The other Kurdish revolt: ethnic fractionalism

Commonweal, Nov 20, 1992 by Aliza Marcus

In the back alleys of Cizre, a downtrodden city in Turkey's Kurdish southeast, a family of about a dozen crowds into a small concrete room. A few weeks earlier they had fled their home in nearby Sirnak after a fifty-hour battle that left their city in ruins. The Turkish military claims it was shooting at separatist Kurdish guerrillas; residents dispute this. They claim that the military, frustrated with its inability to stem rising support for the guerrillas, attacked the city without provocation.

Sirnak now stands a virtual ghost town: buildings are pockmarked with bullet holes, shattered glass litters the streets, most of the 29,000 residents are gone. And the refugee family, like dozens of others interviewed during my visit to the region last September, is fearful and angry.

"Maybe we will go to the guerrillas," says one young man crouched on the bare concrete floor. As his brothers nod their heads in approval he adds, "There, everything is good. In the mountains the fighting is one-on-one. You see what happens to us when we have no weapons."

Since 1984, the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) have been fighting for control of southeast Turkey, a desolate mountainous region that is home to about half the country's estimated 10 to 12 million Kurds. Over 5,000 people have died in the fighting - about one-third of them in 1992 alone - and every day brings reports of a new skirmish.

As the fighting grows, so do reports of human rights abuses against the local civilian population. These range from forced evacuation of villages to torture of detainees and shootings which, as in Sirnak, seem targeted at civilians as much as at guerrillas. At least seventy well-known Kurdish activists, including eight journalists, have been murdered over the past two years by a shadowy group commonly referred to as the "contra-guerrillas." The activists say the group is backed by the security forces, but Turkish officials deny this.

"It's an illusion of the state that by oppressing people they will be able to suppress [Kurdish nationalism]," says a twenty-nine-year-old Kurdish journalist, who claims he was picked up and tortured for almost two weeks last July after police accused him of working for the PKK. "Maybe in the short run people will be scared, but then they will join the guerrillas, because that's the only way they will feel safe and strong," explains the man, who writes for a pro-Kurdish newspaper, which has seen four of its correspondents mysteriously murdered this year while another was shot and left paralyzed.

The current battle in southeast Turkey takes place against decades of official repression of Kurdish national and cultural identity in which use of the Kurdish language, music, and even names were widely restricted. Kurdish uprisings following national independence in 1923 only encouraged Turkey's desire to assimilate the Kurds and repress their ethnic identity. In the republic's early years, hundreds of thousands of Kurds were relocated to western parts of the country. But suppression has never worked.

In the late 1980s, the government took steps to stem growing support for the PKK, a Marxist-Leninist group. Political leaders and others stopped calling the Kurds "mountain Turks," the government's euphemism; and vague promises were made about increasing investment in the economically depressed southeast. In April 1991, an eight-year-old ban against the Kurdish language was lifted, and the security forces became noticeably more relaxed about pemitting the sale of Kurdish music cassettes and pro-Kurdish publications.

In this atmosphere of new tolerance two dozen nationalist Kurds campaigned for parliament in the elections scheduled for the fall of 1991. When their party was disqualified by a technicality, they were invited to run as part of the Social Democratic Populist party (SHP), whose leader, Erdal Inonu, was eager to regain Kurdish support. Many Kurds mistrusted him after he ousted seven Kurdish deputies from the SHP a few years earlier for attending a Kurdish conference in Paris.

The elections produced a coalition government headed by conservative True Path party leader Suleyman Demirel, whose party came in first but fell short of a parliamentary majority. Demirel joined forces with Inonu, making it seem as if the Kurdish situation in the southeast would be addressed at last.

"It was a most strange union," says Ragip Zarakolu, an Istanbul publisher. "The new coalition prepared a democratic program, both [leaders] visited [the southeast] and said they would solve the problem without terror." But after a few months, it became clear that changes would come slowly, or not at all. Zarakolu, who also writes a column for one of the pro-Kurdish newspapers, says the new government quickly discovered it was much easier to govern with the authoritarian restrictions dating back to the 1980-83 military regime and lost interest in the promised reforms.

Certainly, the government has fulfilled few of its campaign promises concerning human rights. A judicial reform bill aimed at ending torture by shortening the detention period and ensuring detainees access to a lawyer fell apart after conservative members of Demirel's party opposed applying the changes to the war-torn southeast. Constitutional reform plans neatly ignore the military-enacted restrictions on the press and universities, among other things. Prime Minister Demirel no longer seems to want to lift emergency rule or disband the government-financed village guards system, two things Kurdish activists say are necessary to defuse tension in the region.