Tag: Leyla Soylemez

  • Murders in Paris but, Perhaps, Peace in Turkey

    Murders in Paris but, Perhaps, Peace in Turkey

    Posted by Jenna Krajeski
    TURKEY-KURDS-UNREST-FRANCE-CRIME-FUNERALThe Kurdish movement in Turkey works in isolation. Guerillas with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.)—which has, for decades, fought the Turkish Army for constitutional rights and autonomy—leave their families for remote posts in the Qandil mountains, on the border between Turkey and Iraq. Hundreds of miles stretch between Istanbul and the politically charged, majority-Kurdish southeast, where economic opportunities are scant compared to western Turkey. Nationalistic media and education on both sides have established an even wider psychological gap. Prisons, where the violent arm of the P.K.K. first came together, continue to hold dissenting Kurds. And, in spite of almost thirty years of armed struggle in a region bordering countries crucial to the political future of the West and the world, Kurds remain largely offstage.

    But recently a few things changed. In Syria, Kurds took control of the northeast, envisioning a future after Assad that includes them. In Iraq, Kurds began managing their own oil deals, defying Baghdad in a push that might transform the de-facto independence of Iraqi Kurdistan into real independence. Turkey, on the heels of a sixty-eight-day hunger strike started by Kurdish prisoners, began new peace talks with Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the P.K.K. Then three Kurdish women were murdered in Paris, shot in the office of the Kurdish Information Center, near the busy Gare du Nord, and the Kurdish issue took on the life of an international murder mystery.

    Whoever shot Sakine Cansiz, Leyla Soylemez, and Fidan Dogan in the office that day used a silencer, a fitting symbol for what is assumed to be the killer’s motive: an end to the talks between Ocalan and the Turkish government. Who did it was less clear. Was it nationalistic Turks? Iranians? A rival Kurd? A few days ago, French authorities arrested Omer Guney, a thirty-year-old Kurd who had worked as Cansiz’s driver, and who has reportedly claimed to be a member of the P.K.K. The arrest has had a calming effect on Turkish politicians, like Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said that anyone who thought the Turkish state was responsible for the murders “will be ashamed and will apologize when the incident comes to light.”

    French authorities continue to investigate Guney, who, they say, was in the office around the time of the murders, and the case is not yet closed. The response from the Kurdish side—including statements from the P.K.K., which denies that Guney was a member—are in direct opposition to Erdogan’s confident tone.

    But even if no one is ever convicted of pulling the trigger that day in Paris, the murders are an important moment in Kurdish-Turkish relations, carrying the issue across oceans, and clarifying a few key components along the way.

    People in Turkey want the war to stop, but the murders could still have halted the negotiations. “We know that whenever such a process starts, there are spoilers,” said Kerim Yildiz, the director of the U.K.-based Democratic Progress Institute, and himself a Kurd living in Europe. “But this is an extremely positive step that must be supported by everyone.” Unlike in the past, the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (B.D.P.) was directly involved and the talks have been made public. Selahattin Demirtas, the co-chair of the B.D.P., whom I reached through D. Dogan, a Kurdish human-rights activist, has been adamant that talks continue, even in the wake of the murders and even though the arrest may expose a rift among members of the P.K.K. “Previous meetings were also being conducted by the government, but they were discreet and mostly conducted in secret,” he wrote to me. “In previous processes the government made serious efforts to prevent any leaks of information, holding off details. This time it was made public by the prime minister himself.”

    The Kurdish issue is an international one. Kurds themselves are spread among Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, as well as a large diaspora community, of which the three murdered women were a part. The Kurdish Institute in Paris estimates the number of Kurds in Western Europe to be close to a million. Kurds in exile import the politics of home. Cansiz, Soylemez, and Dogan worked as lobbyists on behalf of Kurdish rights; Dogan was the Paris representative for the Brussels-based Kurdish National Congress. On the surface, such work so far from Qandil would seem safe, but the duration and intensity of the conflict in Turkey has tainted even the most nonviolent, distant work on behalf of Kurds.

    The Kurdish issue is multigenerational; Cansiz was in her fifties and a founding member of the P.K.K., but Soylemez was twenty-four. Dogan would have turned thirty-two on the day her body was returned to Turkey. Far from being an issue relegated to feuding older generations, young Kurds have internalized the brutality of their parents’ generation. Local sociologists refer to them as the “nineties generation”—Kurds who were children during the harsh nineteen-nineties, and respond to their parents’ wrenching testimonies and their own vague memories by rebelling against the Turkish state. Nazan Ustundag is one of these sociologists studying the impact of the conflict on young Kurds. “How do you become somebody in Turkey if you are a Kurdish person?” she asked one day last year, when we met for coffee in Istanbul. “They cannot be assimilated. Those days are over.”

    Last week, the bodies of Cansiz, Soylemez, and Dogan were returned to Turkey, to be buried. In Diyarbakir, southeast Turkey’s most important city, they were met by thousands of mourners, who followed the flag-draped coffins as they were carried through the crowd. Protests are common in Diyarbakir, and often devolve into clashes between protesters and police, but that day they were peaceful. Baris Alen, who works in the mayor’s office, told me that the major difference between the gathering that day and previous demonstrations was “the attitude of the police force. It was obvious they were trying not to disturb the event.” Speeches, too—even those from the families of the murdered women—revealed that both sides were still focused on peace. “Basically we can say that Kurdish people strongly support the peace process,” Alen said.

    There is reason for optimism. The bodies of the three women left Paris and landed in Turkey, and brought with them the cameras and pens and curious, mournful eyes not just of the Kurds who left their homes and jobs in Diyarbakir to attend the demonstration, but the Kurds living in Europe and the Turks ready for peace. These murders—as vicious as they were—could be a turning point for Turkey. Given the political activism that marked the lives of Dogan, Soylemez, and Cansiz, it is a worthy legacy.

    Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty

    Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/murders-in-paris-but-perhaps-peace-in-turkey#ixzz2J6uTkMmN
  • Crowds Gather in Turkey to Honor 3 Kurds Killed in Paris

    Crowds Gather in Turkey to Honor 3 Kurds Killed in Paris

    18turkey_span-articleLarge-v2

    Three Kurdish activists who were killed in Paris last week were mourned Thursday in the southern Turkish city of Diyarbakir. Tens of thousands attended.

    By SEBNEM ARSU

    HATAY, Turkey — Tens of thousands of people gathered Thursday in the southern city of Diyarbakir to mourn the deaths of three Kurdish activists murdered in Paris last week, an outpouring that some said amounted to the largest political gathering that the Turkish authorities had ever allowed the Kurds to stage.

    With fragile peace talks to end three decades of armed insurgency just beginning, top Turkish and Kurdish officials called for calm, and none of the national television networks carried the event live. But a few Web portals provided real-time coverage as crowds accompanying three funeral trucks for the women poured into Batikent Square in Diyarbakir, the hub of Kurdish political and cultural life. The most prominent of the slain women, Sakine Cansiz, was a founding member of the insurgent group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. Experts said she had been raising funds for the group in Europe.

    The private IMC TV portal showed that many in the crowd wore white scarves for peace and black clothing for mourning, as suggested by the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, the organizer of the ceremony.

    The reason for the killings remains unclear, but they were widely perceived as an effort to derail the talks, which for the first time involve Abdullah Ocalan, the founder and spiritual leader of the P.K.K., who has been held in an isolated island prison since his capture in 1999.

    Ms. Cansiz, 55, was his close ally. The two women found dead with her — Fidan Dogan, who would have turned 31 on Thursday, and Leyla Soylemez, 24 — were Kurdish activists. All three were found dead at the unmarked Kurdistan Information Office in Paris last Thursday, apparently shot by one or more gunmen with silenced pistols. The office had been locked from the outside, and three shell casings were found on the floor. Two women were shot in the head, one in the stomach.

    Turkish government officials speculated that the killings might have emerged from internal conflict in the P.K.K. The P.K.K. is known for meting out strict operational discipline, including punishments as extreme as executions for wayward members. Some Kurdish political activists countered by accusing the Turkish “deep state,” a nationalist underground network that was behind hundreds of extrajudicial assaults against Kurds in the 1990s and considers any ethnicity a threat against Turkey’s national unity.

    The mourners on Thursday carried pictures of the slain women and round black banners that read, “We all are Sakine,” “We all are Fidan” and “We all are Leyla.”

    Turkish security forces remained at a distance despite the crowds, which some took as a sign of the government’s sincerity in the quest for a peace deal.

    “In the past, the police would have definitely interfered such a funeral crowd, and things would have turned violent,” one Kurd who attended the ceremony, Mustafa Iritas, said in a phone interview. “This is a very good sign for the talks. I am very happy, and have better hopes for peace.”

    The talks between Mr. Ocalan and senior Turkish intelligence officials started in the last week of December. They focus on Ankara’s demands for the P.K.K. to lay down arms unilaterally and those who were involved in fighting to settle in a location other than Turkey. Mr. Ocalan’s participation drew strong criticism in nationalist circles that he was being given too much recognition, but it overwhelmingly pleased the nearly 15 million Kurds in Turkey and drastically elevated their sense of the chances for a resolution.

    “Even today that we’ve lost three comrades to a massacre, our people call for peace and brotherhood of peoples,” Ahmet Turk, a prominent Kurdish politician, said as he addressed the crowd from the top of a bus parked in front of three coffins wrapped in P.K.K. flags. “However, peace would only come with mutual respect and communication of people, with justice and equality.”

    More than 40,000 people have been killed in P.K.K. attacks or anti-P.K.K. military operations since the group, which has a separatist agenda, took up arms in 1984. It conducted suicide bombings and assaults at tourism centers, prompting Turkey, the European Union and the United States to label it a terrorist organization.

    Many in the group, like Ms. Cansiz, fled to Europe as political refugees after the 1980 military coup in Turkey. But they continued to generate financial resources and political propaganda as the P.K.K. continued sporadic attacks in Turkey from bases in the Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq.

    Peace talks in Oslo in 2011 broke down after recordings were leaked to the news media, igniting strong reactions in nationalist circles that oppose any contact with the rebels. A surge of violence followed.

    Cumali Soylemez, the father of Ms. Soylemez, was one of the last speakers who took the stage before coffins were sent off to Tunceli, Kahramanmaras and Mersin for burials on Friday.

    “I do not have much to say, except that they wanted peace and got killed by traitors, but we will continue with peace,” he said. “Peace is a good thing. Damn the war; war is just bad.”

    A version of this article appeared in print on January 18, 2013, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Crowds Gather in Turkey to Honor 3 Kurds Killed in Paris .
  • Mayor’s Sons Split by Turkey-PKK War as Funerals Test Peace Plan

    By Selcan Hacaoglu – Jan 16, 2013 11:00 PM GMT+0100
    Ibrahim Usta/AP Photo
    Masked men display flags of outlawed rebel group of the PKK, as Turkish Kurds celebrate the Nowruz in Istanbul.

    Abdullah Demirbas told his two sons that Turkey’s Kurds should claim their rights through politics, not war. One agreed, and is preparing to start compulsory service in Turkey’s army. The other didn’t, and fled to the mountains to join militants fighting against it.

    Kurds march with a banner reading ‘Our three comrades are immortal’ and bearing the portraits of the slain members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Sakine Cansiz, Leyla Soylemez, and Fidan Dogan, during a protest in Diyarbakir on Jan. 13. Source: STR/AFP/Getty Images

    “When warplanes flew sorties over our house, my wife prayed until the morning,” fearing for the safety of their younger boy as Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK bases came under Turkish bombardment, Demirbas said. Baran, 20, joined the group four years ago, according to Demirbas, mayor of a district in Turkey’s main Kurdish city, Diyarbakir. “He said results can only be achieved through arms. My other son is a teacher and he believes in politics, like me.”

    A peace initiative is under way that may test both arguments. Among Kurds and within Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, momentum is swinging toward a political solution. The conflict has killed almost 40,000 people and cost more than $300 billion over three decades as the PKK fought for autonomy in the largely Kurdish southeast. Erdogan’s past efforts to end it foundered, first amid a nationalist backlash in 2009 against what were seen as victory celebrations by the PKK, and then when a bombing raid near the Iraq border in 2011 killed more than 30 Kurdish civilians mistaken for PKK fighters.

    Erdogan has confirmed contacts with the PKK’s jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan, a breakthrough for a country that once directed media to refer to him as “the baby-killer,” and classifies the group as terrorists, as do the U.S. and European Union.

    ‘High Expectations’

    The main legal Kurdish party, which Demirbas represents, said yesterday that the initiative has raised “high expectations.” It comes as Syrian Kurds seek greater autonomy after the fall of Bashar al-Assad while Kurds in northern Iraq, who are already largely self-governing, engage in a tense standoff with the Baghdad government over oil revenue.

    Success would “liberate Turkey to have a more effective hand in the neighborhood, and demonstrate to a multi-sectarian Middle East the ways to accommodate religious and ethnic diversity,” said Fadi Hakura, an analyst at the Chatham House think-tank in London. “That’s a powerful message.”

    The murder of three Kurdish women linked to the PKK, one a founder of the group, in Paris last week showed the dangers ahead for the peace process. Their funeral ceremony in Diyarbakir today may pose another challenge, with tens of thousands of Kurds likely to attend.

    White Scarves

    Yesterday, a plane carrying the bodies back to Turkey landed on a runway flanked by airstrips that were used by Turkish warplanes bombing PKK bases in northern Iraq just a few days ago. Hundreds were there to greet the coffins. Armored police cars are parked at street corners in Diyarbakir, and security cameras monitor the main streets and squares. Authorities say PKK elements opposed to reconciliation may attempt to provoke violence.

    Ocalan, in an appeal issued via his brother Mehmet, called for “common sense,” according to Milliyet daily. Diyarbakir’s Kurdish mayor Osman Baydemir urged everyone attending to show their desire for peace by wearing white scarves.

    The city of 1.5 million people is home to at least 250,000 Kurds who were forced out of their villages in an army campaign in the 1990s.

    In that decade, when the war was at its height, Turkey spent an average 3.9 percent of gross domestic product on the military, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The conflict eased after Ocalan’s capture in 1999. Under Erdogan’s government in the eight years through 2010 the figure was 2.6 percent, in line with the global average at the end of that period, according to SIPRI. Fighting flared up again last year, when more than 700 people were killed.

    No Roadmap

    Speeches yesterday by Erdogan and Selahattin Demirtas, co- leader of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, showed the gap the two sides still have to close. The premier said military operations against the PKK won’t be put on hold during talks, and will continue until the group disarms.

    Demirtas said such attacks may sabotage a fragile process, and accused the government of lacking a roadmap for meeting Kurdish demands. Those include the right to education in Kurdish, and the release of Ocalan and thousands of other prisoners.

    Earlier in his premiership, Erdogan raised expectations in the southeast by removing some restrictions on the Kurdish language in education and media, part of a promised “opening” to an ethnic group that accounts for as much as 20 percent of Turkey’s 75 million people.

    Sleepless Nights

    Until the latest initiative, the government had been taking a harder line. About 8,000 people are still in detention on charges of belonging to the PKK’s urban arm.

    The PKK’s military commander, Murat Karayilan, said “no one should expect a quick solution,” and that the group won’t be fooled by offers of anything short of “autonomy,” the Kurdish Firat News Agency reported Jan. 4.

    An accord with the PKK would remove one source of tension between Turkey and the Kurds who control northern Iraq. Turkey is seeking to import more of their oil and develop rail links.

    Genel Energy Plc (GENL), the largest oil producer in Iraqi Kurdistan, started trucking crude to Turkey last week under a barter deal. For the Iraqi Kurds, locked in a dispute with the Baghdad government and seeking to cement their autonomy, Turkey offers a potential export route.

    Turkey has blamed Iraqi Kurdish leaders for tolerating the PKK’s presence there. The group’s bases, in the high and rugged terrain where the borders of Turkey, Iraq and Iran meet, are regularly bombed by Turkish jets.

    Those are the kind of raids, Kurdish mayor Demirbas says, that make his family nervous, thinking of their son in the mountains. “There have been many nights that we didn’t sleep at all,” he said. “At least I didn’t receive any bad news.”

    Minutes after he spoke by phone, several Turkish F-16 jets buzzed over Diyarbakir, heading for the Iraqi border.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-16/mayor-s-sons-split-by-turkey-pkk-war-as-funerals-test-peace-plan