ISRAEL CAN LEARN FROM TURKEY’S EFFORT TO PRESERVE ITS SOCIETAL MOSAIC
By The Daily Star
Daily Star
d=1&article_id=105566&categ_id=17
Saturday , August 22, 2009
Lebanon
Turkey’s decision to dramatically switch gears on how it deals with its
Kurdish citizens is part of a "Kurdish initiative" by Prime Minister
Erdogan, and gives the region a considerable amount of food for
thought. Turkey’s earlier policies were well-known, if not infamous:
erasing the names of villages of its Kurdish community and banning the
use of the Kurdish language in public settings, among other measures,
all a part of "Turkification" process that didn’t go very far in
solving what was seen as a problem, and not a source of diversity.
Sound familiar? We’re seeing the old-style policies of ethnic "cultural
cleansing" in Palestine, as the obsession with having a Jewish state
has led Israeli officials to introduce measures aimed at erasing the
presence of the Palestinians from their own land.
The policies of denial and mass eradication, whether of street signs
or actual human beings, never seem to work.
Was it smart for Turkey to reject a recognition of the Kurds, one of
the oldest peoples in the region, and the world’s biggest national
group without a state? No.
Can Turkey wish away the Armenians and their past, by denying
historical facts? Again, the answer is no.
The same goes for the Israelis’ attempts to eliminate the presence
of the Palestinians, as well as the calls by some to eliminate the
Jewish presence in the Middle East.
The Amazig people of North Africa, commonly referred to as the Berbers,
face similar struggles over asserting their cultural and other rights;
Iraq provides an example of non-state actors targeting ethnic and
religious groups, such as Kurds, Turkmen and various Christian sects,
to create a supposedly "purer" country.
The campaigns to erase entire cultural and ethnic groups from our
countries usually take decades to set up and implement, but that
doesn’t mean that the authors of such policies gain any satisfaction
in the end. We can sit back and predict that such policies are
doomed to fail, but this doesn’t mean that the actions don’t have
any repercussion.
In Palestine, the Israelis are getting further entrenched in
self-delusion, while the Palestinians sink deeper into desperation,
to the point of abandoning local politics and adopting non-national
agendas, be they from Washington or Tehran. It seems like a no-win
situation, doomed to produce hatred and instability.
But in Turkey, which was mired in a fierce strain of nationalism over
six decades, an abrupt and dramatic about-face on the Kurdish issue
has finally arisen, giving us hope that other attitudes and policies
can change as well. Politicians and movements can buck the trend for a
while, and pretend that their measures are going to produce a radical
solution, or they can gain some inspiration from an encouraging step
by Turkey, to keep our mosaic in place.
From: Baghdasarian