Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January-February 2008, pages 38-39

Talking Turkey

Turkish Prime Minister Says War Against Kurds Has Entered “Very Critical Stage”

By Jon Gorvett

A woman carries a heavy load as she returns to her home in Turkey’s southeastern province of Sirnak, near the border with Iraq, Nov. 9, 2007. (AFP Photo/Mustafa Ozer).

WITH SNOW FALLING thick across the rugged mountains of southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq, this winter will likely be the harshest for some time for the inhabitants of this remote border. Along the line now, too, are several tens of thousands of Turkish troops, while up in the hills an unknown number of their adversaries wait and watch.

Although the standoff here has occupied world headlines since the spring, it has occupied the lives of the locals for decades. The conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish nationalist and separatist fighters of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) began in the 1980s—though many in the region see this as merely the latest phase of a conflict that is much older. Indeed, in some villages the rebellion against Kemal Ataturk’s new Turkish Republic back in the 1920s by the Kurdish Islamist tribal leader Sheikh Said is still controversial.

The price of this seemingly endless war has been correspondingly high. Exact figures of casualties in the PKK campaign are essentially unknown, with the accounting of dead and wounded creatively distorted on all sides. The numbers 30,000 or 40,000 dead are the most common currencies. One thing most agree on is that the majority of those killed have been from among Turkey’s ethnic Kurdish minority, who form the majority in the southeastern region.

The economic cost also has been great, with the southeast region slumped in poverty for generations. Its people have often left for Turkey’s cities to find work, or for Europe and beyond to escape the harsh conditions. In the region’s capital, Diyarbakir, the official unemployment rate stands at around 60 percent.

The landscape too is scarred, blighted by this long war. As part of the army’s campaign in the 1980s and 1990s to deny the PKK logistic support, troops forcibly evacuated many villages seen as “pro-PKK.” Many still stand empty, their fields fallow. Others became battlegrounds in the fighting—sometimes between the PKK and the army, often between the pro-government Kurds of the Village Guards and the PKK, or even in spin-off conflicts within clans and families, split apart by divided loyalties and wounded honor in this highly traditional society.

This all denuded the region’s countryside, swelling the population of the southeast’s cities still further, as shanties of displaced people boomed around Diyarbakir, Van, Batman and Hakkari. As the Turkish army tightened its grip, the PKK was also pushed back further into the hills and over the border into neighboring northern Iraq.

In late November 2007, however, Turkey’s prime minister, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, claimed that this war had finally entered a “very critical stage.” Certainly, it has been in an entirely new phase for most of this year, with Erdogan’s government, which has Islamist roots, under immense pressure from the staunchly secular military and opposition Turkish nationalist parties to launch an invasion of northern Iraq to crush the PKK bases there.

Yet Erdogan has resisted this pressure, perhaps aware more than most of the dangers of such an adventure. Indeed, the conflict over what to do about the PKK—and the Kurdish issue more generally—has become a clash of opposing and perhaps irreconcilable visions of what Turkey is and should be.

This was illustrated most clearly by the decision of a group of right-wing Turkish nationalist lawyers in November to launch legal proceedings against the Democratic Turkey Party (DTP).

The largely Kurdish DTP won 24 seats in Turkey’s 500-seat parliament at the July 2007 elections (see Sept./Oct. 2007 Washington Report, p. 34), and stands in a tradition of broadly leftist Kurdish nationalist parties from the southeast. Traditionally these have also usually been banned after being found by the Turkish courts to have links to the PKK. The lawyers this time accuse the DTP of essentially the same thing, citing the party’s refusal to condemn the PKK as terrorists as evidence.

As this issue was going to press, the Constitutional Court had agreed to examine the lawyers’ case. The Court is widely known for its support for the military and secular establishment, meaning the likelihood is high that the case will go ahead. Without a change in Turkey’s current draconian laws in this area, there is a strong possibility that the DTP eventually will be banned.

The lawyers’ case provoked two major reactions—one expected and one significantly unexpected. The first was on the street. A demonstration by around 40,000 people in Diyarbakir in support of the DTP and calling for the release of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was met with tear gas and water cannon. Meanwhile, in Istanbul Turkey’s ultra-nationalists were also on the street, attacking Kurdish shops in poor neighborhoods such as Gaziosmanpasa, where a supermarket rumored to have connections to a leading DTP figure was burned down. Though often unreported, the consequences of the conflict are not limited to the southeast, with many of Turkey’s estimated 13 million ethnic Kurds these days living in marginal districts in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, often alongside poor and disaffected Turks.

The second reaction, on Nov. 25, was from Erdogan himself. Speaking out against closing the DTP, he said, “If we are going to get rid of terrorism, this will happen by keeping democracy as a means of seeking a solution and asking for rights…Everyone should be able to freely express themselves through constitutional and legitimate means in a democratic environment.”

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), of course, comes from a line of parties that also has been banned over the years by the Constitutional Court. The prime minister began his political career as mayor of Istanbul for the pro-Islamist Welfare Party, which was ejected from office in the 1997 “soft coup,” then banned a year later. In 2001 its successor, the Virtue Party, also was banned.

Yet Erdogan’s opposition to any ban for the DTP is not just based on this shared experience. Many of the AKP’s deputies are from the southeast, with the party gaining at the DTP’s expense in the 2007 elections. That carries with it a burden on the government to address the problems of the southeast, not simply by shelling villages in northern Iraq, but by tackling the economic and social basis of the conflict. The AKP also needs to do this as part of its European Union accession plans, and—perhaps more importantly—so that it does not keep getting pushed into a corner on the “security issue” by the military and the opposition. 

Meanwhile, there is another burden now being borne by many Turkish citizens. This comes as a consequence of the surge of nationalistic feeling that has been unleashed by the opposition parties and by a fervently nationalistic media, which has made sometimes-hysterical calls for military intervention into northern Iraq. The result of those calls may be shouldered by the poor and displaced Kurds of Turkey’s cities in smoldering high streets, and by the poor Turks in neighboring districts, as the coffins of their conscripted sons continue to come back from the wintry southeast.

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

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