How Turkey fails its Kurds
By Jonathan Power International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2005
BUCUK TEPE, Turkey This is the edge of tomorrow’s Europe, at least if Turkey
gets its way. A desolate mud-built village, close to the Syrian border,
reduced to rubble by the Turkish Army when it was battling the rebels of the
Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, is slowly being repopulated by a brave
few.
The families are understandably nervous. The PKK has recently restarted its
insurgency, breaking a five-year truce, angry with the government’s slow
delivery on its promises to allow Kurdish in the primary schools, full-scale
broadcasting in Kurdish and to invest in economic development. “This
violence is what we don’t want,” says one man, living with his extended
family under nothing more than a homemade canopy.
Five minutes drive from the river Tigris, which farther downstream watered
the first of humankind’s civilizations, we engage in what seems an almost
surreal conversation. On the one hand, the grandfather, who has fathered 12
children, explains how they make a living with their herd of sheep out of
what appears to be stony, barren land without a blade of green grass to be
seen. On the other, he says, although in their hearts they feel Asian they
want to enter the Europe Union. “Europe will give us peace and give us Kurds
our rights,” he says. “And give us food and jobs,” one of his sons adds.
A few kilometers away is another larger, more prosperous, village that
escaped the war unscathed. The villagers grow wheat and lentils, and
although they say the water is of poor quality, every house has a television
and half the men of the village, as they converse with me in a large circle,
show me their cellphones. The refrain is the same, even from the young men
who hover standing at the back: “We don’t want to fight again. We Kurds want
Europe to accept Turkey. We feel deep in ourselves Asian, but now we want to
be European.”
But how can modern Europe swallow all this? The poverty, the ignorance
(girls are rarely educated out here), and now the renewed boiling of war.
This is not the civilization of contemporary Europe, and probably not even
of ancient Mesopotamia. This is life almost, if not quite, at its most
elementary and unsparing.
The Turkish government is desperate to cement on Oct. 3 the agreement to
begin negotiations for entry to the European Union, but as one senior
official told me, Ankara “seems never to miss a chance to shoot itself in
the foot.” This year Turkey has witnessed the police beating up women
demonstrators in Istanbul, the indictment of Turkey’s best-known novelist,
Orhan Pamuk, for writing that the Armenian accusations of Turkish genocide
in the days of the Ottoman Empire need to be looked at openly and, most
important, the bureaucratic go-slow on implementing what was promised to the
Kurds – thus providing the kindling for a renewal of the insurgency.
Some of Turkey’s liberal voices are driven to wonder what is really going on
behind the scenes. Inur Cevik, who was once a prime minister’s senior aide
and now publishes the English-language newspaper The Anatolian, is described
by one senior European ambassador as someone who “is pretty damned true.” He
told me that he is convinced that parts of the army are conniving with the
PKK to restart the fighting in order to derail the Turkish approach to
Europe. But, for all the ineptness of the Turkish government that gives rise
to such conspiracy theories, the likelihood is that these are rogue
elements.
Moreover, apart from the fact that the high command of the Turkish Army is
firmly pro-Europe, as their mentor Ataturk would have expected them to be,
the PKK itself is also split on Europe, with some elements appearing to
realize that an anti-European stance is not popular in this southeastern
corner of Turkey.
Neither, for all its romantic allure, is the PKK’s occasional talk of a
united Kurdistan. Kurds are impressed with the degree of political and
economic autonomy that the Iraqi Kurds have won during the recent
negotiations on the Iraqi constitution, but they are also aware that it is a
precarious autonomy and that the government of that province is still,
despite elections, essentially feudal, dominated by two families.
Most of Turkey’s Kurds want to be European and are neither seriously tempted
by the PKK or a united Kurdistan. But Turkey still doesn’t know how to bring
its Kurds up to the starting line. And in making this grave mistake it is
probably delaying the chances of Turkey of entering the Europe Union as
quickly as it wants to.