TURKEY CAN’T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS
By: Kamal Dib
[IST01_SYRIA-CRISIS-_1013_11.jpg] Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul (R)
receives UN-Arab League peace envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi in
Istanbul 13 October 2012. (Photo: Reuters – Mustafa Oztartan)
Published Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Despite claiming to be a democratic model for the Islamic world –
and being held up by the US as the exemplary Israel-friendly Muslim
state which the “Arab Winter” countries should emulate – Turkey has
a bleak history with its ethnic minorities.
In the 20th century it committed massacres against the Armenians,
killing a million people, and the Assyrians, whose civilization had
survived for more than two thousand years in Mardin, Kilis, Nuseybin
and Antep. They were expelled or murdered, and hundreds of thousands
were forced to flee to Syria and Lebanon. There are still elderly
Assyrians living in Canada today who can give credible eyewitness
accounts of the horrors inflicted on the areas of southern Turkey
they used to inhabit.
As the Turkish government sees it, any voice or activity that diverts
attention away from Syria must be stifled, because breaking Syria’s
back is the key to assuming leadership of the region.Today, it is
the Kurdish Question which most continues to irk extreme Turkish
nationalists. Constituting between 20 and 25 percent of the population
of Turkey, the Kurds are too numerous to be treated as an alien
minority and eliminated as the Armenians and Assyrians were.
But “democratic” Turkey’s attitude towards them, especially in the
east of the country, differs little from “democratic” Israel’s attitude
to the Palestinians in the 1948 areas and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Erdogan government’s neglect of the Kurdish Question has two
principal causes.
The first is historic. The ruling authorities in Ankara, of whatever
stripe, have treated the Kurds with high-handedness and a sense of
racial superiority ever since the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. This
was the case in secularist Kemalist days (Ataturk insisted the Kurds
did not exist, but were “Mountain Turks”) and it remained so under
the generals, and after the rise of today’s “Islamic centrists” who
treat Kurdish activism as terrorism which threatens national security,
and respond to it with military crackdowns.
The second reason for neglecting the Kurdish Question is that it
weakens Turkey’s prestige while the country is trying to lead the
region towards a “moderate peace” in line with US global policy. In
Erdogan’s view, this is not the time for the Kurds to be stirring –
not that he or any Turkish leader before him ever thought there was
a right time for the Kurds to stir.
As the Turkish government sees it, any voice or activity that diverts
attention away from Syria must be stifled, because breaking Syria’s
back is the key to assuming leadership of the region. Ankara has
been active in broader international media and diplomatic efforts
to suppress or forestall problems elsewhere in the world that could
reduce the focus on Syria, interceding with a variety of other
governments to that ends (for example, urging Israel to temporarily
ease its repression and persecution of the Palestinians, or trying
to reconcile North and South Sudan).
With Syria taking up most of the Ankara government’s time, it was
bound to portray any domestic troubles inside Turkey, especially
relating to the Kurds, as being linked to Syria. But that is a myth.
The fact is that there is an organic link between Turkey’s treatment
of its Kurds, and its ability to continue serving as a model of an
Islamic democracy with a rising economy. It is the Kurdish time-bomb
that threatens Turkey’s future. The Syrian factor can be controlled
merely by ceasing to interfere in Syrian affairs.
The areas of Syria adjoining Turkey gained much from the rapprochement
between the two countries in recent years. But now they have been
economically paralysed, and turned into a gathering-ground for fighters
from around the world, including extremist groups like al-Qaeda and
others, exploited by Turkish Islamist extremists. More than 100,000
gunmen have crossed into Syria, while concentrations of Syrian refugees
have built up in the border areas.
There is an organic link between Turkey’s treatment of its Kurds, and
its ability to continue serving as a model of an Islamic democracy
with a rising economy.The Kurdish Question has been a fact of life
for over a century in Turkey, as in the other states of the region
between which the Kurds are distributed. The Turkish government cannot
continue ignoring the domestic ethnic and sectarian factors at play
within its own territory, and act as though the Turkish Republic is
a mono-sectarian and mono-ethnic country.
Yet until today, under a false cloak of democracy, repression has
the upper hand in Turkey. The Turkish army invades Kurdish districts,
blows up houses and kills hundreds of people, and conquers adjoining
border areas in Iraq and Syria – with barely a passing mention made
by the international media, whose ethics prompt them only to espouse
those causes that serve neo-liberal hegemony.
In Istanbul, journalists, writers, and dissidents are arrested for
writing articles about the Kurds or Armenians. Even Nobel laureate
Orhan Pamuk fled the country after an article on the massacres of
Armenians. One publisher was jailed for two years for printing a
translated book that referred to the slaughter of Kurds in the 1990s
with the blessing of the Clinton administration. Every Turk – Kurdish
or otherwise – who is aware of what is happening in the Kurdish areas
advises you to watch the films of the Kurdish director Yilmaz Gunay,
who is exiled in Europe. They depict daily sufferings in southeastern
Turkey similar to those experienced by Palestinians in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip.
A self-professed champion of the Palestinian cause cannot also be
Israel’s chief ally in the region, and an avowed supporter of the
“Arab Spring” ought to treat people fairly within its own borders and
allow them to exercise their rights and liberties. The Kurdish people
are a nation with an ancient civilization, language and culture,
and a right to freedom and self-determination.
Kamal Dib is a Lebanese-Canadian author and economist.
http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/12999/