The World Today
April 1999

Own Goal For Turkey?
By David McDowall

 

Has the snatching of the Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan allowed Turkey to achieve victory over its ‘troublesome’ Kurdish people? Or might the protest triggered by the arrest and impending trial provide a new focus which could be more uncomfortable for Turkey than attacks by Öcalan’s guerrilla fighters?

Turkey is understandably cock a-hoop over its capture of Abdullah Öcalan, the Kurd who has posed the most serious threat to the Republic since its foundation in 1923. It now hopes to bring the war in the south-east to a reasonably speedy close after fifteen years of bitter conflict. A public trial of Öcalan will demonstrate to the fifteen million or so Kurds, making up over twenty percent of Turkey’s population, that it is high time they resumed their role as dutiful Turkish citizens.

Within a couple of days of Öcalan’s capture in February, Turkish troops attacked the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) bases in northern Iraq. Military operations will intensify. A ten percent increase on the 1998 arms procurement budget will bring expenditure on war equipment this year to a dizzy $3.4 billion. The Kurds are the only serious target. No wonder Turkey feels the separatist emergency is nearly over.

And yet one cannot help wondering if Turkey’s decision to seize and try Öcalan may not prove to be a spectacular own-goal. His capture has dramatically incited Kurdish exile communities across the parliamentary democracies, from Europe through America to the Antipodes. Self-immolation, hunger-strikes, and the dramatic ‘martyrdom’ of those shot dead by Israeli security in Berlin are indicative of the passions that the arrest has excited. It is unlikely that such people will abandon their struggle lightly.

Europe has always been an important arena of Kurdish nationalist endeavour. It was to Europe that the first Kurdish nationalist journal, Kurdistan, moved shortly after its initial publication in Cairo exactly 101 years ago. Paris, Geneva and London remained important Kurdish expatriate centres until the middle of the century. But it was from the 1960s onwards that a mixture of refugees and migrant workers flooded into Europe, mainly into Germany where over 500,000 Kurds live today. Another 200,000 have made their homes elsewhere, mainly in France, Italy and the United Kingdom.

 

Highly Organised

The most significant feature of recent events in Europe has been the degree of organisation and coordination by phone, fax and e-mail. It is an indication that the PKK is far more highly organised than previously assumed. This is a key reason why the organisation is unlikely to disappear overnight, despite the body-blow it has suffered.

It is rumoured that a struggle is taking place between the ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’. Whichever faction triumphs — and there is always the possibility of a split — the PKK may well shift its efforts from the guerrilla war in the south-east.

If the hawks prevail, there could be attacks on civilian targets, for example the Turkish tourist trade which is worth $4 billion annually. If the doves win the argument, they will seek to persuade European Union member states that their own interests will be best served by applying pressure on Turkey to address its Kurdish problem. This might produce a repetition in other imaginative ways of the recent demonstrations in Europe to draw attention to the denial of Kurdish rights.

The PKK will wish to damage Turkey’s reputation, undermine its trade and tourist links with Europe, embarrass its NATO allies and persuade the European Union it cannot possibly contemplate closer relations with Turkey until it cleans up its act. Öcalan’s capture may, therefore, be a catalyst that could achieve far more in the next phase than continued operations out of Syria could ever have done.

 

Recruiting Ground

What about the impact inside Turkey of Öcalan’s capture? There is no doubt at all that most Kurds are deeply dismayed. Yet they are also very angry, and probably feel they have little to lose in continuing their struggle.

Since 1992 Turkish forces have destroyed approximately half the Kurdish rural habitat, razing over three thousand villages and rendering homeless almost three million people. In the context of Britain, it would be as if every inhabitant of Wales had had their dwelling destroyed. Many of them now squat on the edges of Diyarbakir, a city of 500,000 in 1992 and now with a population of 1.5 million. Such dispossessed people will provide the next wave of recruits, for another phase of struggle.

Where do these dispossessed people go? If they follow previous migration patterns, at least forty percent will drift out of the Kurdish region, primarily to Istanbul and Izmir, and also to the southern cities close to the Mediterranean, notably Mersin, Adana and Iskanderun (Alexandretta).

The majority will probably be preoccupied with economic survival and will integrate into Turkish society, but not all. Children who have seen their parents violated — village evacuations by the security forces are notoriously brutal — will grow up passionately hostile to the state. In fact the security forces and the PKK must share equal honours in forging a mass national movement among Kurds of all ages. It cannot possibly wither away.

Undoubtedly Turkey has sown dragon’s teeth for the future. Strategically, therefore, the village evictions are likely to spread disaffected people beyond the south-east, where containment of the guerrilla struggle left the rest of Turkey relatively untroubled, creating discontented communities in western Turkey and also along the southern littoral.

Istanbul is already home to more than three million Kurds. It is said that a Kurdish majority now exists in Adana, other littoral towns and also in the Hatay, the Turkish ‘bite’ out of north-west Syria. Many live in suburbs and shanty areas of ethnic concentration, and are already closely monitored by the police.

Shanty area families with politically active members risk their shelter being bulldozed. This collective punishment reminds Kurds, even in Istanbul, of state repression of their identity. It is a highly effective education, likely to produce more Öcalans in the next generation.

 

Demographic Threat

There is another important dimension. Turkey’s Kurds have a birth-rate roughly fifty percent higher than that of Turks. Moreover half the Kurds are under the age of fifteen, compared with about a third of Turks. In other words, regardless of what it decides to do, the state faces a worrying demographic challenge.

At a guess, the Kurdish population was probably only about fifteen percent of the whole in 1923. By the 1970s it had reached some nineteen percent, and it seems likely it is now close to a quarter. But one should be cautious of a pure numbers game, for large numbers of people are of mixed Turkish-Kurdish descent. Besides, many Kurdish migrants assimilate into Turkish society. Even so, higher population growth means that assimilation will never head off the Kurdish challenge. Politicised Kurds are bound to increase in number.

The real issue is about those who feel themselves to be Kurdish, and this is possibly as much an economic as a political matter. Neglect, deprivation and marginalisation promote alienation. The average per capita income in the east is barely one third that of western Turkey.

Literacy is less than fifty percent compared with a national average of eighty percent. Only seventy percent of children ever appear at primary school, and because they are only taught in Turkish, while most only speak Kurdish, huge numbers drop out. Only eighteen percent ever start secondary school and only nine percent complete the cycle. Illiterate Kurdish mothers produce Kurdish speaking children. Turkey’s national language policies are self-defeating and emphasise to Kurds that they remain denied by the state.

 

Breaching the Ramparts

Today, these denied and neglected people are linked to the diaspora in Europe as never before. Through MED-TV, the four year old Kurdish satellite television service beamed from London and Brussels, they are daily reminded of the nationalist agenda. The smashing of TV satellite dishes in Kurdish areas is not going to stop the arrival of ideas. Borders are more permeable than ever.

Not only, therefore, can Turkey no longer confine the Kurdish problem to the south-east, but it can no longer isolate the Kurdish community as it was able to up to 1965 when foreigners were forbidden to travel there. Satellite TV and telephone, e-mail and the internet, and even the humble transistor radio, will increasingly penetrate the country’s ideological ramparts.

 

Two Ideas

Why, then, does Turkey seem prepared to go to almost any length to deny its Kurds cultural, civil and political rights? Despite the polls plan for April, the country is in practice not ruled by elected parties but by the National Security Council, which sees itself as a guardian of the values of the nation. Two ideas in particular govern attitudes to the Kurds.

First, the territorial integrity of Turkey within its present boundaries is viewed with almost religious fervour, the result of its bloody war of independence. The second idea concerns the identity of every citizen. Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, hoped to forge a new society based upon the thought that all citizens were by definition Turkish. Kurdish identity defies this ideological definition. To Turks, talk of Kurdish identity also rings serious separatist alarm bells, even though few Kurds — probably barely fifteen percent — genuinely seek separation.

Not so long ago, the President of the Constitutional Court reportedly observed ‘The indivisibility of the state comes first and the (rule of) law is subordinate to this requirement.’ Thus the state has allowed its forces both overtly and covertly to commit a wide range of human rights offences from routine torture of detainees through to extra-judicial killings and disappearances.

Hundreds of Kurds have died, in circumstances that have nothing to do with the PKK war. Most of them have been activists in perfectly legal political parties or other functions of civil society, for example journalists or vendors for newspapers, trade unionists or even teachers. They have died because Turkey cannot abide their views.

In September 1992, for example, several journalists were murdered in the south-east, among them the much-respected septuagenarian Kurdish writer, Musa Anter, who was visiting Diyarbakir. Suleyman Demirel, now Turkey’s President, remarked, ‘Those killed were not real journalists. They were militants.... they kill each other.’ About a year ago it was admitted that Anter was one of the many victims killed by the state’s agents.

Since last October, when it managed to intimidate Syria into expelling Öcalan, Turkey has had a real drive against legitimate Kurdish expression, rounding up hundreds of members of the People’s Democracy Party (HADEP), and initiating moves for the Constitutional Court to close it. It has also shut cultural organisations identified with the Kurdish community, thus undermining its claim to cultural tolerance of Kurdish identity.

Human rights violations in Turkey’s Kurdish war far exceed recent atrocities in Kosovo. The danger is that this becomes so widely recognised that the European Union finds it difficult to ignore. Turkey is clearly frightened of this.

Within a week of seizing Öcalan, expressions of European governmental concern that he may not get a fair trial, not to mention the barrage of adverse press reporting on Turkey’s murky human rights record, prompted Prime Minister, Bulent Ecevit, to warn Europe to mind its own business.

 

Other People’s Business

No European state ever wanted to give Öcalan house-room. They all dislike him and the PKK, hence his odyssey ending in disaster in Nairobi. But they hardly want Turkey to embark on a ritual and humiliating show trial, with further adverse press comment on the Kurdish situation.

One of the lessons of international relations in the 1990s, whether in Europe or elsewhere, is that blatant human rights violations are indeed ‘other people’s business’. Over fifty cases of Turkish violations are under consideration at the European Court of Human Rights. All are brought by individual plaintiffs, and so far no other contracting party, i.e. another European state, has brought a case against Turkey. Nor is one likely to.

European states, particularly the NATO members, want no trouble with Turkey — a fellow member. Nor do they wish to damage trade relations, particularly important for Germany, France, Italy and Britain. But they are likely to find it difficult to ignore Turkey’s human rights record, already a major stumbling block in its efforts to draw closer to the European Union.

That is why European ministers have warned of the importance of a fair trial for Öcalan. The trouble is that European diplomats and lawyers have observed several political trials in the state security courts in recent years. Their reports reflect unanimous unease with the improper legal process, and their low expectation that Turkey is capable of a fair and publicly accountable trial in the sense this would be understood in the European Union.

Here too, the Kurdish expatriate community may prove pivotal. Just as the messages which this community can broadcast to Turkey pose a profound threat to its internal stability, so also a disciplined and coordinated campaign of awareness-raising within the European Union could prove infinitely more damaging to Turkey’s long-term political and economic prospects than Öcalan’s guerrilla campaign could ever have done. In other words, far from drawing to a close, the struggle over Turkey’s Kurds may now be entering a new and, for Turkey, more threatening phase.

David McDowall is the author of A Modern History of the Kurds (IB Tauris, 1997) and The Kurds (Minority Rights Group International, 1996).