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Turkey's
failure with its Kurds
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
September 22,
2005
LONDON - This is the edge of
tomorrow's Europe, at least if Turkey gets its way. A
desolate, mud-built, village, close up to the Syrian
border, reduced to rubble by the Turkish army battling
the terrorists of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), is
slowly being repopulated by a brave few. The families are
understandably nervous. The PKK has recently restarted
its insurgency, breaking a five year truce, angry with
the government's slow delivery on its promises to allow
Kurdish in the primary schools, full scale broadcasting
in Kurdish and to invest in economic development. "This
violence is what we don't want", says one man, living
with his extended family under nothing more than a
homemade canopy.
Five minutes drive from the river
Tigris that watered downstream the first of humankind's
civilizations, we engage in what seems to be almost
surreal conversation. On the one hand, the grandfather,
who has fathered twelve children, explains how they make
a living with their herd of sheep out of what appears to
be a stony, barren land without a blade of green grass to
be seen. On the other, he says, although in their hearts
they feel Asian they want to enter the Europe Union.
"Europe will give us peace and give us Kurds our rights",
he says. "And give us food and jobs" adds one of his
sons.
A few kilometres away is another
larger, more prosperous, village that escaped the war
unscathed. The villagers grow wheat and lentils, and
although they say the water is of poor quality every
house has a television and half the men of the village,
as they converse with me in a large circle, show me their
mobile phones. The refrain is the same, even from the
young men who hover standing at the back: "We don't want
to fight again. We Kurds want Europe to accept Turkey. We
feel deep in ourselves Asian, but now we want to be
European".
But how can modern Europe swallow
all this? The poverty, the ignorance (girls are rarely
educated out here), and now the renewed bubbling and
boiling of war. This is not the civilization of
contemporary Europe, and probably not even of ancient
Mesopotamia. This is life almost, if not quite, at its
most elementary and unsparing.
The Turkish government, as one
senior official told me, "seems never to miss a chance to
shoot itself in the foot". Desperate as it is to cement
on October 3rd the agreement of the EU to begin its
negotiations for entry, it has this year seen not only
the police beating up women demonstrators, the indictment
of Turkey's best known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, for writing
that the Armenian accusations of Turkish genocide in the
days of the Ottoman empire need to be looked at openly
but, most importantly, the bureaucratic go-slow on
implementing what was promised to the Kurds, and thus
providing the kindling for a renewal of the insurgency.
Some of the country's liberal
voices are driven to wonder what is really going on
behind the scenes. Inur Cevik, who was once a prime
minister's senior aide and now publishes the English
language newspaper, The Anatolian, and who is described
by one senior European ambassador as someone who "is
pretty damned true", tells me that he is convinced that
parts of the army are conniving with the PKK to restart
the fighting so as to derail the Turkish approach to
Europe.
But, for all the ineptness of the
Turkish government that gives rise to such conspiracy
theories, the likelihood is that these are rogue
elements. Moreover, apart from the fact that the high
command of the Turkish army is firmly pro Europe, as
their mentor Ataturk would have expected them to be, the
PKK itself is also split on Europe. The PKK appears to
realize that an anti-European stance is not popular in
this southeastern corner of Turkey.
Neither, for all its romantic
allure, is their occasional talk of a united Kurdistan.
Once again the militants of the PKK are split. Kurds are
impressed with the degree of political and economic
autonomy that the Iraqi Kurds have won during the recent
negotiations on the Iraqi constitution, but they are also
aware that it is a precarious autonomy and that the
government of that province is still, despite elections,
essentially feudal, dominated by two families.
Most of the country's Kurds want to
be European and are neither seriously tempted by the PKK
or a united Kurdistan. But Turkey still doesn't know how
to bring its Kurds up to the starting line. And in making
this grave mistake it is probably delaying the chances of
Turkey of entering as quickly into the Europe Union as it
wants to.
Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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