MARK THOMAS REFUSES TO IGNORE THE PROBLEM OF TURKEY

Columnists
Mark Thomas
Monday 24th April 2006

New Statesman, UK
April 19 2006

There is one EU problem that is resolutely not going away and will
only get worse: that is, Turkey’s membership, writes Mark Thomas

For some in Britain, slagging off the European Union (something I am
about to do for the next 900 words) is an instinctive act of patriotic
faith, akin to not knowing the second verse of the National Anthem. For
many of us, the EU remains a quasi-democratic institution in search of
an electorate. Quite tellingly, we tend to see the EU not so much as a
vehicle for change as a means of registering a protest vote. Remember
Robert Kilroy-Silk? Who can forget a tan like that? Britons loved him
so much that we voted for him to leave the country five days a week,
to spend that time in a place he says he despises.

The EU has become adept at dealing with its many problems and crises.

By which I mean it ignores them and hopes they will go away. The EU
constitution is a case in point. However, there is one problem that
is resolutely not going away and is going to get worse: that is,
Turkey’s membership. The patrician consensus is that Turkey joining
would be a jolly good thing as having a Muslim state in the EU would
bring all sorts of benefits. However, Turkey’s membership is dependent
on the country introducing significant reforms – including many in
the area of minorities’ rights, eradicating the role of the military
in the running of the state and bringing democratic procedures into
the institutions of the country.

So far, Turkey has failed to come up to scratch, but more importantly
the EU has allowed this situation to continue. The deal was this:
Turkey is allowed into the EU but the EU gets to monitor and
investigate human-rights abuses and pressurise Turkey to reform.

Neither side has kept to the deal.

The Kurdish region of Turkey has suffered a steep rise in violence
over the past weeks, with a huge deployment of troops against the
civilian population. The Turkish police and military have attacked
demonstrators using tear gas, batons, tanks and other lethal weapons.

The Kurdish cities have seen a de facto return to state-of-emergency
rule. Significant numbers of Kurdish trade unionists, human-rights
defenders and political activists have been imprisoned, many of them
shot and wounded by troops. Across the Kurdish region, at least 15
people have died, including three children, aged three, six and nine.

Reports from human-rights defenders state that some of those killed
were shot in the head at close range, suggesting execution.

The mayor of Diyarbakir, who tried to mediate between the authorities
and protesters, has been physically attacked by the military, which
has called for his suspension. And democratic Kurdish parties are
being raided and their members imprisoned. How did it return to this
so quickly?

The events that led to this escalation started with the funeral,
on 28 March, of four PKK guerrillas, attended by a crowd of between
20,000 and 30,000 Kurds. After provocation from the local police,
mourners clashed with the authorities and troops were called in.

However, the real motor at work has been the failure of the Turkish
state to work with the Kurds to take advantage of the PKK ceasefire.

Ankara has refused to negotiate. “We will not talk to terrorists,”
the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declares. And he has done
so with the backing of the EU. Instead of urging dialogue, the EU has
followed the UK and the United States in proscribing the PKK, even
though it announced a ceasefire and formally renounced violence. Just
about every attempt by grass-roots Kurdish groups to form inclusive
democratic movements has been regarded by the EU and the UK as merely
another group to add to the list of terrorist organisations. At the
same time, unemployment, poverty and political stagnation have fuelled
the clashes between Kurds and the Turkish state.

With the region threatening to return to the bad old days of the
mid-1990s, when 3,500 Kurdish villages were destroyed, 30,000 people
killed and over a million Kurds internally displaced, the EU simply has
to intervene. If the deal is that Turkey gets to join if it respects
minority rights and introduces democracy to the institutions of the
state, what happens if it breaks the deal? At the moment, the penalty
is . . . nothing.

The British media tend to regard Turkey through the lens of bird flu
and the occasional bomb, though in tabloid terms Turkey is strictly
sick chickens. Occasionally, the broadsheets will rally round a cause
celèbres, such as the case of the internationally renowned writer
Orhan Pamuk. When he was threatened with prison for mentioning the
Armenian genocide, the literary world rushed to his defence. But
the trouble with causes celèbres is that once the celeb has gone,
little attention remains on the cause.

It is doubtful that Eren Keskin will get the same press attention.

Keskin was the founder of the Legal Aid Office for the Victims of
Sexual Harassment and Rape in Custody. When I met her in 2001, her
Istanbul office was cramped and insalubrious. She talked about how
Kurdish women had to endure sexual harassment and rape at the hands
of the Turkish authorities. In 2002, she gave a lecture in Germany
describing her work and the horrific scale of rape in custody in
Turkey. For daring to speak about this, she was put on trial back
home. This year, she was sentenced to ten months for the crime of
“insulting the moral character of the military”.

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress