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  • The wrongs and rights of minorities

    The Economist
    March 19, 2005
    U.S. Edition

    The wrongs and rights of minorities


    Turkey has yet to face up to its diversity

    THE country has moved some way towards meeting the Copenhagen
    criteria for EU membership. It has abolished the death penalty,
    saving the life of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the PKK, an
    outlawed Kurdish organisation responsible for a guerrilla war through
    much of the 1990s. It has revised the penal code (previously
    unchanged since 1926) and reinforced the rights of women. It has
    introduced a new law allowing broadcasting in any language, including
    Kurdish. And it has brought to an end the random searches that used
    to be common, particularly in the east. Now nobody can be searched
    without a court order.

    The government has also introduced an official policy of zero
    tolerance towards torture, for which its police and security forces
    became infamous in the West in 1978 with the release of "Midnight
    Express", Alan Parker's film about a young American imprisoned on
    drugs charges. The punishment for torture has been increased, and
    sentences may no longer be deferred or converted into fines, as often
    happened in the past.

    But changing the law is one thing, changing habits is another. A
    villager in the east who gets searched by the state police may still
    not dare demand to see a court order. The police forces, it is said,
    are being retrained, but the Turkish Human Rights Foundation (TIHV)
    says that of 918 people treated at its centres in 2004, 337 claimed
    they had been tortured. The comparable figures for 2003 were 925 and
    340. The TIHV says that even in 2004, "torture was applied
    systematically by police, gendarmerie and special units in
    interrogation centres." It claims that 21 people died in
    "extra-judicial killings" during the year.

    In its October 2004 report on Turkish accession, the European
    Commission emphasised the need for further "strengthening and full
    implementation of provisions related to the respect of fundamental
    freedoms and protection of human rights, including women's rights,
    trade-union rights, minority rights and problems faced by non-Muslim
    religious communities."

    >From its very beginnings the republic has been confused about
    minorities. In his book, "Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two
    Worlds", Stephen Kinzer, a New York Times journalist, wrote:
    "Something about the concept of diversity frightens Turkey's ruling
    elite." Officially the state recognises only three minorities: those
    mentioned in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, signed after Ataturk's army
    had thrown out the occupying forces left over from the first world
    war. The treaty specifically protects the rights of the Armenian,
    Greek and Jewish communities in the country.

    In the early years of the republic there were Kurds in parliament,
    and the deputy speaker was an Alevi (a religious minority of which
    more later). But after Kurdish uprisings in 1925 and 1937 were
    brutally suppressed, the republic went into denial about its cultural
    diversity. The word "minority" came to refer only to the Lausanne
    trio, who were non-Muslims and indeed were increasingly perceived as
    non-Turks. If you are a member of a minority in Turkey today you are,
    almost by definition, seen as not fully Turkish.

    The Kemalists' narrow brand of nationalism has helped to suppress the
    country's sensitivity to minorities. At Anit Kabir, one of the huge
    murals in the museum below Ataturk's tomb depicts the Greek army
    marching through occupied Anatolia in 1919, with a soldier on
    horseback about to bayonet a beautiful Turkish girl. In the
    background is a Greek cleric brandishing a cross and inciting the
    soldiers. The picture caption explains (in English): "During these
    massacres the fact that clerics played a provoking role has been
    proven by historical evidence." As anti-clerical as Ataturk was
    (whatever the faith), it is hard to believe that he would have
    approved of such a message.

    Turkey has also found it difficult to face up to the Armenians'
    persistent allegation that the massacres of 1915, in the maelstrom of
    the first world war, were genocide. Gunduz Aktan, the head of an
    Ankara think-tank and a former Turkish ambassador in Athens,
    dismisses the claims as "Holocaust envy".

    The most troublesome minority in recent years has been the biggest of
    them all, the Kurds. Where minorities are concerned, size does
    matter. The Armenians, Greeks and Jews in Turkey today number in the
    tens of thousands; the Kurds up to 15m. In the 15-year guerrilla war
    in the east between the Turkish army and security forces and Mr
    Ocalan's PKK, some 35,000 civilians and troops were killed. Many more
    villagers were displaced (some say perhaps a million), terrorised out
    of their homes, often by fellow Kurds, and forced to move to cities
    far away. But nobody really knows what proportion of the Kurds the
    PKK stands for.

    The more extreme Kurds say they want their own homeland - "Kurdistan",
    a word that provokes shivers in Ankara - to embrace their people living
    in Iran and Iraq as well as in Turkey. The more moderate Turkish
    Kurds want to be allowed to speak their own language, to be taught it
    in school, and to hear it broadcast - all of which they are slowly and
    grudgingly being granted. DEHAP's party congress this year was
    attended by Mr Ocalan's sister and Feleknas Uca, a German member of
    the European Parliament. Both addressed the meeting in Kurdish. The
    Kurds' cause has received extensive publicity abroad. Leyla Zana, a
    member of the Turkish parliament imprisoned for ten years for
    speaking in Kurdish in the parliament building, was released last
    year after intense pressure from abroad. The Kurdish Human Rights
    Project, a London-based charity, has been effective in bringing
    Kurdish cases to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

    Among them are thousands of claims for compensation for loss of
    property as a result of the military incursion against the PKK in the
    1990s. Such cases, however, can be heard in Strasbourg only if
    domestic laws offer no prospect of compensation, and Turkey recently
    passed a law "on damages incurred from terrorism and combating
    terrorism". The governor of Tunceli, a town close to mountains where
    the PKK was particularly active, said recently that 6,200 people in
    his province had applied for compensation under the new law.

    The government is also making modest attempts to help Kurds who were
    forcibly removed from their villages to return home. Incidents in the
    east are now few and far between, even though last summer the PKK,
    renamed Kongra-Gel, ended a ceasefire called after Mr Ocalan was
    arrested in Kenya in 1999. The organisation said the government had
    reneged on a promised amnesty to its members.

    So has the Kurdish problem been more or less resolved? Not if you
    listen to the many Turks who believe in conspiracy theories. Such
    theories thrive in a society that still thinks transparency in public
    affairs is an oxymoron. After the tsunami disaster in Asia on
    December 26th last year, the American embassy in Ankara felt obliged
    to issue an official denial of colourful Turkish newspaper reports
    that the wave had been caused by American underwater nuclear
    explosions designed to kill large numbers of Muslims.

    The conspiracy theory about the Kurds goes something like this: Mr
    Ocalan, although held in solitary confinement on a remote island in
    the Sea of Marmara, still controls the larger part of the
    organisation through visits from his brother, his sister and a
    lawyer. Since his captors are said to be able to control what
    messages he conveys in return for supplying him with cigarettes and
    other favours, why would he end the ceasefire unless dark forces
    wished to resurrect the Kurdish uprising? And why ever would they
    want to do that? In order to undermine the EU negotiations by
    reigniting civil war in the east, concludes the theory.

    This may not be as absurd as it sounds. There are powerful groups
    inside Turkey who see no advantage in joining the EU, and many Turks
    believe in the presence of dark forces inside the state. Anyone who
    doubts the idea of an état profond, a deep state - a combination of
    military officers, secret-service agents, politicians and businessmen
    that pull invisible strings - is silenced with one word: "Susurluk".
    This is the name of a town in western Turkey where in 1996 a Mercedes
    car crashed into a lorry, killing three of its four occupants. These
    proved to be an eerily ill-assorted bunch: a notorious gangster,
    sought by Interpol, and his mistress; a Kurdish MP and clan chief
    suspected of renting out his private army to the Turkish authorities
    in their fight against the PKK; and a top-ranking police officer who
    had been director of the country's main police academy. What they
    were doing together that night may never be known - the sole survivor,
    the clan chief, claims to remember nothing - but it is sure to fuel
    Turkish conspiracy theories for years to come.

    There is another large minority in Turkey that has received nothing
    like as much attention as the Kurds. Most Turks are Sunni Muslims,
    whereas most Arabs are Shiites. But there is a group called the Alevi
    who have lived in Anatolia for many centuries and who are not Sunni.

    Their main prophet, like the Shiites', is not Mohammed but his
    son-in-law, Ali. Most of them maintain that their religion is
    separate from Islam, and that it is a purely Anatolian faith based on
    Shaman and Zoroastrian beliefs going back 6,000 years. Christian,
    Jewish and Islamic influences were added later, though the Alevi
    accept that the Islamic influence is the strongest.

    Their number is uncertain, because no census in Turkey has asked
    about religious affiliation since the early 1920s. At that time the
    Alevi accounted for about 35% of the then population of 13m. Today
    the best estimate is that they make up about a fifth of a population
    that has grown to 70m, their share whittled down by the success of
    the republic's policy of "ignore them and hope they will assimilate".


    Many of the Alevi are also Kurds. The most predominantly Alevi town
    is Tunceli, once a PKK stronghold and a place notably short of
    mosques. The Alevi are not keen on them because Ali, their prophet,
    was murdered in one. Their houses of prayer are called cemevi.

    In the cities they tend to practise their religion in private. Kazim
    Genc, an Alevi human-rights lawyer, says he discourages his daughter
    from mentioning her faith because Sunni Muslims think Alevi rites
    include sexual orgies and incest. Of the AK Party's 367 members of
    parliament, not one has admitted to being an Alevi.

    The current government treats the Alevi as merely a cultural group,
    not a religious minority. That way it can sidestep its legal
    obligation to set aside space in towns and cities for religious
    communities' "places of worship". When in May 2004 a group of Alevi
    in the Istanbul district of Kartal asked for land to be allocated for
    a cemevi, the local governor said they were Muslims and Kartal had
    enough mosques already. Indeed it has: almost 700 of them. But there
    is only one cemevi. The Alevi have taken the case to an Istanbul
    court and are awaiting a hearing.

    Another case has gone all the way to the Court of Human Rights in
    Strasbourg, a journey that the Kurds have taken with some success. It
    involves a student who is trying to establish his right to stay away
    from compulsory religious classes in school on the ground that they
    teach only Sunni Islam. The authorities may have to learn to come to
    terms with yet more scary diversity.
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