YALCýN DOðAN: A SOLUTION TO THE KURDISH SITUATION IS STILL OUT THERE

Hurriyet, Turkey
April 4 2006

The Democratic Society (DTP) Party official from Siirt who called on
Kurdish citizens to protest is young, still a university student. He
is in his twenties. Would the DTP really have such a hard time finding
a reasonable person to take this guy’s place? For the past week now,
I have been watching and reading about the events taking place in the
Southeast and in Istanbul from abroad. The stance of the foreign press
as to what is taking place here is frightening: they present it with
headlines like “Kurdish uprising in Turkey.” They don’t perceive it
as terror. To counter this, I have been listening to the opinions of
some of my collegues who have actually been in Diyarbakir, and seen
the events live and in person.

Here is the first hand account of one of them:

“I have seen everything happen in Diyarbakir. Those who were attacking
the banks and the stores were in no way shouting PKK slogans. These
were young people who had migrated to the big city from the surrounding
countryside, and who had definitely never entered a big store to
do shopping, who had never set foot into a bank. And now they were
attacking banks, stores, and cars. Above and beyond the PKK, the real
problem for these youth is unemployment, even hunger.”

The PKK is behind these people on the streets. After all, poverty
is the biggest source of support for the PKK. Business owners in
the Southeast have been making the same observations. They are now
repeating the same thing they have been trying to tell Ankara for
years: “The region needs economic development.” This is not new.

On the look out for an identity

Of course, while this all may be true, it is not accurate to view
the events only through the lens of the economy, nor simply through
the lens of terror. There is, after all, Kurdish nationalism to deal
with too. This is Kurdish nationalism that rose with the fall of the
Ottoman Empire. Some theories say that nationalism creates nations,
while other theories attest that nations create nationalism. I say
that nationalism is really a search for identity. On the question
of identity, the famous novelist Amin Maalouf has this to say: “An
attack on a person’s language is the biggest attack possible on his
identity.” (This is from Maalouf’s book, ‘Deadly Identities.’)

Another writer on the topic, Hakan Ozoglu, notes in his book “The
Ottoman State and Kurdish Nationalism” that “land played an important
role in opening the way to Kurdish nationalism and thus the development
of the Kurdish identity.” Ozoglu’s thesis is that land is in fact more
important than language and religion in terms of identity formation. I
think Ozoglu is right here.

Three historical reasons

Today’s separationist movement rests on a demand for land. The
fight over identity is at the forefront of this movement. I wonder
how effective today’s Kurdish nationalism would be had there been a
wide-spread initiative to boslter the Kurdish identity, and to remove
the barriers from economic development in the region? Historically,
there have been three factors which instigated Kurdish nationalism.

These were the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire, the Kurdish-Armenian
clashes, and the pressure of Turkish nationalism. Despite the seeming
desperation of the situation we find ourselves in today, there is
a solution.

There are two basic precautions that could be taken, one political,
the other economic, to prevent further disruption to life in the
Southeast and throughout Turkey. The political precaution would
be to reduce the 10% vote threshhold in the elections. Because of
the current 10% threshhold, an entire region has no parliamentary
representation. This matter is one of the most basic barriers to
solving the Kurdish problem. Let the 10% threshhold be reduced, and
allow Kurdish parties representation in the Turkish Parliament (TBMM).

The second precaution that could be taken is economic. There has
to be a shift in programs that will help reduce unemployment in the
region. Programs favoring investment in the Southeast must be given
priority. The sabotage by the PKK against some of the new investments
in the Southeast only serves to underline what a potentially important
effect these programs could have on the region. The time when we
could simply view these events as terrorism has now passed.

We are facing a problem which must be solved as a whole, not just in
bits and pieces.

–Boundary_(ID_DspLojBs97NSx1vxzkMW4Q)–