The Economist
March 19, 2005
U.S. Edition

The wrongs and rights of minorities

Turkey has yet to face up to its diversity

THE country has moved some way towards meeting the Copenhagen
criteria for EU membership. It has abolished the death penalty,
saving the life of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the PKK, an
outlawed Kurdish organisation responsible for a guerrilla war through
much of the 1990s. It has revised the penal code (previously
unchanged since 1926) and reinforced the rights of women. It has
introduced a new law allowing broadcasting in any language, including
Kurdish. And it has brought to an end the random searches that used
to be common, particularly in the east. Now nobody can be searched
without a court order.

The government has also introduced an official policy of zero
tolerance towards torture, for which its police and security forces
became infamous in the West in 1978 with the release of “Midnight
Express”, Alan Parker’s film about a young American imprisoned on
drugs charges. The punishment for torture has been increased, and
sentences may no longer be deferred or converted into fines, as often
happened in the past.

But changing the law is one thing, changing habits is another. A
villager in the east who gets searched by the state police may still
not dare demand to see a court order. The police forces, it is said,
are being retrained, but the Turkish Human Rights Foundation (TIHV)
says that of 918 people treated at its centres in 2004, 337 claimed
they had been tortured. The comparable figures for 2003 were 925 and
340. The TIHV says that even in 2004, “torture was applied
systematically by police, gendarmerie and special units in
interrogation centres.” It claims that 21 people died in
“extra-judicial killings” during the year.

In its October 2004 report on Turkish accession, the European
Commission emphasised the need for further “strengthening and full
implementation of provisions related to the respect of fundamental
freedoms and protection of human rights, including women’s rights,
trade-union rights, minority rights and problems faced by non-Muslim
religious communities.”

>From its very beginnings the republic has been confused about
minorities. In his book, “Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two
Worlds”, Stephen Kinzer, a New York Times journalist, wrote:
“Something about the concept of diversity frightens Turkey’s ruling
elite.” Officially the state recognises only three minorities: those
mentioned in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, signed after Ataturk’s army
had thrown out the occupying forces left over from the first world
war. The treaty specifically protects the rights of the Armenian,
Greek and Jewish communities in the country.

In the early years of the republic there were Kurds in parliament,
and the deputy speaker was an Alevi (a religious minority of which
more later). But after Kurdish uprisings in 1925 and 1937 were
brutally suppressed, the republic went into denial about its cultural
diversity. The word “minority” came to refer only to the Lausanne
trio, who were non-Muslims and indeed were increasingly perceived as
non-Turks. If you are a member of a minority in Turkey today you are,
almost by definition, seen as not fully Turkish.

The Kemalists’ narrow brand of nationalism has helped to suppress the
country’s sensitivity to minorities. At Anit Kabir, one of the huge
murals in the museum below Ataturk’s tomb depicts the Greek army
marching through occupied Anatolia in 1919, with a soldier on
horseback about to bayonet a beautiful Turkish girl. In the
background is a Greek cleric brandishing a cross and inciting the
soldiers. The picture caption explains (in English): “During these
massacres the fact that clerics played a provoking role has been
proven by historical evidence.” As anti-clerical as Ataturk was
(whatever the faith), it is hard to believe that he would have
approved of such a message.

Turkey has also found it difficult to face up to the Armenians’
persistent allegation that the massacres of 1915, in the maelstrom of
the first world war, were genocide. Gunduz Aktan, the head of an
Ankara think-tank and a former Turkish ambassador in Athens,
dismisses the claims as “Holocaust envy”.

The most troublesome minority in recent years has been the biggest of
them all, the Kurds. Where minorities are concerned, size does
matter. The Armenians, Greeks and Jews in Turkey today number in the
tens of thousands; the Kurds up to 15m. In the 15-year guerrilla war
in the east between the Turkish army and security forces and Mr
Ocalan’s PKK, some 35,000 civilians and troops were killed. Many more
villagers were displaced (some say perhaps a million), terrorised out
of their homes, often by fellow Kurds, and forced to move to cities
far away. But nobody really knows what proportion of the Kurds the
PKK stands for.

The more extreme Kurds say they want their own homeland – “Kurdistan”,
a word that provokes shivers in Ankara – to embrace their people living
in Iran and Iraq as well as in Turkey. The more moderate Turkish
Kurds want to be allowed to speak their own language, to be taught it
in school, and to hear it broadcast – all of which they are slowly and
grudgingly being granted. DEHAP’s party congress this year was
attended by Mr Ocalan’s sister and Feleknas Uca, a German member of
the European Parliament. Both addressed the meeting in Kurdish. The
Kurds’ cause has received extensive publicity abroad. Leyla Zana, a
member of the Turkish parliament imprisoned for ten years for
speaking in Kurdish in the parliament building, was released last
year after intense pressure from abroad. The Kurdish Human Rights
Project, a London-based charity, has been effective in bringing
Kurdish cases to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Among them are thousands of claims for compensation for loss of
property as a result of the military incursion against the PKK in the
1990s. Such cases, however, can be heard in Strasbourg only if
domestic laws offer no prospect of compensation, and Turkey recently
passed a law “on damages incurred from terrorism and combating
terrorism”. The governor of Tunceli, a town close to mountains where
the PKK was particularly active, said recently that 6,200 people in
his province had applied for compensation under the new law.

The government is also making modest attempts to help Kurds who were
forcibly removed from their villages to return home. Incidents in the
east are now few and far between, even though last summer the PKK,
renamed Kongra-Gel, ended a ceasefire called after Mr Ocalan was
arrested in Kenya in 1999. The organisation said the government had
reneged on a promised amnesty to its members.

So has the Kurdish problem been more or less resolved? Not if you
listen to the many Turks who believe in conspiracy theories. Such
theories thrive in a society that still thinks transparency in public
affairs is an oxymoron. After the tsunami disaster in Asia on
December 26th last year, the American embassy in Ankara felt obliged
to issue an official denial of colourful Turkish newspaper reports
that the wave had been caused by American underwater nuclear
explosions designed to kill large numbers of Muslims.

The conspiracy theory about the Kurds goes something like this: Mr
Ocalan, although held in solitary confinement on a remote island in
the Sea of Marmara, still controls the larger part of the
organisation through visits from his brother, his sister and a
lawyer. Since his captors are said to be able to control what
messages he conveys in return for supplying him with cigarettes and
other favours, why would he end the ceasefire unless dark forces
wished to resurrect the Kurdish uprising? And why ever would they
want to do that? In order to undermine the EU negotiations by
reigniting civil war in the east, concludes the theory.

This may not be as absurd as it sounds. There are powerful groups
inside Turkey who see no advantage in joining the EU, and many Turks
believe in the presence of dark forces inside the state. Anyone who
doubts the idea of an état profond, a deep state – a combination of
military officers, secret-service agents, politicians and businessmen
that pull invisible strings – is silenced with one word: “Susurluk”.
This is the name of a town in western Turkey where in 1996 a Mercedes
car crashed into a lorry, killing three of its four occupants. These
proved to be an eerily ill-assorted bunch: a notorious gangster,
sought by Interpol, and his mistress; a Kurdish MP and clan chief
suspected of renting out his private army to the Turkish authorities
in their fight against the PKK; and a top-ranking police officer who
had been director of the country’s main police academy. What they
were doing together that night may never be known – the sole survivor,
the clan chief, claims to remember nothing – but it is sure to fuel
Turkish conspiracy theories for years to come.

There is another large minority in Turkey that has received nothing
like as much attention as the Kurds. Most Turks are Sunni Muslims,
whereas most Arabs are Shiites. But there is a group called the Alevi
who have lived in Anatolia for many centuries and who are not Sunni.

Their main prophet, like the Shiites’, is not Mohammed but his
son-in-law, Ali. Most of them maintain that their religion is
separate from Islam, and that it is a purely Anatolian faith based on
Shaman and Zoroastrian beliefs going back 6,000 years. Christian,
Jewish and Islamic influences were added later, though the Alevi
accept that the Islamic influence is the strongest.

Their number is uncertain, because no census in Turkey has asked
about religious affiliation since the early 1920s. At that time the
Alevi accounted for about 35% of the then population of 13m. Today
the best estimate is that they make up about a fifth of a population
that has grown to 70m, their share whittled down by the success of
the republic’s policy of “ignore them and hope they will assimilate”.

Many of the Alevi are also Kurds. The most predominantly Alevi town
is Tunceli, once a PKK stronghold and a place notably short of
mosques. The Alevi are not keen on them because Ali, their prophet,
was murdered in one. Their houses of prayer are called cemevi.

In the cities they tend to practise their religion in private. Kazim
Genc, an Alevi human-rights lawyer, says he discourages his daughter
from mentioning her faith because Sunni Muslims think Alevi rites
include sexual orgies and incest. Of the AK Party’s 367 members of
parliament, not one has admitted to being an Alevi.

The current government treats the Alevi as merely a cultural group,
not a religious minority. That way it can sidestep its legal
obligation to set aside space in towns and cities for religious
communities’ “places of worship”. When in May 2004 a group of Alevi
in the Istanbul district of Kartal asked for land to be allocated for
a cemevi, the local governor said they were Muslims and Kartal had
enough mosques already. Indeed it has: almost 700 of them. But there
is only one cemevi. The Alevi have taken the case to an Istanbul
court and are awaiting a hearing.

Another case has gone all the way to the Court of Human Rights in
Strasbourg, a journey that the Kurds have taken with some success. It
involves a student who is trying to establish his right to stay away
from compulsory religious classes in school on the ground that they
teach only Sunni Islam. The authorities may have to learn to come to
terms with yet more scary diversity.