[lg policy] Clashes With Kurds Are Pushing Turkey Back Toward Conflict

Tue Oct 25 21:22:25 UTC 2011

T
October 24, 2011
Clashes With Kurds Are Pushing Turkey Back Toward Conflict
By LIAM STACK and SEBNEM ARSU

CIZRE, Turkey — Thousands of people filled the streets of this dusty town
near the borders with Syria and Iraq on Sunday to mourn the death of a local
heroine, a commander in a mountaintop training camp for Kurdish militants
seeking autonomy for the country’s largely Kurdish southeast.

The elderly leaned on knotted wooden canes as they marched, and children in
balaclavas fashioned from T-shirts gathered stones to throw at police
officers at dusk, when the sounds of percussion bombs echoed through
deserted streets. Chants exulting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K.,
mingled with condolences for the family of Cicek Botan, a native of Cizre
and the middle-age P.K.K. commander who fought the Turkish state for more
than two decades before being killed on Oct. 10 in a raid on a training camp
in Iraq.

“The P.K.K. is the community, and we are the community,” the crowd chanted
as they awaited her body, which did not arrive in time for the funeral that
quickly turned into a demonstration. “Oh martyr, your blood will not be
spilled in vain! Every Kurd is a guerrilla!”

Although Turkey, the United States and the European Union consider the
P.K.K. a terrorist organization, sympathy for both the group and its goals
remains widespread in many towns in Turkey’s rugged southeast.

Public opinion in the rest of the country runs in the opposite direction. In
Istanbul’s Taksim Square on Sunday, thousands rallied against the P.K.K.,
whose fighters killed 24 soldiers and injured 18 others in a complex attack
last week. In response, the Turkish military sent more than 10,000 soldiers
backed by surveillance drones, helicopters and F-16 and F-4 jets into the
southern province of Hakkari and over the border into Iraq, killing at least
270 militants and injuring more than 210, the top commander of the Turkish
Armed Forces, Gen. Necdet Ozel,  said in a rare interview with the NTV news
channel on Sunday.

“We will not tie our hands waiting for a political solution while they are
killing our young,” Ayfer Ozcan, 38, said in Istanbul as she tied a headband
in the colors of the Turkish flag around her daughter’s head. Nearby, people
chanted in support of the military operation.

“Our operations proved no results so far, but neither have the attacks by
the P.K.K.,” Ms. Ozcan said. The P.K.K.’s aggressive attack and the
government’s muscular response have provoked anxiety about the future,
particularly because they follow several years of relative calm.

“These developments are a really disturbing escalation, because they appear
to be an attempt by the P.K.K. to invite Turkey back to the hell of the
1990s,” said Hugh Pope, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, which
researches conflicts worldwide.

Turkey had appeared to be moving toward political reforms intended to
address the roots of its conflict. At the center of the effort are draft
constitutional amendments that would give broader rights to Kurds and other
minorities. Parliament is still drafting the amendments.

“There has been a new narrative of normalcy in the southeast for the last
several years, and they are trying to bring it back to the old narrative of
conflict with the Turkish state,” said Mr. Pope, who, like many people,
contended that only political reforms can solve the conflict, which has
claimed more than 40,000 lives since 1984.

But violence has increased markedly here in the southeast since June,
according to figures compiled by the International Crisis Group; 111 members
of the security forces have been killed, as have 31 civilians and at least
80 P.K.K. fighters. The separatist group has also kidnapped at least 20
people viewed as supportive of the state, although data on kidnappings are
imprecise.

“We have been down this road many times before,” Mr. Pope said, referring to
the recent military action. “Politicians might say they can hit the P.K.K.
out of the park this time, but it never has worked and it never can work.”

In southeast Turkey, sympathy with the P.K.K. mingles with weariness over
decades of conflict that have touched almost every family in a region that
is poorer and less developed than the rest of Turkey. The conflict began
when the P.K.K. took up arms in 1984 to demand autonomy for the Kurdish
region. Over the years, that goal expanded to include education rights in
the Kurdish language and the release of jailed P.K.K. members like the
leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Turkey has refused to respond to the demands of the P.K.K. but recently
approved public broadcasting in Kurdish. Kurds make up about a fifth of
Turkey’s total population, 74 million.

“We want peace, but we also want our rights,” said Narinc, 55, a protester
in Cizre who declined to give her last name. “We don’t want any of these
poor boys to die, but we want the state to hear us and to see what our lives
here are like.”

Residents say that protests and clashes between young men and the police are
increasingly common in towns like Cizre, which was a hotbed of the national
government’s long war with the P.K.K. in the 1990s. On Sunday night, police
officers in armored cars used tear gas to disperse a crowd of youths
throwing stones; the previous night, plainclothes officers carrying
automatic rifles chased a group of teenagers who threw a gasoline bomb at a
bank.

Turkish troops have pursued the P.K.K. across the mountainous border with
Iraq more than 25 times since the conflict began, but the military has not
managed to subdue the militants or diminish their combat ability. Some of
the military operations involved as many as 30,000 troops.

The road to a political solution has also been bumpy. The government has
refused to recognize the P.K.K. as part of any official talks, although
records of meetings between Turkish intelligence officials and the P.K.K.
were leaked last month to the local news media. The dominant political party
in the southeast, the Peace and Democracy Party, is widely considered to be
the political wing of the P.K.K. and has been banned by court order eight
times. It has resumed its operations each time.

Nevertheless, public opinion among both Turks and Kurds strongly supports a
political solution to the conflict.

“No matter how grave our grievances are, we need to keep searching for a
resolution and accept that there could be differing ideas on a resolution,”
wrote Nuray Mert, a columnist for the newspaper Milliyet. “Otherwise, we do
not get anywhere close to peace but will be doomed to live in a dark period,
where different ideas and offers for resolution are either oppressed or
punished.”

Liam Stack reported from Cizre, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/world/europe/clashes-with-kurdish-rebels-push-turkey-back-toward-conflict.html

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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