THE BIG PICTURE: ETHNIC CHALLENGES IN POST-AK PARTY TURKISH POLITICS

Today’s Zaman, Turkey
April 25 2008

Turks tend to be cynical about the European Union’s intentions when
it comes to dealing with the Kurdish issue.

That is to say, they view European attempts to make Turkey more
liberal and respectful of the fundamental rights of its ethnic Kurdish
community as a heinous attempt to create an independent Kurdish
state. Instead, Turks could reciprocate their European counterparts’
goodwill to promote ethnic and cultural pluralism in Turkey by simply
promoting the Flemish and Walloon cultures of Belgium; the Scottish,
Welsh and Northern Irish cultures of the United Kingdom; the Breton and
North African cultures of France; the Albanian and Sicilian cultures of
Italy; Spain’s Basque and Catalan cultures; and the Turkish culture of
Germany. No need to mention that Ankara could and should have used its
diplomatic clout to convince Athens to recognize its ethnic Turkish
and Muslim minorities, which it has so far not even included in the
national census. Skeptics would argue that Athens indeed intends to
let these minorities diminish either through migration to Turkey or
assimilation into the orthodox Greek identity.

Regardless of any external meddling, Turkey’s Kurdish issue seems
already on the way to becoming a major source of instability for Turkey
in the coming months. Though the Kurds have enjoyed unprecedented
political expansion during the rule of the Justice and Development
Party (AK Party) government and 20 pro-Kurdish representatives won
seats in Parliament, enabling them to later form a parliamentary
group, it is dubious whether they will enjoy the same political space
in the absence of a unifying party like the AK Party. As a matter
of fact, even the current situation may be unsatisfactory for the
Kurds. Sezgin Tanrıkulu, head of the Diyarbakır Bar Association,
notes that a sizeable segment of the Kurdish population sees armed
struggle as legitimate because they think they are excluded from the
democratic process. Given the course of developments in Turkey, a real
exclusion of Kurds from the political process will likely take place
when and if the AK Party is shut down, literally leaving the Kurdish
deputies alone in Parliament with the Republican People’s Party (CHP)
and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).

The other scenario is the following: Neither opposition party
cooperates with the ruling AK Party to amend the Constitution to
prevent the AK Party’s closure, and then the government calls for an
early election on June 29, 2008, combining parliamentary and local
elections, and the AK Party gains a landslide electoral victory
on both ballots, either severely marginalizing the opposition in
Parliament or even leaving them out of Parliament due to the 10 percent
entry threshold. The new parliamentary arithmetic, which would seem
crushingly in favor of the AK Party and relatively in favor of the
pro-Kurdish politicians, would mobilize ultranationalist groups against
the Kurdish presence in Parliament while their representation is either
marginalized or democratically left out of Parliament. Theoretically,
the presence of pro-Kurdish politicians in Parliament and the
political mobilization of Turkey’s ethnic-Kurdish citizens along with
it should create a peaceful cultural plurality. Practically, however,
in the absence of two or more parties in Parliament at the same time
balancing each other out on the Kurdish issue, a Turkish-versus-Kurdish
struggle for political gain is likely to be the main source of conflict
in Turkish politics.

Ethnic plurality or ethnic conflict?

Under purely secular circumstances where two or more ethnic groups
view one another distinct as opposed to similar, the expansion of
politics enables these ethnic groups’ political mobilization and
relative economic wellbeing, which in turn sustains their political
mobilization. Therefore political and economic expansion of the ethnic
groups strengthens ethnic mobilization in general, in turn increasing
prospects for conflict among various ethnic groups.

Subscribing to the constructivist approach, prominent American
sociologist Joane Nagel argues that ethnicity is not a primordial
identity but a way of self-definition: an identity constructed
and reconstructed parallel to changing political and economic
circumstances and the desire of reaping the benefits of those changing
circumstances. Nagel further explains that parallel to political and
economic modernization and to the extent that resources are available,
ethnic identities diffuse from smaller to larger scale in order to
seize emerging political and economic opportunities. Therefore the
concurrent diminishing and emergence of ethnic boundaries takes
place as small ethnic groups join together to create a larger and
stronger political unit under an overarching ethnic identity, or
they dissolve themselves into a larger and stronger ethnic group to
achieve their particular goals within and through that larger ethnic
group. Once the small ethnic groups achieve their intended goals,
they may reclaim their original ethnic identity.

The emergence and development of the ethnic Kurdish identity in Turkey
illustrates such a political construction of ethnic identities. Ankara
faced the Kurdish ethnicity challenge for the first time when the
Allied Powers of World War I dictated at the Treaty of Sèvres in
1920 that the Kurds should be given autonomy after the division of
the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, the treaty was not ratified by the
Turkish Parliament, and three years later, in the Lausanne Treaty,
Britain withdrew its earlier support for Kurdish autonomy to gain
Turkish support to isolate Russia. Neither then nor later — at
least so far — has the variety within the ethnic Kurdish identity
been recognized. That is to say, the ethnic Kurdish identity has been
viewed as monolithic for political reasons and its sub-categories —
such as Kurmanji-speaking Kurds, Sorani-speaking Kurds, Zaza-speaking
Kurds, Alevi Kurds, Sunni Kurds and Assyrian Kurds — have not been
mentioned. It would only be reasonable for both Kurdish leaders and
the external actors who have historically shown great interest in
Kurdish autonomy to sustain an overarching Kurdish identity to achieve
certain political and economic goals. However once the Kurds achieve
a political and economic autonomy, one can expect that the fault
lines among those sub-Kurdish identities to re-emerge and further
ethnic division take place. Then, one can even expect an Armenian
claim over the Kurdish entity on the basis that a sizeable number of
Armenians had converted to Islam and joined the Kurds to avoid the
forced displacement imposed by the Ottoman state during World War I.

However the causes that led to the emergence and development of
a seemingly monolithic Kurdish identity cannot be limited to the
instrumental calculations of both Kurdish leaders and their foreign
allies. As a matter of fact, the Turkish state’s repressive policies,
or fascist policies, as some may put it, against Kurdish locals during
the course of the fight against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK) have also greatly contributed to the construction of a unified
ethnic Kurdish identity. Not only the poorly managed displacement of
the Kurdish population from village to city, but the mistreatment and
torture of Kurdish individuals due to alleged ties to the PKK have
solidified the ethnic Kurdish identity against the state. So the
Kurdish people’s ever-increasing grievances were most effective in
the political formation of the distinct Kurdish identity. After all,
as Aliza Marcus notes in her "Blood and Belief," how would Abdullah
Ocalan manipulate Kurds to take up arms against the Turkish state
without even firing one bullet himself throughout the 17 years in
which he managed to administer the PKK from Damascus?

>From mountain to Parliament: happily ever after?

Ocalan’s 1999 capture and the subsequent dispersion of the PKK’s
leadership increased hopes for a non-violent resolution to Turkey’s
so-called Kurdish problem. With the CIA’s assistance, the Turkish
secret service took Ocalan into custody right after he left the Greek
Embassy in Kenya hoping to flee to Holland. The first video images
of Ocalan, in which he pleaded, "I love my country. My mother is a
Turk. If I can be of service, I will," were probably more disappointing
and devastating to the pro-PKK Kurds than anything else up until
that point. No matter how regretful the Kurdish nationalists have
been for years and the comrades lost to the PKK’s armed struggle,
they are unlikely to give up pursuit of their ethno-nationalist goals.

Turkey’s recent political and legal reforms to accommodate ethnic and
cultural plurality in the political space provide a fertile ground
for the non-violent pursuit of ethnic Kurdish nationalism. The
very fact that the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) has
so far peacefully coexisted with the Turkish nationalist MHP in
Parliament illustrates a significant change in Turkish politics. The
predecessors of the DTP, the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party
(HADEP) and Democracy Party (DEP), were both shut down and their
members banned from party politics while serving jail time. The
question is whether this change is to stay or is just contingent on
the ruling AK Party’s parliamentary majority. If it is due to the AK
Party, then the post-AK Party Parliament would be too small for the
pro-Kurdish DTP to survive. The shrinking political space for Kurds
would eventually lead to increased PKK violence. If the change is
because Turkish nationalists have indeed liberalized, then the ethnic
fault lines between Turks and Kurds are likely to deepen because the
DTP and the emerging pro-Kurdish civic organizations would want to
maximize their ethnic interests, which is quite normal and acceptable.

What will happen, then? Will Kurds be able to pursue their goals
through politics happily ever after? Quite unlikely… In the absence
of a majority center-right party in Parliament such as the AK Party,
the military will inevitably step in to eliminate rising ethnic
tensions between Turkish and Kurdish nationalists. Likely attacks by
ultranationalists on Turkish citizens of Kurdish origin would only
increase nationwide instability and insecurity, thereby making a
regulative military interference amenable to the public.

What if the AK Party is not shut down? In other words, what if the
ruling AK Party avoids being shut down by going for an early election
on June 29, as has been proposed by a senior party member? According
to AK Party deputy Salih Kapusuz, the AK Party will first seek to
convince the CHP and MHP to support the government’s constitutional
amendment plan to toughen political party closure. If the two do not
cooperate, the AK Party will alternatively resort to its earlier
strategy of early elections to overcome the closure case against
it by increasing its public support, just like it did to overcome
the chaos sparked by the AK Party’s nomination of Abdullah Gul for
president in 2007. According to various recent polls, if there were
an election today, the AK Party would be likely to get in excess of
51 percent of the popular vote, while the CHP and the MHP are likely
to garner 12 and 9 percent or less, respectively. Given that political
parties must receive at least 10 percent of the popular vote to enter
Parliament, there is even a possibility of an electoral outcome that
would make the AK Party the only party in Parliament, along with the
independently elected pro-Kurdish DTP deputies. Such an overwhelming
electoral victory by the AK Party would only exacerbate the political
instability, instigating a possible civil unrest of which the citizens
of Kurdish origin would likely be the prime target.

* Mehmet Kalyoncu is an international relations analyst and author of
"A Civilian Response to Ethno-Religious Conflict: The Gulen Movement
in Southeast Turkey."

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