The dark side of Turkey’s dream

Poverty and pollution cloud Turkey’s bid to join the EU

Jonny Dymond
Sunday December 19, 2004
The Observer

More than 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles) from the the conference
centre in Brussels where Turkey’s European destiny was hammered
out on Friday sits the city of Kars, in the far north-east of the
country. From Kars you can see Turkey’s borders with Armenia and
Georgia, frontiers which, if negotiations are successful, will form
the eastern edge of the European Union a decade from now. Kars is a
miserable place. Once it was rich; its broad boulevards and the few
remaining grand Russian and Armenian traders’ houses are a reminder
of days when the city was a prized possession of the Russian empire
and trade brought wealth and style.

Until the Sixties, says Erol Huryurt, owner of the city newspaper
that bears his name, there was money; he remembers the Azeri opera
and a Viennese orchestra coming to town.

‘When I was a child,’ says Huryurt, ‘I used to go round distributing
the paper. The shop owners wore suits, they were so clean cut and
polite. They knew how to behave. Now it’s all changed.’

A page from one of the earliest copies of the paper (circulation just
400) hangs on his office wall next to the 150-year-old printing press
that cranked out every copy of the paper until last year.

Beneath the lead story advising readers about the latest machinations
of the President Dwight Eisenhower about half a century ago is an
article telling of a ball to be held in the city centre. ‘All the
night will be full of surprises,’ the paper says.

The only surprise you find in Kars in the evenings now is if there
is anyone on the streets. By night the centre is deserted. Many of
the streets are pitch black, lighting being a luxury the city cannot
afford. In the day Kars has a worn-out feeling, with shabby shops
selling dusty merchandise, unemployed men gathering at street corners
like unwanted rubbish.

Like much of Turkey, Kars looks to the EU to sort out its
problems. Residents hope the country’s membership will bludgeon their
government into reopening the border with Armenia, closed since 1993,
believing trade will again flow from Armenia and the Caucasus beyond.

The city has received attention recently because it is the setting
for the most recent book, Snow, by Turkey’s renowned novelist, Orhan
Pamuk. Appearing at one of the Turkey-EU conferences that have become
a feature of Istanbul life in the past year, Pamuk stirred a sleepy
audience to wild applause with ringing praise for the change Turkey
has undergone in the past few years.

‘The EU must understand its powers of transformation. Had we discussed
the issues we have talked about today six or seven years ago we’d have
been condemned as traitors. The hope of joining the EU can change a
country,’ said the author, who has best informed the outside world
about Turkey’s struggles to understand itself.

‘We are changing, we are leaving an identity. We are stepping outside
our muddy shoes.’

Turkey’s political transformation, on paper at least, has been
breathtaking in speed and scale. Less than a decade ago the military,
which had launched three coups since 1960, eased the Islamist
government out of power. Turkey was a byword for human rights abuse
and systematic torture.

In just four years there has been a near-revolutionary change in
the judicial and constitutional infrastructure. The death penalty
has been abolished, civil and criminal codes overhauled. Education
and broadcasting in Kurdish, a language embraced by up to a fifth of
the population, has been legalised. Penalties for torture have been
raised and the military pushed out of positions of influence.

What happens in parliament in Ankara is one thing. Change on the
ground is another, however. Across the country’s troubled south-east,
which bore the brunt of the Kurdish insurrection of the Eighties and
Nineties and the state’s brutal response to it, security forces are
on high alert. Kongra-Gel, the Kurdish paramilitary group once called
the PKK, has renounced its five-year ceasefire. Human rights groups
say more than 400 people have died since the summer.

There are signs the security forces have learnt some lessons from
the days when their heavy-handed response to the PKK fed the Kurdish
resistance. Hundreds of thousands – maybe millions – of Kurds were
forced from their homes. It was a brutal operation, often conducted
at the end of a tank barrel. Villages were burnt, crops destroyed,
animals slaughtered.

Tunceli, an eastern province, was once criss-crossed with military
checkpoints; journalists sneaked in past the security forces to
where around 2,000 paramilitaries hid and operated from the Munzur
mountains. Now most checkpoints have gone but on one of the roads
out of the province’s capital one still observes military comings
and goings. But a sign apologises to travellers for any inconvenience
and wishes drivers a safe journey.

It’s good public relations, but the Kurdish conflict is not entirely
banished. In Mardin province last month a lorry driver, Ahmet Kaymaz,
and his 12 -year-old son Ugur were shot dead by the security forces
outside their home. Eleven bullets were pumped into the boy’s
back. The authorities said they were terrorists. Ugur was wearing
his slippers. Shooting first, and asking questions much later, is a
habit that dies hard.

Yet Turkey’s painful political transformation is as nothing compared
with what is to come. Over the next decade Turkey will have to put
the the EU’s 80,000 page rule book, into law.

Regulations on everything from food hygiene to child labour and bidding
for local authority contracts will have to change. Heather Grabbe,
at the office of the EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn, says the
new central European members believe spending on EU compliance has cost
them between three and four per cent of their gross domestic product.

Turkey, juggling a mountain of debt, has no money to spare. And the
private sector will feel the pain too.

As night falls on Gaziantep, a south-eastern city near the Syrian
border, a belt of blackness hovers around the city. It looks almost
romantic; but it is industrial pollution.

The pollution reaches into the city centre where the air has a gritty,
slightly soupy quality. Once Turkey starts implementing EU pollution
standards, this will have to go. But, wondered one EU diplomat, what
will be reaction when factories start to close because they cannot
or will not pay to clean up their act?

Wander through Gaziantep’s streets, and at every turn you see things
that must change. The butchers who smoke as they cut meat on premises
devoid of refrigeration are in for a rude shock.

‘It will,’ says Cengiz Candar, a former adviser to the late President
Turgut Ozal, ‘be a very difficult process. It will be difficult to
swallow, and if it is swallowed it will be very difficult to digest.’

Candar believes next year will see a rise in support for nationalist
parties, as Turks vent their spleen on an EU demanding everything
and giving little back.

Just a few minutes drive from the relatively prosperous centre of
Gaziantep lies the neighbourhood of Beydile, a classic Turkish shanty
town. Breeze-block houses are thrown up at night to avoid building
regulations, and the electricity, much of it purloined from power
lines, comes and goes.

Families with seven or eight children are common: the people of
Beydile fled from further east to escape the troubles of the Kurdish
insurrection. But they brought with them the rural poverty they fled.

Many speak of Europe as if it were a pot of gold; many also express
hope that their children might escape to the sunlit uplands of the
EU. It is difficult to see what their barely educated children would
do there, except live in a different kind of poverty, devoid of the
community that just about keeps things together in Gaziantep.

Not all of Turkey is like this; but too much of it is for European
tastes. The country, says David Judson, the American-born editor of
the Turkish financial newspaper Referans, is sharply divided.

‘If western Turkey were integrating with the EU you’d be talking
about a country with a per capita income roughly approaching that of
Greece. When you add in the eastern Turkey, parts of which resemble
Afghanistan, you are dealing with a whole different set of issues.’

The bitter wrangle over the recognition of Cyprus cast a shadow over
Turkey’s triumph in Brussels; just three years ago such a result would
have been inconceivable. ‘This was a critical point in history,’ says
Kemal Koprulu, a member of one of Turkey’s most pro-EU think-tanks.

Stirring stuff. But it feels a long way from the checkpoints of
Tunceli, the shanty towns of Gaziantep and the lonely streets of
Kars. Turkey and the EU have taken a leap into the dark; never has the
EU taken on a challenge the size of Turkey; and never in a candidate
have expectations been so high.

The threat of disappointment, even disaster, will be a constant
companion on Turkey’s long journey.