Turkish Forum

Tag: Kurds in Turkey

  • What Do the Kurds Think?

    What Do the Kurds Think?

    by Yigal Schleifer

    The European Council on Foreign Relations recently released an interesting study called “What Does Turkey Think?”, which consists of several essays by prominent Turkish analysts who take a look at key keys issues facing Turkey foreign and domestic policy. The whole study is worth reading, but I found an article written by Osman Baydemir, the Kurdish mayor of Diyarbakir, particularly interesting — especially in light of recent events.

    Baydemir is a member of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, which was able to get 36 of its members into parliament following Turkey’s recent elections. The party, though, is refusing to take parliament’s membership oath because several of its MP’s are currently in jail awaiting trial on terror-related charges and the courts are refusing to release them.

    Although Baydemir’s article came out before the election, it sheds light on how the BDP looks at Turkish politics and what animates its own politics. From his piece:

    For those who are not in power, there is little democracy. There is no legal protection for workers whose factories are closed down, for women who are murdered by their husbands, and for children given 100-year jail sentences for throwing stones at armed policemen, or for regions in which the natural environment has been destroyed. The most significant cause of insecurity is the fact that, from the day it was founded, the republic has been informed by a belief that “the people do not know what is best for them, but we do”. This has shaped efforts to modernise and then democratise society from the top down, using radical methods to realise an exclusionist enlightenment mission.

    This top-down approach to democracy has simply been passed down from republican elites to the AKP. Like its predecessor, the AKP government asserts that “we know best”. People have an impression that the AKP represents a soft form of liberal piety because it stood for change and shows respect to women who do not wear the headscarf and nominates them for candidacy. However, the AKP government’s practices are very much at odds with its democratic image. Many now believe that the party is driven by authoritarian thinking. By winning a parliamentary majority, the AKP aims to establish full hegemony, which entitles it to the discretionary use of power. The AKP’s position in the new constitutional debate as and on constitutional amendments passed in parliament cannot be seen as democratic.

    A fundamental principle of democracy is recognition of “the other”. The party’s support of the 10 percent electoral threshold, which prevents the formation of coalition governments and means that the will of the people – foremost of the Kurds – is not fairly reflected in parliament. Prime Minister Erdoğan believes neither in the essence of democracy nor in elections but above all in the principle of subordination. The presidential system he pursues fosters this culture of submissivene

    via Turkey: What Do the Kurds Think? | EurasiaNet.org.

    The full article can be found here.

  • Turkish democracy can rise to the Kurdish challenge

    Turkish democracy can rise to the Kurdish challenge

    Turkish democracy can rise to the Kurdish challenge

    With a new civilian constitution, Turkey may be able to show the world that full democracy is possible in an Islamic country

    Yavuz Baydar
    guardian.co.uk

    A Kurd throws a molotov coktail during a clash with riot police in Istanbul on the anniversary of the capture of Abdullah Ocalan. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images
    A Kurd throws a molotov coktail during a clash with riot police in Istanbul on the anniversary of the capture of Abdullah Ocalan. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

    Kurdish demonstrators throw molotov coktails

    A Kurd throws a molotov coktail during a clash with riot police in Istanbul on the anniversary of the capture of Abdullah Ocalan. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

    Last Sunday’s elections in Turkey, won with a sweeping victory by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party, brought the country much closer to conclusively tackling two major challenges: finding a solution to the chronic, and traumatic, Kurdish conflict; and replacing the restrictive constitution with a new, civilian one.

    With an 88% turnout, the voters managed to shape a parliament where the female deputy rate increased to 15%, comparable to France and the US Congress. This means the conditions are now ripe for facing these challenges, and completing what can be called the “deepening of democratisation” – the final phase of a process strongly influenced by negotiation with the European Union.

    But there have been two winners of the elections, not one. The AK party consolidated its power base, but the Kurdish “independent” candidate list, in effect representing the BDP – the political wing of the PKK – almost doubled its seats (from 20 to 36).

    It is apparent that both challenges require fair play from both sides: AK enjoys massive public confidence as a key player in the transformation of Turkey, and the driver of the transition to democracy. Clearly, the very existence of the Kurdish conflict, involving in varying degrees some 14 million Kurds in the country, is a powerful reminder of the inevitability of a new constitution, since the current one is in full denial of their existence and demands. So after the elections Turkey will be watching an interesting tango for two, with an extremely difficult choreography.

    In order to understand the picture let us look closer at these two winners.

    The AK party – with a clear identity as “post-Islamist”, and a globalist-pragmatist coalition around it – is now the choice of every second voter. No other party in Turkish history has managed to stay in power three times in a row, let alone increasing its vote, as it did on Sunday by 25%. Remarkable success indeed.

    The Kurdish “independent” list managed to turn the elections into a choice between voting for the list of its radical demands (linked with Kurdish identity and collective rights) and voting for what it sees as “parties of the system”. Although it could not raise its vote, it stands solid as an interlocutor of the former. Results show that the Kurdish vote in the country was shared almost 50:50 between AK and BDP.

    Communication between the two parties are now vital if a peaceful solution is to be found – by no means an easy task. It will involve tough issues such as a ceasefire with PKK fighters (some 7,000 in the mountains of Turkey and Iraq), disarmament, a general amnesty and, certainly, placing Abdullah Ocalan – the jailed PKK leader – under house arrest.

    That will have to go hand in hand with the main challenge facing the victorious AK party: a new constitution. The parts of this constitution hardest for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the victorious prime minister, to “sell” to the Turkish majority will be those dealing with language, education, citizenship and decentralisation. Although the BDP sounds uncompromising in its demands on the language and citizenship, many Kurds say they would be happy with a draft that does not inject their identity into it, so long as it does not refer to any nationalism.

    The hardest task, however, will be to design a model for decentralisation of power, a necessity for today’s Turkey. But what model should be used? Germany, Canada, Spain? Nobody seems to know, and for the public this is a very sensitive area. The gap between Kurds and Turks threatens to widen on this hot issue.

    If there is common will in the new parliament for replacing the constitution, the country will finally be able to liberate itself from the chains of the military coup of 1980. This step is a precondition for Turkey to become part of the EU as a full member, as well as a true model for the entire Arab world, struggling for a free order with an eye fixed upon Turkey.

    In essence, it is also what this election was about: showing the world that a fully fledged democracy, free from internal conflicts, is possible in an Islamic country – given that the tranquil, pious masses are “left alone”, free from the mechanisms of tutelage or tyranny.

    via Turkish democracy can rise to the Kurdish challenge | Yavuz Baydar | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

  • Turkey’s Kurds Slowly Build Cultural Autonomy

    Turkey’s Kurds Slowly Build Cultural Autonomy

    A BALEFUL love song wafted from the Vizyon Muzik Market. Not so long ago playing Kurdish music over a loudspeaker into the streets here might have provoked the Turkish police. Just speaking the names of certain Kurdish singers at one time could have landed a Kurd in prison.

    kurds

    These days hundreds of CDs featuring Kurdish pop singers fill one of the long walls in the small, shoebox-shaped Vizyon Muzik. The discs face a few dozen Turkish ones. Abdulvahap Ciftci, the 25-year-old Kurd who runs the place, told me one sunny morning not long ago that customers buy some 250 Kurdish albums a week. “And maybe I sell one Turkish album,” he calculated, wagging a single finger, slowly. “Maybe.”

    Turkey is holding elections in a few days. For months pro-Kurdish activists have been staging rallies that during recent weeks have increasingly turned into violent confrontations with the police in this heavily Kurdish region of the southeast. Capitalizing on the Arab Spring and the general state of turmoil in that part of the world, as well as on Turkey’s vocal support for Egyptian reformers, the Kurds here have been looking toward elections to press longstanding claims for broader parliamentary representation and more freedoms, political and cultural.

    Not that there’s ever much difference between politics and culture for this country’s Kurds. Since the 1920s, when Turkey started forcibly assimilating its Kurds, roughly 20 percent of the population, in a struggle to forge a nation-state out of the broken remnants of the Ottoman Empire, they have resisted. Since the mid-1980s tens of thousands on both sides have died. This must now be the world’s longest bloody conflict.

    In March a Turkish movie, “Press,” opened in Istanbul, recounting the torture and killing of dozens of investigative journalists working for Ozgur Gundem, a newspaper here at the epicenter of the Kurdish struggle. More than 75 of its employees were killed from 1992 to 1994, when the paper was shut down by the government. Only just recently it went back into print. Still, the movie’s 38-year-old director, Sedat Yilmaz, told me recently, the police wanted to make sure he used fake copies of Ozgur Gundem, not real ones.

    “It is now at least possible to talk about issues a little more openly,” Mr. Yilmaz said. We spoke over a din at the film’s opening in a basement theater in Istanbul, amid a crush of young Turks engulfed, as usual, in a thick nimbus of blue cigarette smoke. “The best way to do this is through films and plays and music, which is finally starting to happen.” At the Istanbul International film festival in April “Press” won the Turkish equivalent of an Oscar for its exploration of human rights abuses.

    But change comes slowly, incrementally, if at all here. Concessions by the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2009 made way for the first Kurdish national television station, and the government also permitted the teaching of Kurdish language classes in private universities (but not public ones). Token gestures, they made front-page headlines: first because they were signals to the outside world that a democratic state run by an Islamic leader will not automatically become xenophobic or tribalist, and second because even small steps toward acknowledging Kurdish culture can provoke political firestorms inside the country. Turkish nationalists raised a ruckus. Nationalists regard even the most basic Kurdish demand — that their language also be allowed in grade schools and at official settings where Kurds are involved — as treason.

    Turkish Kurds respond that increased cultural freedom only encourages their loyalty to the Turkish state. But in this deeply patriotic country, where sentiments are old and entrenched, Mr. Erdogan’s government, guarding its tenuous majority in Parliament on the verge of the elections, has assumed a more and more hawkish line lately. The arrests of large numbers of Kurdish political activists have fed the Kurds’ concern that the government never really had true democracy in mind for them but just cooked up some window dressing for Western consumption. Recent clashes in this city between the police and hundreds of protesters attending the funerals of separatist militants proved how fragile the peace is in the region.

    via Turkey’s Kurds Slowly Build Cultural Autonomy – NYTimes.com.

  • Election Rhetoric Raises Tensions With Kurds

    Election Rhetoric Raises Tensions With Kurds

    By AYLA ALBAYRAK

    ISTANBUL—Election violence and political rhetoric increased tensions with the Kurdish minority in Turkey, as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused the main Kurdish political party of involvement in an attack on his campaign convoy.

    At election rallies Thursday ahead of the June 12 poll, Mr. Erdogan described members of the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, or BDP, as “subcontractors” for Kurdish terrorists he said were responsible for the ambush.

    Mr. Erdogan’s broadside followed an attack Wednesday on his bus and its police escort by a group armed with guns and a grenade as the convoy was returning to Ankara from a rally in Kastomonu in the Black Sea region. One policeman was killed and another is in critical condition. Reports said the attack seemed to target only the security detail.

    The prime minister wasn’t in the convoy, having been flown by helicopter from the rally. No one has taken responsibility for the assault.

    The attack, and allegations of Kurdish involvement, have hit a sensitive area in Turkish politics and could shift some voters toward more nationalist parties on both sides, analysts said.

    Media speculation on who was responsible for the attack focused on the militant Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, after the BDP failed to condemn the ambush, which appears to have triggered Mr. Erdogan’s comments.

    On Thursday, Erdogan Bektas, governor of the region where the ambush took place, said an initial assessment suggested the attackers weren’t aware of any campaign buses and were targeting police.

    Mr. Bektas said in an interview by telephone taht a group of five or six people “acting in the name of the PKK,” appears to have been responsible. He declined to clarify his statement.

    Kurdish political leaders and parliamentary candidates convened an emergency meeting Thursday in Diyarbakir, the main city in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, to discuss a response to the prime minister. Speaking by telephone, Kurdish election candidate Aysel Tugluk said that some participants called for an election boycott, but that there would be no immediate decision.

    Last month, a decision by Turkey’s election commission to disqualify seven Kurdish candidates triggered streets riots and a tough police response in cities across the southeast and in Istanbul. The election commission later reinstated all but one of the candidates.

    “Acts of violence, together with these attacks, and the protests staged in the east, the southeast and in big cities, are not a coincidence,” Mr. Erdogan said in a speech in Osmaniye, in southern Turkey.

    “This is not the way to rights and freedoms,” he added. “On the 12th of June, there will be elections, take your rights and freedoms at the ballots.”

    The PKK has fought an insurgency against Turkish security forces since 1984. The fighting has claimed some 30,000 to 40,000 lives, but in recent years had subsided to a lower level conflict as both sides made overtures aimed at moving toward political solutions to the conflict.

    Those efforts have stalled. Earlier this year, the PKK said it was ending a unilateral cease-fire. More than150 Kurdish officials are on trial charged with supporting terrorists, and in recent weeks there have been escalating skirmishes between Turkish security forces and PKK militants.

    “If the tension goes on like this, I don’t see how we can hold elections in Dyarbakir. Yesterday there was a funeral for four PKK members and banks shut their doors in the city,” said veteran Kurdish journalist Bayram Balci. Mr. Balci said he didn’t believe the PKK were responsible for the attack as they hadn’t claimed responsibility.

    via Election Rhetoric Raises Tensions With Kurds – WSJ.com.

  • Kurdish Jewish History Arrives In Baltimore

    Kurdish Jewish History Arrives In Baltimore

    Kurdish-Jewish history preserved by author and son of an immigrant.

    Rochelle Eisenberg
    Staff Writer

    ariel-sabar

    When Ariel Sabar was growing up in Los Angeles, he was embarrassed by the exotic ways of his immigrant Kurdish-Jewish father, Dr. Yona Sabar. Dr. Sabar, a professor of Aramaic at the University of California-Los Angeles, was born and raised in the remote northern Iraqi village of Zakho.

    Years later, Mr. Sabar decided to travel to Zakho with his father. The result is “My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search For His Jewish Past In Kurdish Iraq” (Algonquin Books), winner of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.

    Next Thursday, May 7, at 7 p.m., Mr. Sabar will speak at the Center for Jewish Education, at 5750 Park Heights Ave., about his book as part of CJE’s “On The Same Page” initiative. The program was piloted two years to bring together Jewish adults to discuss books with Jewish themes.

    The BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES spoke recently with Mr. Sabar. He worked as a journalist for 15 years, including three years as an investigative reporter at the Baltimore Sun.

    Why did you write the book?

    I was the consummate 1980s L.A. boy. I bought into the L.A. mythology. I boogie-boarded, bought my clothing at a surf shop. As I saw it through a boy’s eyes, my dad didn’t fit in. He didn’t know how to dress, he cut his own hair. I kept him at arm’s length

    The turning point in my life was the birth of my own son, Seth, in 2002. When you have your own kid, it changes your perspective of your relationship with your parents. I felt I was unfair to my own father.

    I also was drawn to the story about a forgotten-but-ancient group of Jews who were part of the oldest community of the Diaspora.

    What was your biggest surprise in Zakho?

    I heard that in Kurdistan (sic), the Jews and Muslims got along. I always was skeptical.

    People knew immediately we were Jews. The first thing the hosts said was, “Welcome to your home.” They invited us to drink tea and eat elaborate meals. There were still fond memories of Jewish life.

    Saddam Hussein tried to rename the Jewish quarter “the Liberated Quarter.” He didn’t want a trace. [After Saddam’s overthrow], my dad’s hometown went back to calling it “the Jewish Quarter.”

    What do you see as disheartening today between Jews and Muslims?

    People look at Iraq and read the headlines. There is this assumption that this was always the way, that they hated each other all the time. The story of the Kurdish Jews and the Jews in Iraq was that when the Israelites were exiled, they formed a pretty good pluralistic society. There were problems, but nothing of the scale of what was seen in Europe.

    What can American Jews learn from the history of the Kurdish Jews?

    What we can take away is the value of reaffirming our ties to our families’ histories. One of the themes of the book is that in the face of so much change, what can we hold on to? Make an effort to talk to grandparents, write down or video their stories and discus what it is about the past you want to preserve.

    Any stories from people you met on your book tours?

    Once or twice, a father of Mideastern background, in one case an Iraqi and in one case even a Kurdish Jew, said to me, “Now I have something to pass on to my child.”

    One son said, “I had no idea I had this history. I didn’t realize we had a rich past.”

    What also came out of the book tour were documents and memoirs that were given to me. I’ve became a repository of Kurdish Jews. I hope to maintain the e-mails and documents that people sent to me.

    What’s your next project?

    It was inspired by the story of how my parents met. My father was in his first year in New York and thinking of going back to Israel. America was not what it seemed. He sees a woman entering Washington Square park, taking photos of people who didn’t succeed in America. It reminded him of the Kurds in Israel. He talked to her and they got married four months later.

    I want to find other stories of people with strikingly different backgrounds, who happen to meet by chance in New York iconic public places.

    Anything else?

    A big Iraqi magazine wrote a four-page spread on the book. I have made friends on Facebook with Kurds in Turkey. An Arab radio station did a piece. The book is being translated into Hebrew, to be published later this year or early next year, and the Dutch have bought the rights to the book. You see the way the book is being received by all three faiths. It’s an affirmation.

    Source:  www.jewishtimes.com, May 1, 2009