The enduring frustration of Turkey’s Kurds
Posted By Noah Blaser Friday, October 4, 2013 – 11:37 AM
“After these years of killings, what else can people feel but
distrust?” asked rights campaigner Raci Bilici, who was trying to make
himself heard over the rumble of a military helicopter flying low
across the sky.
The ancient walls of Diyarbakir, the unofficial capital of Turkey’s
Kurdish separatist movement, loomed overhead as Bilici traced the mass
grave of 29 murdered political prisoners that were found here just one
year ago. “So much has changed for the better, but this is still a
city where nobody wants to know what is buried under their feet.”
Hemmed in by military bases and patrolled by rock-battered armored
cars, Diyarbakir is supposed to be a city moving toward peace. This
week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced a reform
package aimed at expanding rights for the country’s 15-million Kurds,
billing the measure as a step toward ending a 30-year ethnic conflict
that has taken at least 40,000 lives and devastated the country’s
southeast.
The reform, he declared on Monday, will legalize Kurdish-language
education in private, though not public, schools. It will provide
state funding for smaller — read Kurdish — political parties and
lift a ban on the letters q, w, and x — letters essential to Kurdish
that Ankara “banished from the alphabet” in the 1920s. The reform will
meanwhile do away with the before-school oath “I am a Turk, I am hard
working,” which generations of Kurds were forced to recite during
primary school. Critically, Erdogan also promised a parliamentary
debate on changing an “election threshold” that hinders Kurdish
participation in the national legislature.
Those steps seemed far from an open hand in Diyarbakir, where
residents who had gathered to watch the reform announcement on TV
cleared out of cafes and restaurants in anger, widely decrying the
reforms as “empty.” “Who has the money for private school?” asked
father of six, Omer Koroglu. He said native tongue education — a
long-standing demand of Kurds — would remain unaffordable for most
residents in the widely impoverished city. Many dismissed hints of
inclusive electoral laws as a promise undelivered, while others noted
that Kurdish names and letters are already widely in use throughout
the southeast.
Kurds had expected more, especially after a historic cease-fire was
brokered earlier this year between Ankara and Abdullah Ocalan, the
imprisoned leader of the Kurdish Workers’ Parky (PKK). After a bloody
summer of fighting in 2012, Ocalan ordered the withdrawal of the PKK
to its base in northern Iraq, securing implicit promises from Ankara
that it would make reforms to help steer the conflict to a resolution.
Both sides want an end to three decades of fighting. Sinan Ulgen,
chairman of the Istanbul-based Center for Economics and Foreign Policy
Studies (EDAM), said that even if the PKK was dissatisfied with the
pace of reforms, “neither side wants to be the one who starts shooting
again.” Erdogan hinted at future reforms in his speech this week,
though Ulgen warned that advancing reforms piecemeal will see “the
Kurdish side getting frustrated and weary.”
Frustration goes hand in hand with anguished memories for residents of
Turkey’s southeast, where the government depopulated and razed over
4,000 villages in the 1990s, both sides deliberately abducted and
murdered civilians, and thousands of victims were hastily buried in
unmarked graves across the region.
Ankara’s security policy in the southeast is another pervasive source
of distrust, and many in Diyarbakir this week expected a softening of
internationally criticized terror laws that permit arbitrary arrests
and indefinite detentions. Many had also expected the release of some
political prisoners held by Ankara for years without charge.
“If you want to understand the power of the state,” offered Raci
Bilici, head of the Diyarbakir Rights Association (IHD) “you should be
asking me about my brother.” Bilici’s brother has been missing since
he joined the PKK in the 1990s, and last month, the government
published his name on a list of guerillas that declassified military
documents confirm were killed a decade ago. The tragedy, said Bilici,
is that “his and thousands of other bodies could be located in 24
hours” if the government questioned the police and military officials
that once fought the PKK and used brutal counter guerrilla tactics
against Kurdish civilians. But that would require the state to exhume
evidence of the very extra-judicial killings committed in its name —
when the 29 murdered prisoners were found by chance in Diyarbakir last
year, they were found beneath the trash dump of a former police
station. There is little doubt they were murdered by government
forces. “If I ask someone from the government if they know the
location of my brother’s body, they’ll say it is classified,” he said,
growing glassy-eyed. “That’s how the power of the state hangs on you.”
Security policies similarly strengthen perceptions of state impunity.
“If the terror are in place we’ll never be equal citizens. Imagine
sitting in a jail cell for months, knowing you could suddenly be
sentenced to 10 years in prison,” said Dicle University student Bedri
Oguz, who was arrested at a demonstration and detained for six months
without a charge filed against him. “Then one day, they simply said
‘you can go.’ Someone can always exercise power over our lives.”
Current terror laws allow police to equate attendance at political
rallies with membership in a terrorist organization, a policy that is
“totally divorced from democratic law,” said sociologist at Bogazici
University Nazan Ustundag.
Arrests aimed at stemming a government investigation into the Kurdish
Communities Union (KCK), a PKK-affiliated organization, have also
targeted scores of journalists, academics, and politicians. In many
cases, arrests have paralyzed local politics. Local administrators,
who already complain of having little power over Ankara-appointed
regional governors, complain of being arrested and replaced with
government-appointed officials. “It makes residents jaded about
trusting the political process at all,” said Abdullah Demirbas, the
pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) mayor of Diyarbakir’s
historic center. While serving as mayor in 2007, Demirbas was arrested
for publishing municipal announcements in Kurdish, Arabic, Armenian,
and Assyrian alongside Turkish, and jailed for five months.
Softening security policies or making otherwise conciliatory gestures
to Kurds is risky business for Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development
Party (AKP) government, however, because it relies on the country’s
nationalist voting bloc for much of its support. “The government will
almost certainly not be making major reforms in five months before the
next presidential elections,” said Ulgen. “Ankara knows that no side
wants to be the one who shoots first. It has time to stay away from
fast-paced reforms in order to keep voters satisfied.”
Bolder reforms will be needed to win over Rami Sarioglu, a cafe-going
pensioner in Diyarbakir who said his faith in the current government
was lost two years ago, when Turkish warplanes killed 35 Kurdish
civilians near the village of Uludere on the Iraqi border. Turkey’s
government apologized for the strike in early summer the following
year, but has maintained that it mistook the villagers for members of
the PKK. Kurds widely believe the government attacked the villagers
deliberately. “They wanted to say, we can still hit you,” said
Sarioglu.
The government missed one landmark chance to win Kurd’s trust earlier
this year, argued Ayla Demirci, whose husband was abducted during an
army raid on her village in 1996. Recently, the government sentenced
hundreds of military officers to jail for an alleged plot to forcibly
remove the AKP from power. But many of those same officers also served
in the southeast during the years of forced disappearances and state
terrorism. “They had the right people on trial, and they didn’t try to
get answers about what they did to us. They didn’t even try to give us
justice,” Ayla said.
The same could be said about the reform package, said university
student Bedri. Drafted by AKP officials behind closed doors, “it
wasn’t something Kurds had a say in,” he said. “We were supposed to
watch the TV to see how much democracy we won. That isn’t democracy.”
Standing in the shade of Diyarbakir’s hulking medieval walls, rights
campaigner Bilici suggested that, weary of war Turkey’s Kurds have
just one option left: continue to peaceably advocate for their rights.
“The state could help us, maybe they won’t,” he said. “Either way, I
want to find my brother.”
Noah Blaser @nblaser18 is a journalist based in Istanbul, Turkey.
http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/10/04/the_enduring_frustration_of_turkeys_kurds