Turkey, the Kurds, and Human Rights
Marcus, Aliza
Men with video cameras were waiting at the entrance to Cizre, a rundown city in Turkey's Kurdish southeast. The cameras rolled when police pulled me out of the car and checked my bags, my body,...
...I was acquitted, but the point was made...
...The Turkish authorities probably thought they had stifled this Kurdish problem back in 1994, when the constitutional court shut down the pro-Kurdish Democracy party...
...Internationally, however, Turkey's Kurdish conflicts are not so invisible...
...But it's a better solution, and certainly more effective, than bloodshed...
...The party's platform was at the root of the problem...
...Then again, neither can the army...
...It was five days before last winter's general elections in Turkey, and rumor had it the pro-Kurdish People's Labor party (HADEP) was coming to town...
...This way if something happens we can round up suspects more easily...
...Yet again, the rebels were left as the only force fighting for Kurdish rights...
...It wasn't that the PKK got weaker—there is no dearth of volunteers—but civilians grew weary of aiding them...
...The PKK is also tiring of the guerrilla war...
...Nobody is safe from Turkish law...
...But few talk of the Kurds as Kurds...
...The PKK managed to evade the crackdown...
...What was a shock was that the Islamists came in first nationwide, albeit with 21 percent...
...Since World War I, when the western allied powers tried to carve up the remains of the Ottoman Empire, Turks have been wary of claims on their territory...
...Second, there is the issue of human rights...
...We find that videotaping people is useful," said the genial policeman assigned to check my moves...
...Consider the first coalition that came out of elections (it collapsed in June...
...The guerrillas retreated to hitandrun attacks from the mountains...
...Perhaps two million people have been made refugees in their own country...
...It managed to win twenty-three seats in the region, but failed to garner 10 percent of the national vote to qualify for Parliament...
...Others felt it was too dangerous to leave the main roads...
...It would have to do away with laws that ban ethnic-based political parties...
...With only 21 percent of the vote, it would need a coalition partner to govern, leaving it dependent on the other party's views...
...The government had few liberals in it...
...To succeed there, Turkey would have to lift restrictions on freedom of expression...
...There was no dearth of bordering countries interested in backing a group that could destabilize Turkey...
...Unluckily, there were also non-Turks in Turkey...
...The heady days of the early 1990s, when the rebels could move freely in various cities, are finished...
...He runs a tight, Stalin-inspired force that kills Turkish teachers, families of the state-paid Kurdish militia and so-called traitors with impunity...
...But they are tired of the point being made from the barrel of an AK-47...
...Those who did make it to their potential voters regretted it later, after security forces warned people that a vote for HADEP meant that the village would be burned down...
...The real problem, though, is Turkey...
...This worked well, up to a point...
...Its thirteen deputies were kicked out of Parliament and the seven who did not flee abroad were tried for alleged links to the rebels...
...So just make reforms, Ocalan says, and allow the Kurds to be Kurds...
...q SUMMER • 1996 • 107...
...The guerrillas get their backing because people are tired of being oppressed— and because nonviolent opposition to government policies is banned...
...Ankara says all citizens are equal, but only Turks (and foreigners) have the right to study in their mother tongue...
...Such changes are never easy—certainly not in a country built on the mythology that all its citizens are Turks...
...In other words, it could try democracy and respect for human rights...
...It did have many hawks, including the former general chief of staff, the former governor for emergency rule in the southeast, and the former Istanbul police chief—who last year publicly threatened the government minister for human rights...
...When the republic was founded in 1923, Kemal Ataturk (which means father of the Turks) laid great weight on the Turkish "national identity" in order to hold the country together...
...Although abuses like torture and mysterious killings occur throughout the country, everything is much worse in the southeast...
...The Welfare party also capitalized on Kurdish discontent...
...Nor does this mean they think the rebels can be ignored...
...The Turks are undecided about what to do with the Kurds, who have been in a state of unrest since the republic was founded in 1923...
...The Kurdish problem is, first and foremost, that Kurds want to be Kurds...
...It wasn't hard...
...Some 2,500 villages—about 20 percent of the region's settlements— lie empty, usually because security personnel forced the people out...
...The cameras rolled when police pulled me out of the car and checked my bags, my body, and my press card...
...Those who did not flee their villages made it clear to the rebels that they were no longer welcome...
...So are PKK promises to "liberate" the Kurdish southeast...
...Perhaps its greatest competition among Kurds came from the proIslamic Welfare party, which said the army could be replaced by an Islamic brotherhood that would treat all citizens equally as long as they were Muslims (which most Kurds are...
...Strict restrictions on freedom of expression make most discussion—that is, talk contrary to Ankara's position—against the law...
...Ankara could give them a hand...
...And I was put on trial last fall for a Reuters article that described soldiers throwing Kurds out of their villages...
...The mili106 • DISSENT Turkey, the Kurds, and Human Rights tary rulers of 1980-1983 (the third coup in as many decades) quickly did away with all this by banning everything and arresting hundreds of thousands...
...HADEP had no real chance...
...In a free Turkey, the rebels would be no match for the politicians...
...The European Parliament almost turned down the customs union with Ankara last year because of human rights abuses...
...They want the right to have Kurdish-language television and radio broadcasts, Kurdish-language education, and to have their folklore recognized as distinctly Kurdish...
...Huge swaths of the southeast are now kept empty...
...Finally it is a question of political structure—will Kurds accept a unitary state, or do they want autonomy, a federation, or even independence...
...The papers and groups were shut down and the leaders put on trial...
...This does not mean these Kurds don't like the idea of independence, or a new type of gov7 ernment that would give Kurds autonomy in the southeast...
...The overwhelming military superiority of the Turkish army—coupled with ruthless methods—has shown that the rebels cannot win on the battlefield...
...Giving bread to the rebels was an easy way to end up in prison or dead...
...After several uprisings between 1925 and 1938 were crushed, Kurdish activists tried alternative newspapers and cultural groups...
...Various European leaders have called on Turkey to ease up limits on freedom of expression...
...Right now he would like nothing more than to negotiate with Ankara...
...Thousands of activists, among them leading businessmen, lawyers, journalists, and local officials, have been mysteriously murdered...
...A Welfare coalition would not want to raise the ire of the army, and the army is more interested in new weaponry than Kurdish reform...
...But it could make them superfluous...
...And the other parties...
...Ankara isn't interested, so he says: no problem, talk to other Kurdish groups...
...Unfortunately, the Kurds discovered that the political arena was a closed one...
...The regime says Kurds can play their own music, but try to apply for a spot in a state cultural festival as a Kurdish music group...
...The new government has also promised to lift the state of emergency in the region...
...Police could be prosecuted for torture (although some say this might leave the country short of policemen) and soldiers could be punished for opening fire on villages...
...This was probably good news for the PKK, which started to lose active support two years ago when then-Premier Tansu Ciller gave the army a free hand to sweep the region...
...Some were put off by the rooftop marksmen...
...Kurds preferred 104 • DISSENT Turkey, the Kurds, and Human Rights Welfare to the other parties precisely because it is not obsessed with Turkish nationalism and because the southeast is still a stronghold of traditional Islam...
...And candidates were not keen on going out to meet their constituents...
...It was not exactly a lively campaign in the southeast, where separatist Kurdish rebels have been battling Turkish soldiers...
...To be even more effective, it could fund Kurdish cultural programs and permit Kurdish-language education...
...And so the Kurdish problem, which exploded anew in 1984 when the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) started fighting for control of the southeast, was again relegated domestically to the occasional think-piece by a newspaper columnist and the faxed complaints of human rights monitors...
...State Department (Washington supplies most of the army's major hardware) says that serious human rights violations are occurring in the southeast, where at least twenty thousand people have died since the PKK took up arms...
...This would not get rid of the PKK...
...Inside Cizre, a city of squat, dirty concrete buildings, there didn't appear to be many potential suspects around...
...Columnist Ahmet Altan received a suspended sentence for a satire imagining that Ataturk, the revered founder of the republic, had been a Kurd and it was Turks who were oppressed...
...Most everyone had cleared off the streets when special forces with black masks over their faces took up position on rooftops...
...They did well for all the classic reasons: people were tired of the ruling parties' unkept promises to fix the staggering economy...
...They would like to talk about it...
...Like every other government, the coalition had promised to make changes in the southeast...
...But they don't know what to do...
...It was the chance to throw their lot into the legal, democratic arena—again...
...Hence the group's close ties with Syria and, at various times, Iran, Iraq, and the former Soviet Union...
...Kurds who did not vote for HADEP by and large voted for the Islamists...
...If Kurds needed another sign, it came during the first cabinet meeting, when ministers voted to extend the state of emergency in the southeast...
...But of course there aren't any...
...With its calls for equal rights for Kurds as a separate ethnic group and its complaints about massive human rights abuses by security forces against civilians in the region, it was downright revolutionary...
...Mainstream Turkish political parties were still wavering over whether or not to admit that there is a Kurdish ethnic group in Turkey—or whether this question matters...
...Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader, is not a man to be admired...
...Welfare is the one party that has not been part of any government since the end of the last period of military rule (1980-1983...
...By the 1970s, the leftist fashion for armed revolution had spread to the Kurds...
...Some have shed the traditional MarxistLeninist outlook that long marked opposition to the state and they shy away from an organization that still speaks of socialist revolution...
...Not that these steps alone would end the rebels' monopoly on the Kurdish problem...
...Among the most celebrated recent cases was the conviction of Yasar Kemal, perhaps the country's most famous author, who accused Turkey of both abusing Kurds and lying about it...
...Still, the issue is not so much what is happening outside the country, but what is going on inside...
...The party could thus honestly say it was not responsible for repressive policies toward the Kurds...
...It wasn't until the late 1960s that a Turkish party (in this case, the Socialist party) recognized something called the Kurdish problem...
...The new regime confronted this fact by promulgating laws that equated expressions of Kurdish ethnic identity with attempts to overthrow the state...
...We started at soccer games and now we want to do it all the time...
...Turkey insists that the Kurds are unhappy because of the region's poverty— but of course there are lots of impoverished areas that have not risen up against the state...
...Behind me was a mile-long line of cars waiting to go through the same process...
...It's something promised for years—and it's open to debate what this would mean in practical terms—but it would be a sign of confidence...
...Clashes have declined, but troop numbers have stayed the same...
...The government says there is no oppression, but tell that to someone who just spent a year in prison for writing that the Kurds are oppressed...
...This is one reason why the December elections were so important to Kurds...
...Even the U.S...
...They also think the rebel war is backfiring...
...Mainstream newspapers usually figure it's safer to ignore the issue than face being labeled a traitor...
...Some Turks talk of "our citizens of Kurdish origin," others refer to the need for "first-class treatment" to those who feel "second-class," and almost everyone speaks of "terrorism...
...The party later reconstituted itself as HADEP...
...For years there has been talk in Turkey of devolving power to local authorities, meaning that teachers, state health workers and other officials would be appointed by provinces instead of by Ankara...
...They also got a boost from Ankara: by banning all Kurdish organizations, Turkey established the PKK as the leading—that is, the only—Kurdish organization...
...Welfare had set up an enviable social welfare network and Islamist mayors were said not to wallow in corruption...
...Conservative party leader Mesut Yilmaz joined up with former Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, a darling of the West who last year convinced Europe that Turkey's human rights record should not prevent it from joining a customs union with the European Union...
...In power, though, it might not act much different from previous governments...
...There's also the army, which is traditionally suspicious of a whiff of Islam in politics — and is known for staging coups when it feels its vision of Turkey is under threat (there were three between 1960 and 1980...
...For all the talk of the rebels, the issue is not the PKK alone...
...Security forces were not keen on the pro-Kurdish party, which was favored to sweep the region in the December vote for Parliament...
...The response is silence...
...But in Turkey deeds often fall far short of promises...
...Journalists who step out of bounds sometimes have their copy changed...
...It's the best way to keep the rebels out...
...Properly implemented, this would give Kurds some responsibility for their own affairs...
...When they swept, they took a lot of people and villages with them...
...For added security, armored personnel carriers had blocked off side streets...
...But Kurdish frustration with the PKK is mounting...
...It's really no surprise that most people are silent...
...This was not such a shock considering that Kurds make up perhaps 15 percent of Turkey's sixty million people (the country does not collect statistics on its minorities...
...Traditional Kurdish village life has been decimated and leading Kurdish activists have been killed (usually by forces that get at least passive backing from the security apparatus...
...Those who still dare are put on trial...
...People have been put on trial for saying Turkey oppresses the Kurds, for interviewing PKK rebels, for saying the Kurds should have an independent state, and for writing about army abuses against civilians...
...Twelve years of the rebel SUMMER • 1996 • 105 Turkey, the Kurds, and Human Rights war had worn down many Kurds...
Vol. 43 • July 1996 • No. 3
