In recent years, this practice largely ceased, as the conflict itself wound down. The capture of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, and a subsequent cease-fire by the PKK, led to a major de-escalation of violence. Meanwhile, Turkish government efforts to reform legal practices and liberalize laws—such as allowing Kurdish-language broadcast rights—gave the impression of a relaxation in the region’s tensions.

Back in Diyarbakir, following the submission of the villagers’ case to the relevant authorities, the court opened hearings on Oct. 17. It did not meet to try the case against the Turkish soldiers who allegedly carried out the village burning, however. Instead, it was convened to try the lawyers who had brought the case. They have been charged with “misusing their duties” and “trying to obtain unearned income by making baseless assertions and false accusations,” according to a June 3, 2003 indictment.

 

There is still concern that much of what has been legislated has not been translated into action.

This followed a complaint against them by Brigadier Levent Ersoz, the commander of the paramilitary gendarmerie forces in the Lice district. It was his troops who stood accused of destroying the villages. Ersoz claimed that two locals had told him that the villages had not been destroyed “by force,” and that therefore the lawyers were trying “to cause the state to lose money by exploiting needy people and to sabotage the security forces in the anti-terror struggle,” his complaint read.

Speaking to the press in mid-October, one of the lawyers, Sezgin Tanrikulu, who is also the chairman of the Diyarbakir Bar Association, pointed out that the case against him and his colleagues pre-judged the outcome of the case he was bringing against the gendarmerie on the villagers’ behalf. “It is for the courts to ascertain the facts of our application for damages,” he said. “The gendarmerie does not have such a role.”

Tanrikulu then went on to comment on how much of a change there in fact has been in repressive practices. Referring to the recently passed 6th European Union harmonization package, which included many reforms of legal procedures, he said: “[The harmonization package] says ‘nobody can search your house without a court order.’ But the Interior Ministry and the Justice Ministry then jointly made a new search regulation. This says ‘police forces must show a search warrant, if it is possible.’ That means they don’t have to show one it if it’s not possible, which means they can still search your house without a warrant. This regulation shows the resistance of the bureaucracy against democratization.”

This resistance has been noticed in other areas as well. A February law change designed to bring Turkey closer to EU standards opened for retrial the cases of imprisoned Kurdish parliamentary deputies Leyla Zana, Hatip Dicle, Orhan Dogan and Selim Sada. All were locked up in 1994, after making speeches in Kurdish at their swearing in ceremonies. Since opening in June, however, the retrial has dragged on, at one day a month.

 

Encouraging Signs

Yet the signs overall are still encouraging—after all, a retrial of any kind would have seemed out of the question until relatively recently. The successful passing of the 7th EU harmonization package in August also led to a revision of many laws related to anti-terrorism and criminal libel, both areas which had served to muzzle rights in times past.

Since then, some important acquittals have been handed down—notably of Omer Asan, on trial since March 2002 for making a study of the language, culture and history of Turkey’s northern Black Sea region, long home to a number of the country’s other minorities. Fikret Baskaya also was acquitted recently in a case over a critique of official Kemalist ideology in a book he had written back in 1994. Meanwhile, instances of extra-judicial killings and disappearances in the southeast seem also to be subsiding.

Also in October, the EU was due to release its latest progress report on Turkey, with widespread advance leaking indicating that it would be the most positive yet. EU enlargement chief Gunther Verheugen, long something of a bogeyman in Turkey for his perceived antipathy to Ankara’s EU drive, seemed remarkably upbeat about the country’s progress. His main concern was over Cyprus, rather than the passage of internal reform—although the report likely will underscore the need for further evidence of implementation.

All of which begs the question of how effective the government is likely to be in changing practice throughout a system of highly entrenched traditional “habits.” While the government’s commitment to reform seems hard to question, its make-up—moderate Islamist to some, like a European Christian democrat party to others—is both a blessing and a curse. On the up side, it gives the government an outsider’s view of the establishment and knowledge of its inadequacies. On the down side, however, its composition makes it deeply mistrusted by secular reformers and an easy target for the mostly secular forces within the state who are resisting change.

While this conflict is far from over, after just a year in office, Prime Minister Recep Erdogan’s government perhaps deserves a little more credit than it sometimes gets for coming this far.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.

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