TURKEY’S KURDS’ CRITICAL HUNGER STRIKE
POSTED BY JULIA HARTE
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 6
2012 – 3:26 PM
The last time Erkan Yildirim visited his imprisoned wife, Pervin,
she told him about her recent meeting with their colleague, Fatma.
“Pervin said Fatma was very sluggish, that her eyes were slowly
darkening, that two or three people had to bring her to and from the
bathroom,” says Yildirim, nearly choking on the words. At that time,
Fatma had been on a hunger strike for more than a month.
What his wife said next, however, was even more troubling. Pervin
informed Yildirim that she was about to begin her own indefinite
hunger strike.
Pervin and Fatma are two of the approximately 700 Kurdish prisoners
who are currently on hunger strikes across Turkey, though unofficial
estimates put the count closer to 1,000. Since September 12, when
64 prisoners in four provinces around Turkey began refusing their
regular rations, hundreds more have joined in waves, resulting in the
biggest hunger strike ever undertaken by Turkish Kurds. Most of the
striking detainees are in prison on disputed charges of supporting
the outlawed Union of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK), but they come
from a wide range of backgrounds: journalists, college students,
teachers, accountants, lawyers, mayors, and even two elected members
of parliament.
The prisoners’ demands concern two flashpoints of the Kurdish struggle
in Turkey, though the exact demands — and their order of importance
— vary from source to source. The strikers want the government to
allow Kurdish-language education and court defenses, to enter peace
negotiations with imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, and to
allow Ocalan’s relatives and lawyers, who haven’t met with him in over
a year, to visit him and ensure that his living conditions are humane.
Entering peace negotiations with Ocalan is the most critical demand of
the strikers, according to Ramazan Demir, a lawyer in Istanbul whose
firm represents approximately 50 of the inmates on strike. But while
the Kurdish-language rights and Ocalan visits seem more likely to
be granted, negotiating with Ocalan remains anathema to the Turkish
government. Ocalan co-founded the militant Kurdistan Workers Party
(PKK) more than 30 years ago, and in 1984 led it into armed, separatist
conflict against the Turkish government: an ongoing war that annually
claims hundreds of deaths on both sides. Although he was imprisoned
in 1999, Ocalan still wields major influence over the PKK. Despite
the violence he incited, and that recent polls and reports suggest
most Kurds no longer want the fully independent state that Ocalan
advocated, many Kurds believe he is still key to ending the conflict.
Less controversial are the strikers’ calls for Kurdish-language
education and court defense, which Turkey’s 15 million Kurds, who
constitute one fifth of the population, have never been granted. Some
successes on the language front have been achieved, such as the launch
of Turkey’s first national Kurdish-language TV station in 2009 and
the inclusion of Kurdish in foreign language course offerings at some
Turkish universities. While much has been achieved since the 1980s,
when even speaking Kurdish publicly could be cause for arrest, many
Kurds still feel persecuted for asserting their own ethnic identity in
Turkey, citing the more than 8,000 imprisoned Kurds in Turkey, many
of whom have been arrested in what Human Rights Watch has termed “a
crackdown on legal pro-Kurdish politics” in Turkey.
The hunger strikes are a major move to achieve Kurdish rights and peace
negotiations after other efforts have failed. In 2009, Turkey’s ruling
Justice and Development Party (AKP) attempted a “Kurdish Opening” to
address the strikers’ issues, even secretively negotiating with Ocalan
for a short period. The public rapprochement campaign fell apart after
Turkey’s Constitution Court banned the country’s largest pro-Kurdish
political party in December 2009 and the PKK responded with an upsurge
in violence. Since the failure of those efforts, Turkey’s Kurds have
felt progressively more alienated from their government.
With the first group of strikers now approaching their 60th day
without food, many are vomiting blood, losing hearing and vision,
and nearing death, according to the Turkish Medical Association.
Amnesty International ordered Turkey to respect the prisoners’ rights
after hearing reports that strikers were being denied vitamins and
kept in isolated confinement.
Already, the government has offered some concessions. After a meeting
of the Turkish Council of Ministers on November 5, Deputy Prime
Minister Bulent Arinc announced that the government would prepare
legal reforms allowing court defenses in Kurdish. He also declared
that the justice ministry could allow Ocalan to meet with his lawyers,
although the lawyers say they are repeatedly denied access to the
island where Ocalan is imprisoned on the grounds that the boat there
has “broken down.”
No government spokesperson has addressed the demand for
Kurdish-language education, nor for negotiating peace with Ocalan.
Efforts to clarify the justice ministry’s response to the other
demands by calling for comment on this article produced no response.
What is obvious, from speaking to the analysts, lawyers, political
representatives, and relatives of the strikers, is that the hunger
strikes are pushing Turkey to a tipping point in its Kurdish policy.
The strikers will elicit a major reaction — either by achieving
their demands, or by martyring themselves to spur a larger protest.
“The political routes for achieving the demands of the hunger strikers
are closed,” says Koray Caliskan, professor of political science at
Istanbul’s Bosphorus University.
The strikers’ demands are still central to the agenda of the Kurdish
nationalist Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), which holds 29 of the
550 seats in Turkey’s parliament. “In the 21st century, Kurds in
Turkey still can’t educate themselves in their own language, can’t
defend themselves in their own language, can’t get health services
in their own language, and for this they’re bringing their bodies to
the brink of death,” says BDP deputy MP Sebahat Tuncel. “Turkey must
be ashamed of this.”
The ruling party, in the meantime, has issued a series of contradictory
statements about the hunger strikes: They aren’t happening at all;
They’re “just a show;” Hundreds of prisoners are spontaneously
quitting the strike; They’re being forced to strike by the BDP or
PKK. While in Germany recently, Erdogan declared that he’d seen
for himself that “no one is hungry, everyone’s eating” in Turkey’s
prisons. But simultaneously, in Turkey, Justice Minister Sadullah
Ergin announced the number of strikers to be 683.
At his party’s annual meeting on November 3, Erdogan also claimed that
the majority of Turks wanted the death penalty reinstated in Turkey
so that Ocalan could be executed. But two days later, Deputy Prime
Minister Arinc hastened to assure the public that bringing back the
death penalty was “not an issue our government wants to introduce
today.”
“They’re lying like children,” says Roni Sariyildiz, a student at
Istanbul Technical University whose older brother, Faysal Sariyildiz
is one of the imprisoned Kurdish MPs on a hunger strike. “It would be
very funny, but people are going to start dying each day from now on.”
As more inmates join the strike, Erdogan’s claim that the BDP is
“forcing” the inmates to starve themselves seems increasingly
far-fetched. BDP leaders flatly deny it: “It’s as if they’re trying
to render the demands meaningless, saying ‘some of them were forced
to start the hunger strike.’ But it wasn’t like that at all. These
people started striking of their own volition,” says Tuncel.
The gradual accumulation of strikers proves that they were not
organized by the PKK or the BDP, agrees Caliskan. “It was organized
individually, among inmates and through lawyers,” he explains.
The government can only stop the strikers by meeting their demands,
say their lawyers. “They told me that if anyone tries to stop them by
force-feeding, they will burn themselves,” says Demir, the Istanbul
lawyer.
According to Demir, allowing any of the strikers to die will cause
a “huge divide” between Turks and Kurds. Yildirim agrees. “If the
AKP government can’t answer those who are putting their bodies on
the line, Kurds will be at the point of splitting off from Turks,”
he says. Supporters have echoed this point in their protests over
the past week. As a girl was led to a police bus during a protest on
November 4, she shouted at them, “If you take me, I have six siblings
who will go to [join the PKK in] the mountains!”
Turkish organizations such as the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey
(TIHV) and the Human Rights Foundation (IHD), support the prisoners’
demands for the right to speak Kurdish in school and in court, and
for Ocalan’s lawyer and relatives to visit him and ensure his prison
conditions are humane.
“These are basic human rights issues,” says Metin Bakkalci, head of
TIHV. “We cannot say these are new demands, either, so we are already
very late in meeting them.” Turkey’s prison population has more
than doubled in the last six years, Bakkalci adds, which he believes
indicates the extent to which democratic rights “have been narrowed”
in the country.
Pervin and Fatma, for example, have been at Istanbul’s Bakirkoy Prison
for Women and Children since December 2011, when they were among 36
employees of the Dicle news agency (DIHA) taken away by police on
suspicion of belonging to the KCK. The raid was part of an ongoing
spate of journalist arrests in Turkey that the Committee to Protect
Journalists (CPJ) has termed “one of the world’s biggest crackdowns
on press freedom in recent history” in a recent report.
In the 10 months since their arrest, Pervin, Fatma, and their
colleagues have not been charged with a single crime — primarily
because they, like the thousands of other Kurds detained under the
KCK file, have not been allowed to give statements in their native
Kurdish. Because Kurds are not legally acknowledged as a minority
population within Turkey, their language is not protected like other
minority languages. In protest of this, most of the 8,000 Kurds behind
bars have refused to deliver their defenses until they can do so in
their mother tongue.
If an Armenian has a court hearing in Turkey, the court must provide a
translator. “But if someone tries to defend themselves in Kurdish in
court, they record it as, ‘the accused spoke an unknown language,'”
says Professor Caliskan. “The problem is assimilation.
The government has been partly successful in assimilating them: 40
to 45 percent of the Kurds would not pursue these demands, because
they’re able to forget their Kurdishness.”
Per the November 5 announcement, Turkey’s Law on Criminal Procedures
may soon be amended to require translators for Kurdish defendants.
But the strikers and their friends and family are not forgetting about
their other demands any time soon, and their supporters are taking
ever more urgent steps. After promising to “halt normal life” on
October 30, supporters all over Turkey took to the streets, frequently
clashing with police. Many shops, schools, and transit systems shut
down for the day in the predominantly Kurdish southeastern part of
the country. Protests continued through the week, with police using
tear gas and water cannons to disperse protesters in Istanbul on
Sunday, and hundreds of people gathering in Istanbul’s city center
each evening to raise awareness about the strikers.
Yildirim says he’s losing hope that the government will act soon to
stop the strike: “In this country, certain things won’t change until
people die.”
Even initial deaths may not elicit the desired reaction from the
government. Between 2000 and 2007, thousands of prisoners went on
hunger strikes to protest the conditions in isolation cells, and 122
died. When Turkish security forces tried to stop the strikes through
an intervention named “Operation Return to Life” at 20 prisons,
an additional 31 prisoners died. “In the last decade, I don’t know
of any place that’s had more hunger strikers, and deaths from hunger
strikes, than Turkey,” says Caliskan.
Julia Harte is a freelance reporter based in Istanbul.
From: A. Papazian
http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/11/06/kurdish_hunger_strike_pushes_turkey_toward_the_tipping_point