TURKEY: BROTHERS IN ARMS?
By Elif Aydýn

The Muslim News, UK
icle=3298
Dec 20 2007

The protracted problem of how to deal with terrorists agitating for
separatism in Turkey is back on the agenda with a vengeance. With
the Chief Prosecutor filing a motion to force the closure of the
Democratic Society Party (DTP) for alleged links with the Kurdistan
Workers Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan – PKK) and cross border
incursions by the Turkish military in northern Iraq, the issue has
resurfaced in recent weeks with demands for an insistence on clearer
boundaries and concrete proposals for conflict resolution.

It wasn’t anticipated when the Justice and Development Party (AKP)
won the elections on July 22, that the party’s new government
would adopt quite so belligerent an attitude towards the PKK rebels
operating from bases in northern Iraq and causing much bloodshed
in Turkey’s southeast. Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in
the weeks leading up to the elections patently refused to sanction
a cross border operation by the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) despite
public protestations by the head of the TSK, General Yaþar Buyukanýt,
that such an operation would yield significant and important results
in the battle against renewed terrorist activity in the south east.

Erdogan throughout his electioneering was keen to project his party as
one that saw the problems in the south east as socio-economic; rooted
in cultural and economic neglect, and not political, in terms of a
concerted programme in support of secession. He was the first PM when
in 2005 he openly acknowledged the existence of a ‘Kurdish problem’
and of the failure of the state and successive governments to foster
economic growth and investment in the south east as a palliative to
the discontent that had festered since. His plan of action to reverse
the history of the state’s neglect has been one which focussed on
the expansion of cultural rights, consistent with the demands of
the EU negotiation process, and on economic development. But in
recent months, the escalation in deaths of soldiers on the border,
as well as matters well beyond the region itself, has changed much of
the Erdogan’s and the party’s attitude towards endorsing a military
operation in northern Iraq.

It’s no coincidence of course that the vote in the Turkish Parliament
supporting a cross border operation to rout out PKK rebels that
use the Kandil mountain region to launch offensives into Turkish
territory occurred not soon after a vote in the US House Foreign
Affairs Committee supporting claims for the designation of the
massacre of Armenians in 1915 as ‘genocide’. The Turkish President,
Prime Minister and Foreign Minister had been active, as with every
previous attempt by the House of Representatives, to concede to the
rigorous lobbying of Armenians, to stress the impact of any such vote
on US-Turkish relations. Indeed, so significant was the likely impact
of a vote of support that US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice,
and President George Bush warned the House of the damage its obstinacy
would present to US strategy and interests in Iraq.

For some, Turkey’s behaviour in threatening to cut off vital logistical
support for and co-operation with the US in Iraq in protest over the
Armenian issue, and the Turkish General Assembly’s vote in favour
of military action is commensurate with that of a behemoth whose
ardent nationalism, societal as well as statist, is responsible for
the disdain with which ethnic and religious diversity is treated in
Turkey. The policy of Turkification which has directed the building of
the nation since the Republic’s inception, and latterly, a penal code
which criminalises insults to ‘Turkishness’ and Turkish institutions,
both undermine ethnic pluralism and critical perspectives of the
nation’s history.

Armenians would no doubt contest that the suspension of the vote on
the floor of the House is yet another example of Turkey’s refusal to
face up to its past. And the administration in northern Iraq, which
protested furiously at any attempted incursion into its territory by
the Turkish army, is similarly unimpressed by the militarist posturing
of its powerful neighbour.

Regional and Armenian diaspora politics aside, the problem of
the Demokrat Turkiye Partisi (Democratic Turkey Party, DTP) in
Turkey’s broadening democracy, like so many other internal squabbles;
involving scarf clad women and courageous journalists to Christian
missionaries and foreign property investors, is about the comfortable
fit of diversity and difference in a society long led to believe that
uniformity and a single, supra all embracing identity was its source
of strength.

Many in the AKP have themselves learnt from the harsh experience
of February 28, 1997, what Turks call the post modern coup; that
ousted the coalition government of Necmettin Erbakan’s Refah Party,
as well as the closure of the party’s successor, Fazilet, in 2001,
what it’s like to be at the receiving end of discriminatory policies
and establishment prejudices.

The ruling party’s backing of reforms contingent to its EU membership
bid, has had the intended consequence of broadening the liberties
it seeks for its own constituency, with respect to the freedom of
religion, to the Kurdish minority. The AKP’s insistence on the Republic
encompassing those of both a religious and non religious inclination
is as easily extended in this discourse on the indivisibility of the
unitary state and the recognition of ethnic, as well as religious,
difference.

The distance travelled by the AKP to render itself a party of the
people, not of ‘a’ people, something evident in the party’s candidate
list for the 2007 general elections, governs its attitude towards
its Kurdish brethren.

While Kurdish parliamentary hopefuls contested the election as
independents, so as to overcome the 10% threshold to parliamentary
representation, the party was trumped by the AKP at the ballot box
with the incumbents almost doubling their support in the South East,
attracting more than half the votes in the region’s 20 largest Kurdish
populated cities.

The AKP’s hitherto more co-operational stance and its emphasis on
political methods for divesting ethnicity based party organisations
of their ethnic constituency and a separatist agenda has seen Prime
Minister Erdogan adopt an inclusionary policy in the make up of his
new administration. Efkan Ala was announced as the new Permanent
Undersecretary to the PM’s office. Ala is former governor of Batman
and Diyarbakýr, densely Kurdish populated provinces in the South East,
and a well respected figure for his handling of ethnic tensions in
the region through the 1990s.

The current cabinet also includes several deputies representing
southeast regions, ensuring that an ethno-regional representation
in the Government persists at a time when hostilities at the border
have given rise to sufficient grievance in the wider population to
return deputies from the far right nationalist party, as well as
Kurdish representatives.

Just as the AKP over the years has had to imprint its commitment
to Turkey’s secular democracy on the populace in words and deeds,
so too is the DTP required to make clear its rejection of terrorism
and violence for political gains if it is to be a valued and valuable
actor in Turkish politics. While the establishment and sections of the
population at large have in the past demonstrated their weaknesses in
failing to reject the inherent flaws of a nation building policy that
manufactured consent but didn’t entirely merit it, through neglecting
difference; ethnic, religious or otherwise, the long path trodden by
the AKP, with the aid of the EU walking stick, holds out some promise
for the future. Having learnt that protesting one’s commitment to the
rules of the democratic game must be evidenced in deeds and not merely
panegyrics, its demands that the DTP and residents in Turkey’s south
east speak out and clearly against terrorism as the sine qua non to
normalised political engagement, is a lesson borne of personal and
party experience.

Broadening the Turkish imagination to willingly embrace the country’s
diversity is a struggle in which, as Erdogan rightly insists, all
Turks are involved whatever their ethnic, religious or linguistic
origins. "Those who have embraced the fundamental values of this
country are my brothers," he says.

And of those that demand the unilateral and unequivocal backing
of democracy as the means through which to deal with diversity
in dignity, let them too demonstrate their commitment to the
‘brotherhood’. Amending aspects of the penal code and the law on
foundations would be a good place to start wouldn’t you say so,
brother?

–Boundary_(ID_/EKXUYj/Fhiripd3U/yov g)–