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Erdogan plays Palestinian saviour, but what about the Kurds?

Turkey’s prime minister is championing Abbas’s UN appeal – yet still has to resolve the Kurdish issue back home

Simon Tisdall · 21/09/2011 · guardian.co.uk

A Kurdish demonstration in Istanbul this month, calling for the release of the jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. Photograph: Tolga Bozoglu/EPA

Turkey’s noisy championing of Palestinian rights, a source of growing friction with the US and Israel, jars uncomfortably with Ankara’s treatment of its own disadvantaged and stateless minority – the Kurds. Bomb attacks this week in Ankara, blamed on Kurdish PKK militants, highlight the deteriorating internal security situation and stoke fears that Turkey’s troubles could spill over into Syria and Iraq, further aggravating Arab spring instability.

Apparently oblivious to possible double standards, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, has been in voluble form of late. His tour last week of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia played upon a common theme – Turkey’s support for the justified aspirations of oppressed peoples everywhere. Erdogan’s long-running feud with Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians reached new heights when he warned the Turkish navy might escort future relief flotillas to Gaza.

Alarmed at the implications for US interests, Barack Obama took time at the UN in New York on Tuesday to talk Erdogan down, stressing their shared interest in peaceful, negotiated outcomes in Palestine, Syria and elsewhere. Turkey is a leading backer of President Mahmoud Abbas’s bid for UN recognition of Palestinian statehood. Obama, flanked by Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu, desperately hopes to shove this uncomfortable issue back in the freezer.

The US also wants to head off renewed ground incursions targeting PKK bases in Iraq, as threatened last week by a senior Turkish minister, given obvious security concerns surrounding the US troop withdrawal. Rising tensions over disputed gas fields off Cyprus are adding to Washington’s worries at a time when, to put it mildly, the Greek government and its Greek Cypriot allies are not in the best shape.

Unfortunately for the majority of Turkey’s Kurds who want a peaceful settlement, one consequence of resulting American appeasement of Ankara is likely to be ever closer US co-operation with Turkey’s escalating military operations against the PKK. Like the EU, the US lists the PKK as a terrorist organisation, a categorisation passionately disputed by the main Kurdish national party, the BDP, which describes it as a “resistance” group. Washington already provides military satellite intelligence to Ankara. Now there is renewed talk of a Turkish base for US Predator drones, which the Turks want to target the PKK inside Iraq.

Erdogan has made important efforts to resolve the Kurdish issue, notably via the so-called “democratic opening” that included talks with the jailed PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan. For their part, the PKK and Kurdish political parties have renounced their former separatist agenda. But gains have been limited, hardliners on both sides have obstructed the process, and Erdogan’s attention has shifted to the wider stage of Arab emancipation and the “re-Ottomanisation”, as some call it, of the Middle East. For him, it seems, the role of grand regional rainmaker is more alluring than that of down-home, hard-slog peacemaker.

The Kurdish parties are still trying to get his attention. The BDP’s woefully under-reported congress in Ankara earlier this month produced an eight-point protocol or “road map” for what it called a democratic resolution; and it proposed resumed talks as a matter of urgency. “All identities, cultures, languages and religions must be protected by the constitution. As a basic principle there must be a constitutional nationality that is not founded on ethnicity,” it said.

“The right to speak in the mother tongue – including in public – must be universally protected by the constitution. Education in the mother tongue language must be recognised as a fundamental right … There must be a transition to a decentralised administration. With regards to autonomy, local, provincial and regional councils must have more powers,” a BDP summary of the protocol said.

This is hardly an earth-shaking or revolutionary agenda. It is a far cry from the forfeited dream of an independent state spanning south-east Turkey, north-western Iran and parts of Syria and Iraq. And as the International Crisis Group notes in a report published this week, the acceptance of universal rights should not be regarded as a concession by the Turkish government.

The ICG report argues persuasively that the basis for a negotiated, peaceful settlement remains in place despite an upsurge in violence since June’s elections that has claimed more than 100 lives. “The PKK must immediately end its new wave of terrorist and insurgent attacks, and the Turkish authorities must control the escalation with the aim to halt all violence. A hot war and militaristic tactics did not solve the Kurdish problem in the 1990s and will not now,” the ICG says.

It continues: “The Turkish Kurd nationalist movement must firmly commit to a legal, non-violent struggle within Turkey, and its elected representatives must take up their seats in parliament, the only place to shape the country-wide reforms that can give Turkish Kurds long-denied universal rights. The Turkish authorities must implement radical judicial, social and political measures that persuade all Turkish Kurds they are fully respected citizens.”

Surely this is not so hard to do? It’s time Erdogan stopped playing Palestinian saviour and put Turkey’s problems first.

October 7, 2011
For Turkey’s Kurdish Protesters, Long Sentences and Little Hope

Jenna Krajeski – Jenna Krajeski is a journalist based in Istanbul. Her previous work has appeared in Al-Masry Al-Youm, The New Yorker, Slate, The World Policy Journal, Bidoun, The San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere.

By Jenna Krajeski

Oct 6 2011, 8:16 AM ET “With this Kurdish issue, there are two ways of struggling: with weapons or with politics. I chose politics because war never ends.”

Ferman, his mother, and her son in Turkey / Jenna Krajeski

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — On July 14, 2008, Diyarbakir, a majority Kurdish city in southeast Turkey, erupted in protests. Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned founder of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), had been forced to cut his hair, and men and women in the city, angered by what they saw as a humiliation of their leader, chopped their own hair and gathered in Kosuyblu Park. Among them were two 15-year-old boys, Mazlon and Ferman (his name has been changed). When police began spraying tear gas, the boys threw rocks and were arrested.

At the same time, an assembly had been called to remember the prisoners who had died in 1982 during a hunger strike in nearby Diyarbakir prison. Hawar (also not his real name), age 15, stopped to listen on his way home from working as a cell-phone salesman. When he turned to leave, he was blocked by a line of police, who began spraying the crowd with tear gas and water cannons. Hawar felt trapped. “There were only stones, so I threw a stone.” He was arrested.

Their stories converged in Diyarbakir prison, where the three boys were accused of terrorism. For almost a year, the boys shared a cell, and became close friends.

I met Hawar’s father, Arif, for breakfast in Diyarbakir. A small man with a gray mustache and two pens clipped neatly to the inside of his shirt pocket, Arif spoke adamantly about the stone-throwing kids, a cause he has taken up since Hawar’s arrest. He tells the story of the arrest with determined, slow speech–bored with the familiar narrative, still stunned by the details.

When Hawar wasn’t home by 11 p.m., Arif started to worry. He called police stations, looking for him. “If he was in a hospital, I would have gotten information right away. If there is no news, it means he is arrested.”

Arif, like the three boys, was unaware that in 2006 Turkey had tightened its anti-terror laws and that juveniles could now be tried as adults. When he realized that his son could be in prison for years, “It was like volcanoes were exploding inside me,” he said. “There was nothing I could do for him.”

Arif’s retelling, though thick with residual fear, included some optimism. Hawar’s prison term–ten months and eight days–was comparatively short and since then, he’s been doing well. Later that day, from a plush arm chair below framed photos of himself and his two brothers, Hawar narrated his own imprisonment.

“They arrested us and put us in the back of the police car. They beat us and swore at us. Then they took us to the hospital, where doctors examined us, supposedly for evidence of torture. They did not record our bruises. ‘Their’ doctors didn’t care about us.”

Being unaware of the severity of the charges against him, each day in prison was a new shock to Hawar. But nothing compared to the shock of the sentence itself: 38 years. “When I saw the 38 years, I thought I have to get used to living my life in prison.”

It was a life that included a 7 a.m. head count followed by an “inedible” breakfast, reading books or beading bracelets, then to the small courtyard for his “right to breathe,” then lunch. After lunch they read some more, and in the evening they were given the day’s newspapers. Hawar, Mazlon, and Ferman favored the more independent Taraf and Radikal, “The best of the worst.” There were no Kurdish news sources allowed. “They were doing their best to close our eyes to the world,” Hawar told me.

But, in spite of the harsh sentence, Hawar found himself more determined. “Before prison I was not interested in finishing school,” he said. “But then I saw the unfairness in this country and decided I wanted to do something. With this Kurdish issue, there are two ways of struggling: with weapons or with politics. I chose politics because war never ends.” In June, Hawar will take the university entrance exam. He plans to become a human rights lawyer.

In prison, Hawar was comforted by the presence of his two friends, but began to worry about Mazlon. The boy had always been cheerful, smiling and making jokes. At first, Mazlon spent his time beading colorful bracelets he would then give to his family when they visited. But he was becoming quickly more radicalized. “When we were talking about resistance, he would say that the only way to fight was with weapons,” Hawar said.

When he was released, like Hawar after ten months and eight days, Mazlon worked as a photographer for a Kurdish newspaper. Because his daily life consisted of documenting protests and funerals–“He told his mother that he cannot be more impassioned about the Kurdish cause than when he was photographing bodies being put in the ground,” Hawar said–Mazlon could not put his jail time behind him. A year after his release, he joined Kurdish guerilla forces in the mountains, and soon after that was killed.

“Mazlon was 100 percent changed by prison,” Hawar said. “There was no education and no justice.”

Across town, Ferman’s mother, Welat, sat on the floor of her living room, leaning against a pillow and playing absentmindedly with her 2-year-old son and 1-year-old grandson.”When Ferman heard that Mazlon was killed, he stopped eating. He went to his memorial and fainted three or four times,” she said. “They were in the same cell. They were very close.”

Half-watching Kurdish Roj TV’s tribute to a recently killed guerilla–15 minutes of stills and interviews set among strikingly isolated mountain ranges–Welat tearfully predicted her son’s future. “If it is not finished now, the youngest generation will never stop fighting.” Ferman, who served more than two years in prison, had been noticeably more agitated since his release, but after Mazlon’s death, she was having a hard time reaching him at all. The sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication given to him by a human rights organization in Diyarbakir had stopped working, and he was now refusing to go to the therapy sessions offered by the same organization. He would not enroll in school, two years behind his former classmates, and he followed news related to the Kurdish issue obsessively. “If he is surrounded by bad things, how can he get better?” she wondered.

Ferman entered the apartment–a clean but sparse place located in Baglar, a neighborhood known for its violent protests–complaining of a headache. He had spent the day selling watermelons at his father’s fruit stand, a job he goes to every day but which his mother says he can only withstand for a couple of hours at a time. The tall boy sat fiddling with his cell phone and politely answering (and often politely refusing to answer) my questions.

“It was bad being in prison. That period was bad. It was like the period of torture in the 90s,” he said, referring to a 1996 incident in Diyarbakir prison in which ten prisoners were beaten to death. “I was in isolation on the first day, and, I don’t know if it was real or not, but I was hearing soldiers shouting. I remembered what happened in the 90s in that prison and I found myself feeling that I was in those years. Now I can’t sleep. When I try I dream about what I faced when I was arrested.”

I asked how he was feeling, and he said, “So-so.” I asked why he wasn’t feeling good, he waved his hands, saying vaguely, “Because of some events.”

He did tell me about his early medical treatment in the prison. Jabbing his thumb into his rib cage, he described how he had trouble breathing during the first days. He was frightened and went to the prison doctors. “When they saw me, they said, ‘Ah, here comes the terrorist.’”

The word stuck. “Being called a terrorist reminded me of the political prisoners, who they also called terrorists. It reminded me of the guerillas. It gave me an identity.”

October 7, 2011
Turkish parliament approves cross-border raids

By Ivan Watson and Yesim Comert, CNN

October 6, 2011 — Updated 0246 GMT (1046 HKT)

Kurdish women hold portraits of their missing sons on May 18, 2011 during a demonstration in Istanbul.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

The vote comes after the arrest of hundreds of suspected PKK members

One analyst says the PKK cannot be defeated militarily

Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Turkey

Istanbul (CNN) — Turkish lawmakers Wednesday voted to extend authorization for the Turkish military to carry out cross border attacks against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.

The vote authorizes cross-border military operations for another year. Its passage came a day after Turkish police arrested more than 100 people across the country, suspected of links to rebels with the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

Lawmakers from the main Kurdish nationalist party, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), denounced the arrests.

In a phone call with CNN, deputy BDP chair Meral Danis Bestas claimed her party was the true target of the arrests.

“Almost 90% of the people detained are from the BDP, members of the party administration or executive council or mayors,” Bestas said.

She also criticized the parliamentary vote on cross-border raids, calling it a “big mistake.”

“It would have been so much better if the first task of the parliament was one that contributed to peace and elimination of obstacles in the way of democracy, rights and freedoms,” Bestas said.

The Kurds represent the largest ethnic minority in Turkey. For decades, they were the target of repressive government policies, implemented by officials who sometimes referred to them as “mountain Turks.” Until just a few years ago, it was illegal to speak Kurdish on radio and television in Turkey. The government of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has tried to improve relations by launching a state Kurdish language TV station in 2009.

Some observers are sounding the alarm about the escalating tensions between Turkey and its ethnic Kurdish minority, warning it may re-ignite a conflict that has simmered since 1984 and claimed more than 30,000 lives.

“A new destructive cycle of violence between the Turkish authorities and Turkish Kurd nationalists has begun,” warned the Brussels-based mediation organization the International Crisis Group in a recent report.

“Soldiers, police and insurgents are being killed in escalating clashes and bombings, demonstrations are being dealt with by excessive tear gas and force, more than 3,000 political activists are in jail for the peaceful expression of their views, and the misuse of the anti-terror law and other restrictive legislation keeps political tension high,” the ICG report said.

Last month, at least three people were killed by an explosion in the heart of the Turkish capital, Ankara. A Kurdish rebel splinter group later claimed responsibility for the attack.

Throughout the summer, dozens of soldiers and police were killed by rebel ambushes across southeastern Turkey. In August, the Turkish military retaliated, carrying out aerial sorties bombing rebel camps in northern Iraq.

Meanwhile, there has been an increase in violent clashes between Kurdish activists and Turkish police in other cities and towns in western Turkey, far away from the PKK’s traditional area of operation in the predominantely Kurdish, southeastern part of the country.

“The PKK cannot be defeated militarily,” said Hugh Pope, the International Crisis Group’s senior Turkey analyst, in an interview with CNN. “This has been tried over and over again in the past 30 years… the PKK can find too much money, too many arms, they have the support of millions of people at least in sympathy. The application of military force, if it goes too far, will only drive more support into the arms of the PKK.”

But some Turkish analysts think the Turkish government stands a new chance of defeating the Kurdish separatists, now that Erdogan has succeeded in imposing civilian control over the armed forces.

“It’s a paradigm shift,” said Lale Kemal, a military analyst and Ankara bureau chief of the Turkish newspaper Taraf. “We should bear in mind the fact that this is the first time in Turkish history since the outbreak of the PKK war that a civilian government is acting like a real actor in ruling the nation.”

via Turkish parliament approves cross-border raids – CNN.com.

October 6, 2011
Preparing for Peace in Turkey

The Erdogan government must not let the escalating insurgency distract it from addressing Kurdish civilians’ underlying problems.

By HUGH POPE

Turkey’s activism throughout the Arab Spring and its showy challenges to Israel have gotten Ankara plenty of international attention in the last several months. But closer to home, a disturbing trend is emerging. Since June, at least 150 people have been killed and hundreds injured in an escalation of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s (PKK) long-running insurgency.

It’s nothing like the worst days of the conflict in the 1990s—not yet, at least. But the downward spiral already includes familiar kidnappings, tit-for-tat clashes between the PKK and Turkish forces, terrorist bombings, Turkish attacks on PKK bases across the Iraqi border, mass detentions of Turkish Kurds and flashes of ethnic strife between Turkish and Kurdish civilians in major cities.

The escalation is even more significant given that Turks and Kurds have come closer than ever to peace over the past two years. But Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been reluctant to spend enough of his enormous domestic political capital to tackle some of the underlying problems of his 15% Kurdish community. He has allowed a hardening of Turkish anti-terror laws, which have put 3,000 Kurd activists behind bars—not for any violent acts, but because they happen to share the nationalist goals of the PKK. He has not relaxed the ban on Kurds learning their mother tongue at primary and secondary school. Just as importantly, Mr. Erdogan has only briefly attempted to reeducate the Turkish-majority public, whose views have been distorted by a near-century of nationalist education and, in the past, anti-Kurd propaganda.

Mr. Erdogan has taken a more nationalist line since campaigning for the June elections, but he needs to find a way back to the pragmatic negotiating position he adopted after his Justice and Development Party (AKP) took power in 2001. In 2005-09, he developed a strategy that became known as the Democratic Opening. This ended torture in jails, gradually liberalized Kurdish-language broadcasting and higher education, and spread a new sense of normalcy and development to the impoverished, refugee-flooded cities in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast.

Not surprisingly, the whole country has benefited. Although these reforms were only steps on the road to fully recognizing Kurds’ civil rights, Mr. Erdogan and the AKP have arguably done more for Turkey’s Kurds than any previous government. Thanks to this, AKP consistently wins half of ethnic Kurds’ votes.

AFP/Getty ImagesAnkara must not let renewed violence distract from addressing Kurdish civilians’ underlying problems.

In parallel, Mr. Erdogan allowed state representatives to negotiate secretly with the PKK. Meeting in Turkey, Europe and northern Iraq, they appeared to have reached agreement on essential parts of an eventual peace deal—including an end to the fighting, a gradual amnesty for insurgents, and perhaps better conditions for jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. A major step occurred in October 2009, when the government allowed eight PKK fighters and 26 PKK sympathizers, who had been living in a refugee camp in Iraq, back into Turkey.

But sadly, Mr. Erdogan and the AKP did not ready the Turkish public for the gesture. Instead of the quiet rapprochement the government had envisioned, tens of thousands of Turkish Kurds poured down to the Iraqi border two years ago, overjoyed at the prospect of an end to the conflict that had blighted their lives for generations. Turkish Kurd politicians overplayed their hand, feting the returning insurgents, who were wearing their distinctive guerrilla outfits. The scenes were broadcast nationwide and outraged an unprepared western Turkish opinion, which did not see Kurdish joy at the possibility of peace, but instead saw only celebrations at their own expense. Mr. Erdogan, meanwhile, saw his polls slipping among Turks and instead of standing fast and seizing control of the story, he dropped the initiative.

Tensions again shot up this year after June’s national elections, when one of the 36 parliamentary deputies from Turkey’s main legal Kurdish nationalist party (Peace and Democracy, or BDP) was stripped of his seat for a last-minute conviction under Turkey’s catch-all antiterror laws. Five other newly elected BDP deputies, detained on similar charges, have been kept in jail since June. Amid Kurds’ protests, BDP deputies boycotted parliamentary sessions over the summer and only returned to chambers this week. Less visibly, the secretive peace negotiations between the Turkish authorities and the PKK have broken down.

The PKK has clearly been the prime mover in the recently escalating violence, perhaps seeking to impress the Turkish authorities with its disruptive abilities and probably also trying to polarize sentiment to win back influence over Turkish Kurds. But the bloodshed is not helping. New pleas for an end to the fighting from Turkish Kurd civil society show that the vast majority of Kurds do not want to split off from Turkey but want to continue to live and prosper there. And the toll of 79 dead Turkish security forces since June underlines that any government attempt at a military solution will be costly and likely as fruitless as that of the 1990s.

BDP’s decision to return to parliament is thus a critical opportunity for the AKP government and Turkish Kurds to find new ways to end the chronic conflict. It goes without saying that the PKK, the armed and dominant wing of the Turkish Kurd nationalist movement, must end its latest wave of terror attacks and commit to legal means of pursuing full rights for Turkish Kurds. Prime Minister Erdogan and the AKP will also have to consider why their recent attempts failed to lessen the mistrust between Turks and Turkish Kurds.

The Turkish authorities must not fall into the PKK’s trap and let the ongoing fighting distract them from pursuing a new constitution, legal system and education curriculum cleansed of ethnic discrimination. They should also change laws that have detained thousands of Turkish Kurds for what they think and not what they do, and engage the BDP far more.

To make this all work, Mr. Erdogan will have to use his domestic support to both convince Turkish Kurds of his sincerity and to persuade Turks that equal rights for all ethnicities will strengthen Turkey, not destroy it. Such an effort will take time and consistency, and may prove initially expensive in the polls. But there could be no bigger achievement than ending a conflict that has killed 30,000 people and, by Mr. Erdogan’s own estimate, cost $300 billion since 1984. Forging a lasting peace with Kurds would truly yield a “Turkish model” of democracy worth emulating elsewhere in the region.

Mr. Pope is the International Crisis Group’s Turkey-Cyprus project director and author of “Turkey Unveiled: a History of Modern Turkey” (Overlook, 3rd ed., 2011).

October 4, 2011
End of Kurdish MPs’ boycott raises hopes for new constitution in Turkey

End of Kurdish MPs’ boycott raises hopes for new constitution in Turkey

Thomas Seibert

The newly elected MPs of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party and its chairman, Selahattin Demirtas, (foreground) seen arriving outside the parliamentary building in Ankara as they ended a four-month boycott of the Turkish parliament. ADEM ALTAN / AFP PHOTO

ISTANBUL // The decision by Turkey’s main Kurdish party to end a parliamentary boycott has boosted hopes for a political consensus on a new constitution that could help solve the Kurdish question.

But as Kurdish deputies took their oaths of office during Saturday’s first session of parliament after the summer break, and government and opposition promised to support all-party talks about a new constitution, continuing violence in the Kurdish region served as a reminder of how difficult the road to peace is likely to be.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, said last week that he hoped for an agreement on a constitution within the first six months of the coming year.

On Saturday, he added that he was prepared to have Turkey’s intelligence service take up new negotiations with Kurdish rebels, sworn enemies of Ankara.

There is broad agreement among politicians, non-governmental groups and academics that Turkey, a rising regional power and an EU candidate country, needs to replace its constitution, which was written under military rule in 1982 and includes many regulations restricting democracy.

But opinions about how the new one should look differ widely.

Mr Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which raked in almost 50 per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections in June, has started preliminary talks with two opposition parties, the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), about the shape of negotiations on the constitution.

The parties agreed to set up a special committee for work on the new basic law.

In a step widely seen as reaching out to the Kurds, the prime minister said the AKP would seek talks in the coming days with the Party for a Democratic Society (BDP), the main Kurdish party.

The BDP won about 30 seats in June but refused to send its deputies to parliament, in protest against the imprisonment of a colleague.

The party decided last week to end the boycott so it would not be left out of the constitutional talks.

The BDP parliamentary group established after the oath-taking on Saturday includes Leyla Zana, a legendary Kurdish politician who spent 10 years in prison after speaking Kurdish during her first oath-taking in parliament in 1991, and Erol Dora, Turkey’s first Christian deputy since the 1960s.

But for all the symbolism and the hope for a speedy agreement on a new basic law, politicians and analysts alike warn that negotiations will not be easy.

Selahattin Demirtas, the BDP leader, said after a meeting with Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s president: “We have entered a tough new phase.”

Turkish courts have jailed numerous BDP members for suspected links to the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a rebel group that has been fighting against the Turkish state since 1984.

Just as politicians in Ankara get ready to tackle the question of whether to enshrine cultural rights of minority groups like Turkey’s estimated 12 million Kurds in the new constitution, the PKK has stepped up its violent campaign in the Kurdish region.

While increasing attacks on outposts of the military and the police, PKK fighters have also started to target civilians.

Twelve teachers, seen by the PKK as representatives of a system that suppresses Kurdish language rights, have been kidnapped by rebels in recent days.

Two weeks ago, four female civilians were killed in a PKK attack in the province of Siirt. The rebels later apologised for the deaths.

Last week, a pregnant woman and her 4-year-old daughter were killed in another shoot-out between PKK members and the police in Batman.

Police say the woman and the girl were shot by PKK members but pro-Kurdish media say police bullets killed them.

As a response to the increase in attacks by the PKK which started in August, Mr Erdogan has ordered airstrikes on rebel camps in northern Iraq.

The government is also asking parliament to extend a mandate for cross-order operations of the armed forces, which would enable Ankara to strike at the PKK in Iraq with an intervention by ground forces.

Mithat Sancar, a law professor at Ankara University, said: “There is a logic of war on both sides.” But while the state was trying to weaken the PKK militarily to force it to accept a solution, the rebels were convinced the state would solve the Kurdish question only under pressure of violence, he said “It is a vicious circle,” Mr Sancar said.

The violence had the potential to derail the political process that was about to begin with the constitutional negotiations, he said.

However, Mr Sancar said, there were also signs of hope, such as the BDP’s return to parliament and Mr Erdogan’s willingness to talk to the Kurdish party.

“This demonstrates that both sides are expecting something from a peaceful process,” Mr Sancar said.

“Both sides are aware that violence is a dead-end street.”

tseibert@thenational.ae

via End of Kurdish MPs’ boycott raises hopes for new constitution in Turkey – The National.

October 3, 2011
The Kurdish Question

By Alexander Weinstock

SATURDAY OCTOBER 01, 2011

Photographer: Dan Phiffer

In Istanbul, a crowd demonstrating in support of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), facing a police line.

Settled in the Middle East since ancient times, the Kurds remain the largest ethnic group without a state of their own in the region. About 35 million are split between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, with small diaspora groups primarily in Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Kurds’ present situation is rooted in the decision to partition areas of the former Ottoman Empire by Great Britain and France after World War I. Today, the Kurdish people struggle for self-determination and the recognition of their ethnic identity within nations where they have significant populations. For example, it is illegal for them to speak their language in Turkey, and the country’s constitution provides for only one ethnic designation, Turkish, thus disavowing the very concept of Kurdish ethnicity. There is little consensus between the many Kurdish groups as to how best to achieve their goals. Overall, Kurdish history in all four states with native Kurdish populations over the last hundred years has been mostly marked by cultural discrimination from ruling regimes, spotted with frequent rebellious uprisings that were violently suppressed.

The different roots of Kurdish nationalism

The Kurds are a distinct ethnic group of Iranian origin with their own language and culture. In modern history, they are also united by a desire for greater autonomy, and, ideally, a state of their own, as well as a shared history of discrimination and oppression from each regime in question. “Self-determination is the right of the Kurdish people,” said Iraq’s president Mr. Jalal Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, in an interview with Le Figaro, published on October 31, 2006.

The causes of clashes between Kurdish minorities and central governments have been different in each country. Kurdish nationalism in Turkey was primarily a reaction to Turkish nationalism in the newly-founded republic. The country’s course toward secularization under the Kemalist ideology (a movement developed by the Turkish national movement leader, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk), which emphasized the absence of religious influence from all public institutions, conflicted with the devout Muslim Kurds’ world view and was a major reason for the rise of the nationalist movement.

Iranian Kurds always bore some discrimination, according to Amnesty International, such as inability to register newborns with certain Kurdish names and difficulty obtaining employment or adequate housing. Such policies reached their zenith in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution. The desire of nearly 2.5 million Sunni Kurds for regional autonomy caused Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of predominantly Shia Iran, to declare jihad (holy war) against them. Shia Kurds, on the other hand, were untouched by the Ayatollah’s decree and did not face discrimination from the Iranian government. Neither have they ever really desired autonomy or independence from Iran due to religious homogeneity with the rest of the population. Shia Kurds have held or currently hold key positions in the Iranian political hierarchy, such as First Vice President Mohammad-Reza Rahimi and former Foreign Minister Karim Sanjabi. In fact, in recent history, the Sunni denomination of Islam has traditionally been discriminated against in Iran regardless of the ethnic group involved. For example, according to Sunni-News, in March of this year, Iranian authorities have forbidden the annual forum of Sunni students set to be held in the town of Zehan.

Ethnic, rather than religious, differences were the cause of the Kurdish nationalist movement in Iraq, according to the analysis of Ms. Denise Natali, a lecturer at the Center for Law and Politics at Salahaddin University in Iraqi Kurdistan, in her book The Kurds and the State. She cites a forceful “Aribization” campaign, which started in 1963 with the rise of the Ba’ath party to power. The initiative involved the ban of the Kurdish language, deportation and ethnic cleansing. The government did propose a plan, which provided for a degree of Kurdish autonomy in 1970. However, according to Mr. George Harris, a Near East history scholar at the Middle East Institute, this was combined with a forceful resettlement program, in which the government tried to settle traditionally Kurdish areas with citizens of Arab ethnicity. The Kurds comprise a lesser percentage of the population in Syria than in the other countries as most of them emigrated from neighboring Turkey. It is for this reason that Syrian Kurds have long been regarded as foreigners by the ruling Ba’ath regime, and thus, were not allowed to participate in elections or travel abroad as Syrian citizens. They were extended some civil liberties as a result of the protests last winter, but some, like the Syrian Kurdish opposition activist Mr. Shirzad Al-Yazidi in an interview with Asharq Alawsat newspaper, call to “look to the recent declaration of democratic autonomy in the Kurdish region of Turkey” as a model for attaining a greater degree of independence for Syrian Kurds. Unlike their Turkish or Iraqi counterparts, however, Syrian Kurds do not seek independence, but rather a wider spectrum of civil rights within the country, such as equal employment opportunities. Mr. Fawzi Shingar, a Syrian Kurdish leader, remarked to Rudaw in English that despite the lack of a common agenda between the many Kurdish groups, “no Kurdish party wants independence from Syria because the Kurds are an inseparable part of the country.”

The struggle for Kurdish independence has often been violent. In the interwar period, Turkey saw an average of three revolts per year. The most well-known of the militant groups, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been in existence for 33 years and has been leading an armed struggle against the Turks for 27 years. Their official agenda is independence from Turkey and possible unification with other Kurdish-populated areas in Iran, Iraq and Syria. The PKK is labeled a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union for its violent actions such as the suicide bombing in Ankara in 2007. In her 2007 book Blood and Belief, Reuters political analyst Ms. Aliza Marcus contends that the PKK guerillas would stop fighting if offered amnesty and certain liberties for Turkey’s Kurdish population. Ms. Marcus also notes that any legitimacy to their demands is countered by their fervent devotion to PKK’s recently retired leader Mr. Abdullah Ocalan, who stressed armed struggle as a means for complete secession of Northern Kurdistan from Turkey.

Other militant groups include the Free Life Party of Kurdistan (PJAK), which has been in regular confrontations with the Iranian government. The most recent incident, as reported by Reuters, occurred last July, involving the assassination of General Abbas Kasemi of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite division in the Iranian army. Iran responded with an armed incursion of 5,000 men into northeastern Iraq’s Kurdish region, accusing the head of Iraqi Kurdistan of illegally sponsoring PJAK activity. Several towns were shelled by Iranian artillery. Despite constant assurances of a victory made by either side, the conflict went on until complete PJAK surrender on September 29.

The statehood question

What is to be done about this situation? Some, like British journalist Mr. David Osler of Lloyd’s List, compare the Kurdish problem to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Naturally, such a comparison brings to mind the familiar one-state vs. two-state solutions. Mr. Daniel Greenfield, a journalist for The Kurdistan Tribune, strongly advocates a completely independent Kurdistan, stating that it would be otherwise impossible for Turkey to enter the EU. “Only by allowing an autonomous Kurdish state within the borders of occupied Northern Kurdistan, will Turkey gain stability and peace,” writes Mr. Greenfield in a blog post from June 20, 2011. He asserts that Turkey’s acceptance into the EU without resolving the Kurdish question will exacerbate ethnic conflicts and undermine the EU’s credibility. However, there are matters other than the Kurdish question that bar Turkey’s entrance into the EU, such as the issues of Cyprus and foreign relations with Greece.

The Kurds find themselves in a complicated situation, at least geopolitically speaking, considering the sheer number of nations and potential negotiations involved. Taken within the greater scope of all of Kurdistan, a two-state solution entails carving out sizable portions of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. This means that each Kurdish minority will have to negotiate with its respective government, and none of these states are inclined to simply give up territory. Iraqi Kurds are in constant contest with the central government for the oil-rich region of Kirkuk. The Kurds inhabit a large portion of Turkey. Syria, with the partition of the country under the French Mandate still fresh in the nation’s consciousness, will most likely not agree to give a piece of its land to its Kurdish residents, despite recent advances such as President Bashar Al-Assad’s granting of Syrian citizenship to the country’s large Kurdish population.

As such, more moderate solutions have been proposed. Mr. Michael Gunter, a professor of political science at Tennessee Technological University, in his 2007 book The Kurds Ascending, sees the solution in an education system that provides a belief “in democracy for all people regardless of ethnic affinity.” Dr. Gunes Tezcur, who teaches political science at Loyola University, points to more serious issues that must first be resolved. In particular, he recommends the cutting of funding from Iraqi Kurds to militant groups such as the Kurdish Freedom Falcons and PKK in Turkey and an acknowledgement of the Turkish government’s civil rights violations by the EU. Some experts, like Yale University’s political science lecturer Mr. Matthew Kocher, believe more moderate solutions have a better chance of success in satisfying all sides involved to some degree than four separate and costly two-state solutions. “The median Kurdish voter probably supported center-right Turkish political parties,” writes Mr. Kocher in his 2002 paper “The Decline of PKK and the Viability of a One-State Solution in Turkey,” which was published in the MOST Journal on Multicultural Studies. He describes the position of Turkish Kurds regarding integration into the state. In light of the Syrian Kurds’ attitude of remaining within Syria voiced by Mr. Shingar and the autonomy granted to Iraqi Kurds by Iraq’s new constitution, it is possible that one-state solutions are gaining popularity. This is indeed a step toward settlement, even though more remains to be done for reconciliation.

October 2, 2011