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Kurdish Aspect, CO
March 8 2008
The patronizing embrace: Turkey's new Kurdish strategy
Kurdishaspect.com - By Kerem Oktem
The Sixth of October 2006 is not going to make it into the textbooks
of Turkish history. On this day, thecouncil of the central Diyarbakir
borough of Suriçi voted unanimously for a project called
`Multilingual Municipality Services'. The mayor, Abdullah Demirbas of
the Democratic Society Party (DTP) justified the proposal with a
reference to the district's majority of Kurdish speakers and the
prevalence of other languages such as Arabic and Armenian. Many of
the residents are indeed of rural origin and have fled to Diyarbakir
during the Kurdish uprising in the 1990s. Their Turkish is often too
patchy to fully benefit from services of the municipality. At the
same time, the idea went, Diyarbakir's multi-cultural and
multilingual past merits a publicity campaign that lives up to the
diversity of its past, exemplified by the surviving Armenian,
Chaldaean and Protestant Churches and the many historical mosques in
the old town.
Demirbas's experiment with `multilingualism' and public services in
Kurdish could have marked a departure from Turkey's assimilatory
policies towards its Kurdish citizens. It could have been a step
towards a genuinely inclusive policy based on the acknowledgement and
recognition of difference, a step in full conformity with the spirit
of EU-induced legal reform packages and with European standards of
human and minority right. Alas, it was not to be: Abdullah Demirbas
was dismissed from office and faced with a barrage of court cases.
The Council of State, the country's supreme administrative court,
deemed the municipality's project unconstitutional, while members of
the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) denounced it as an
attack on Turkey's territorial indivisibility.1
This essay examines Turkey's Kurdish policy since 2002 and discusses
the prospects of legal Kurdish politics under the current government.
It argues that after six years of reform politics by successive AKP
governments, two years of EU accession negotiations and heightened
expectations for progress, developments indicate a suspension of
reform and a shift towards polarization. Turkey's Kurds are now
caught between the promise of a better material life and Islamic
charity politics on the one side and the prospect of hardening
discrimination and exclusion on the other. To be admitted to the
emerging space of AKP-supported material wealth, Kurds are urged to
renounce the Kurdish nationalist movement and its identity-based
politics as presented by the DTP.
1. The mirage of reform: The AKP's Kurdish policy since 2002
Most analysts have expected that the Justice and Development Party
under Prime Minister Erdogan would depart from Turkey's traditional
Kurdish policy that has been wavering between assimilation and
clientelistic co-optation. A closer look at the period since the
AKP's first election victory in November 2002, however, suggests that
the party's greatest asset has been the absence of an explicit
Kurdish policy. What the AKP government did have was a different
rhetoric and an implicit policy: Less inspired by Turkish
ethno-nationalism than by a notion of Muslim solidarity, it followed
the Gulen movement's recommendation of moderate Islam as antidote to
Kurdish nationalism.2 Ignoring Kurdish demands ranging from the right
of education in Kurdish,3 to the termination of all regulations
limiting the public use of Kurdish, the government briefly considered
and then discarded the idea of a general amnesty for armed members of
the PKK. Rather than engaging with Kurdish representatives and
acknowledging the existence of a political conflict, it went for
pragmatic problem management, misunderstood by many as a major
softening in Turkey's security-minded Kurdish policy.
The introduction of limited broadcasting in minority languages and
private language courses, hailed as a first opening by liberals and
as a dangerous first step towards the erosion territorial integrity
by critics, was an important legal change with immediate relevance
for the Kurdish community. Yet, it was not the incumbent AKP
government that passed this key reform package, paving the way for
Turkey's EU membership negotiation, but the coalition led by the late
Bulent Ecevit, which voted in this package just before the November
2002 elections.4 The AKP government managed to take the credit and
create a narrative of democratisation that impressed liberals at home
and analysts abroad, while in reality it shied away from even the
most timid steps towards recognition of Kurdish concerns.
Normalisation or delusion? The first AKP government
November 2002 seemed to herald a new beginning: After almost two
decades of the Kurdish Uprising (Serhildan) and violent conflict
between the Kurdish-nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, Partiya
Karkeren Kurdistan) and Turkish security forces,5 a fragile peace was
taking hold. In place since the 1980 military intervention of 12
September, the state of emergency regime was abrogated in all Kurdish
provinces by the end of 2002, ending more than twenty years of
arbitrary rule by military and security forces.6 It should be noted
that the lifting of the state of emergency was a decision not of the
newly incumbent Erdogan government but of the preceding coalition
government under Bulent Ecevit.
Released from the tight grip of the `State of Emergency Regional
Governorate' (Olaganustu Hal Bolge Valiligi), residents of the
Southeast experienced, for the first time in almost a generation,
basic freedoms like traveling without regular identity controls and
road-blocks. In the large cities of the Southeast, where passers-by
disappeared from the streets at sunset -due to curfews or fear of
arbitrary detention-urban life was slowly restored to its pre-1980
vivacity, even though places like Diyarbakir or Batman were bursting
with hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people. Despite
the poverty, squalor and erosion of traditional social institutions
in these cities, however, there was a remarkable relaxation of
authoritarian policies and softening of attitudes among members of
the security forces.
The lifting of the state of emergency also opened the way for a more
self-conscious Kurdish associational life. The Kurdish
municipalities, through cultural activities, concerts, film festivals
etc. contributed to the emergence of a new public sphere.7 For the
first time in the history of the Turkish Republic, urban space
emerged as a venue for the negotiation and formation of Kurdish
identity. The images of incessant violence and bloodshed, with which
the region was hitherto remembered were replaced, at least in some
part of the Turkish mainstream media, with images of a cultural
revival beyond conflict. Some even thought that a substantive
settlement including a general amnesty for PKK combatants was in easy
reach.
The sense of normalization, even if in the absence of legal reform of
any consequence, was consolidated with the decision of the European
Union in December 2004 to begin accession negotiations. The
subsequent start of EU membership talks in October 2005 appeared to
be the final indicator that Turkey was on the path to reform, a
process that would ultimately benefit the Kurdish constituency. For a
brief period, a window of opportunity emerged, bringing together the
military establishment, the moderate Islamists of the AKP, Kurdish
Nationalists, Alevis and large segments of the Turkish electorate on
a platform for EU membership. Powerful as it might have seemed,
though, the zenith of this unexpected coalition was already
surpassed: A forceful nationalist backlash, orchestrated by rogue
elements within the state and the military, had been in the making
for some time. TV series, movies and historical novels began to
reinstate a sense of Turkish superiority that had to be defended
against internal and external enemies. Leading members of the
military got increasingly vocal about the risk of EU membership for
Turkey's integrity. Local chapters of extreme nationalist
organizations regrouped with retired generals, nationalist lawyers
and rightwing extremists to instill anti-Kurdish sentiment at the
funerals of Turkish soldiers killed by the PKK.8
End of normalization: The Diyarbakir events of 29 March 2006
Violence in the Kurdish provinces never ceased completely: Low-level
armed conflict in some areas continued after the end of emergency
rule, yet fighting was largely confined to rural areas. The most
serious blow to the feeling of normalization was the death in combat
of fourteen PKK fighters on March 29, 2006. It set in motion a circle
of violence that could well be defined as the `return of a state of
exception'.9 Security forces killed at least fourteen demonstrators,
all but one in Diyarbakir. Many of the victims were young men, yet
three were children under ten years of age, who got caught up in the
street fights. In the following wave of detentions and prosecutions,
two-hundred children were taken into custody and around ninety were
charged with participation in illegal protests.
The Diyarbakir events of March 2006 did not only mark the end of
normalization and the return to a politics of violence. They also
signify an important rupture for Kurdish legal politics. Osman
Baydemir, Diyarbakir's prolific DTP mayor had intervened together
with the deputy Governor to persuade the rioters to go home. Yet, he
was booed out. The next day, the Turkish mainstream media scolded him
for supporting the rioters. At the same time, dozens of local DTP
Chairmen and members were arrested on charges of terrorism.
Mounting crisis, elections and the Daglica affair
The March events were followed by a bomb blast in September 2006 that
killed seven in the city -mostly children- and a growing number of
casualties in armed conflict between the security forces and the
PKK.10 With increased conflict and attacks of PKK troops from the
territory of the Kurdistan Regional Government, the General Staff
prepared for cross-border operations to contain PKK action.11 Turkish
Prime Minister Erdogan, however, postponed the operations, giving the
impression to his potential Kurdish voters that his government was
opposed to the incursions. Subsequently, in the elections of July
2007, the AKP made substantial inroads into the Kurdish provinces,
where it trumped the DTP in all but the most nationalist strongholds.
Despite a Turkish - Iraqi security pact and increasing US -
mediation, PKK attacks continued after the elections. They culminated
in the killing of twelve soldiers and the capture of eight at the
Iraqi border near Daglica, in October 2007. Probably for the first
time in Turkey's recent history, centrally organized nationalist mobs
attacked and vandalized DTP party offices, Kurdish businesses and
neighborhoods in western and central Turkish cities. Yet, when the
eight soldiers were released in November, public opinion reacted not
with relief but with disdain. The Justice Minister accused the troops
of voluntary surrender to the PKK, while the media singled out
Private Ramazan Yuce as traitor, because of his Kurdish origins. 12
Following the handover ceremony including DTP Member of Parliament
Fatma Kurtulan, they were interrogated and detained. Kurtulan was
subsequently charged with membership in a terrorist organization.
Amid jingoistic media reports on the Daglica affair, the Turkish air
force began its attack on PKK positions in Northern Iraq on November
13.
2. The politics of disengagement: The DTP in isolation
Until the July 2007 elections, analysts continued to give credit to
the AKP's discourse of reform and democratization and to sympathize
with the party's struggle against the secular establishment. Yet,
Turkey's political prospects have changed significantly. Nationalism
and racism have made the country's western cities much less
hospitable to Kurds, Christians and immigrants. Parallel to the
growing anti-Kurdish and anti-minority sentiment and an increasingly
jingoistic mainstream media, the space for legal Kurdish politics has
become ever-more limited, both in the Parliament and the
municipalities.
Kurdish-interest politics in Turkey have always operated at the very
margins of the political system, and parties were subject to
exclusion, prosecution and often prohibition. The Constitutional
Court has so far closed down all parties with a Kurdish-nationalist
orientation, with a court case pending against the DTP since November
2008. Not unlike Sinn Fein and the IRA or Harri Batasuna and ETA, the
DTP and its predecessors have maintained organic links with the PKK,
which impeded its democratic credentials and its credibility in the
eyes of the Turkish mainstream. Yet as Nicole Watts13 argues, despite
the constant threat of closure on the one side and the interference
of the PKK command on the other, these parties have also provided a
resource for the Kurdish national movement and a potential avenue for
integration into the Turkish mainstream.
The Politics of Disengagement
The DTP, however, has had to face an exclusionary approach by state
agencies, the military and the government that amounts to a
disengagement of the state and the Erdogan government from a legal
Kurdish party.14 The politics of disengagement proceeds on a number
of levels:
On the level of state agencies: Non-cooperation with DTP
municipalities15
On the level of representatives of the military: Active
non-engagement with DTP members, especially during national
celebrations,16
On the legal level: Court cases against mayors for minor offences
like speaking Kurdish during public service17 and against Members of
Parliament.18
The Ministry of Interior has been following DTP municipalities
suspiciously, containing projects or policies that could have an
explicitly Kurdish agenda. An emblematic case is the aforementioned
project of `multi-language municipality services' by Suriçi Mayor
Abdullah Demirbas.19 His project was a modest step to make public
services more accessible for the poor and disenfranchised immigrants
in his district. Many of the residents arrived in Diyarbakir as
internally displaced people in the 1990s with almost no possessions
and no skills for the urban labour market. Especially older women
still speak only little or no Turkish. Much of the project including
information campaigns or wedding ceremonies in Kurdish were geared
towards them. To be fair, the municipality's children's journals in
Turkish and Kurdish, the Kurdish-language theatre and a children's
council did act on the notion of empowering Kurdish identity and
giving the language a higher level of visibility and legitimacy. Yet,
all these projects, one should stress, are in full conformity with
European human and minority rights and would have to be implemented
anyway, if Turkey was to stay on its course for EU membership.
Yet, the cooperation between the government and the judiciary that
led to the impeachment of Abdullah Demirbas shows that such reforms
will not be tolerated if attempted by the DTP. Investigators of the
interior Ministry prepared a file against the mayor. Three months
after the municipal council had voted for the multi-language project,
the Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu called upon the State Council
(Danistay) for the dismissal of mayor Demirbas and the dissolution of
the municipal council. In May 2007, the State Council's eighth
chamber decided in favour of the ministry's request, dismissing the
mayor and dissolving the council.20 The opinion of the court stated:
`... [the fact that the municipality] employed local languages used by
the district population other than the official language Turkish is
in clear violation of the constitution and other laws and is not in
conformity with the realities of our country.
Since the language of education in our country is Turkish and all
literate Turkish citizens can read and write in Turkish, there can be
no conceivable justification for the provision of municipality
languages in a language other than Turkish...
The attempt to turn local languages into official languages with a
project for a multi-language municipality is in clear violation of
the constitution and legal provisions (Translated from the opinion of
the Eighth Chamber of the State Council, 22/05/2007).21
The decision suggests that the judges have not taken into account the
spirit of the EU-induced reforms and EU human and minority rights
standards. They disregard the entitlement to public services and
education in minority languages, as stipulated inter alia by the
European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. It would be next
to impossible for the judges to uphold the ruling, if they reasoned
within the context of European legal norms. Yet, the ruling also
seems to sit uneasy with those reforms of the initial EU-reform
package of the Ecevit government that had paved the way for limited
broadcasting (by the public broadcaster!) and language education in
Kurdish and other local languages.22
3. The double bind of compassion and exclusion
Given the discussion in the preceding section on the limitations of
legal Kurdish politics, a set of questions emerges: Which political
space remains for the DTP under these circumstances? Is there a
strategy behind the politics of disengagement? And, how does this
strategy relate to the AKP's Kurdish policy?
In the eyes of a majority of the Turkish public and mainstream media,
members of the DTP, whether in parliament or local government, are
seen as the PKK's front office. The resulting isolation by Turkey's
political mainstream, despite its decidedly non-nationalist, even
conciliatory approach has also led to a weakening of the DTP's
legitimacy in the eyes of Kurdish nationalists. Prevented from
delivering in the realm of legal politics and unable to control
disenfranchised Kurdish rioters, the DTP has reached a point where
its politics are too accommodationist for its own constituency and
not sufficiently assimilationist for the Turkish mainstream.
It can be said with a degree of certainty that in the current
situation, there is an ad-hoc coalition between the military, the
conservative legal elites and the AKP regarding the disengagement
from the DTP and the Kurdish nationalist constituency it represents.
The military high command and the legal establishment are known for
their disdain towards the public expression of any ethnic and
religious identity that deviates from the republican identity
project,23 hence their attitude is not surprising. What is indeed
startling is that the AKP, who in the past has often presented itself
as critical of the military and lamented interference by the legal
establishment, would be so fully acquiescent.24 In fact, the AKP has
been actively supporting the politics of disengagement. The party's
main motivation seems to be to consolidate its inroads into the
Kurdish areas and to replace, in the 2009 local elections, the DTP
mayors. To achieve this goal, the AKP seems to be ready to squeeze
the DTP out of the space of legal politics by launching
investigations, by eroding the party's legitimacy and by creating
conditions under which a municipality cannot operate successfully.
Yet, this is only one aspect of the government's strategy that also
makes use of AKP networks25 and their `politics of charity',
targeting disenfranchised Kurds with services from Islamic charity
organizations, a discourse of Muslim brotherhood and a promise of
economic development.26 Commenting on a recent occurrence in Adana,
where a local police officer appeased rioting children by handing out
bananas, Ece Temelkuran coined the label `Islamist Banana
Politics'.27 She suggests that Kurds in the Southeast are cut off
their political struggle, while being subjected to a politics of
charity that turns Kurds into a needy and pitiable group.
Yet, the AKP social policy is not limited to symbolic acts of
charity: For a majority in the Kurdish provinces, as elsewhere in
Turkey, services ranging from the provision of social housing, free
schoolbooks and better access to the health system have had a
positive impact on people's daily life. While this is not a strategy
that responds to the demands of the Kurdish movement, it does have an
impact on the quality of people's every-day life, in Turkey in
general as for many in the region.
Conclusion: No alternative to Europe?
Turkey's Kurds, especially those living in the Southeast, have a
marginally better life today than at the beginning of the millennium.
Cities like Diyarbakir, Van or Batman, heavily affected by the influx
of hundreds of thousands of refugees are in the early stages of urban
normalization. New social housing projects, extended health and
educational services and social benefits are available to the urban
poor. At the same time, the progress towards broader human and
minority rights and a more deliberative democratic regime has come to
a deadlock. Many Kurds are left to choose between a Kurdish movement
that appears emasculated and the AKP promise of a better material
life in the bonds of Muslim brotherhood.
Having won the 2007 elections, the Erdogan government will not
resuscitate a reform process that would respond to the longstanding
demands of the Kurdish national movement and hence alienate the more
nationalist factions within the AKP. Without the prospect of EU
membership, the patronizing embrace through charity and limited
community rights seems sufficient, and hence even modest progress on
issues such as education in Kurdish unlikely. If the AKP delivers on
its promises of regional economic development and consolidates the
work of sympathetic Islamic charities, it could win over a growing
number of disaffected Kurds. This would be a return, albeit with an
Islamic flavour, of the republican policy of clientelistic
co-optation for those ready to foreswear the idea of a secular
Kurdish identity, and exclusion for those who do not.28
A darker scenario would see Turkey released from the universe of
mutual obligations with the EU, and a deterioration of the democratic
system, worsened by a continued ground and air offensive against PKK
positions in Northern Iraq. Under such conditions, the government
would loose its support base among Turkey's Kurds, and eventually
also its grip on Turkish politics. Further militarization of Turkish
society would almost certainly lead to increased levels of ethnic
conflict and terrorist attacks in western cities and coastal regions.
Radical Turkish ethno-nationalists with increasingly overt support
from the security and state apparatus would push disenfranchised
Kurds towards terrorist acts, recreating the cycle of violence and
retribution experienced in the 1980s and 90s. Such a rupture in
inter-community relations would be bound to have destabilizing
effects.
The `European option' would be based on a genuine recognition of the
Kurds as a political and cultural constituent of Turkey and the full
implementation of the EU acquis communautaire on minority and human
rights. It would allow for a decentralization of local government
true to the principle of `subsidiarity' and include the use of
Kurdish in public service institutions. The legal representatives of
the Kurdish movement would be encouraged to engage in Turkish
mainstream politics, while an amnesty for PKK fighters would
significantly reduce the PKK's military clout. Under such conditions,
the large majority of Kurds would be integrated into the political
mainstream, while only splinter groups would cling to armed struggle
and extremist violence.
Such a shift in perspective appears feasible within the kind of
post-modern, non-confrontational and consensual political culture,
which is at least partially characteristic of conflict-resolution
within the European Union. At the height of its EU hopes, Turkey
might have been on the trajectory towards such a `post-modern' state
of affairs. Without a firm EU perspective, Turkey will remain
committed to the logic of zero-sum games, power politics and
non-recognition, with only very limited incentives to reach out to a
minority group, whose aspirations can be contained by other means.
Yet, a policy that ignores the demands of secular Kurdish
nationalists and seeks to eliminate the conditions for their legal
representation -even if sweetened by the carrot of cientelistic
co-optation, charity politics and a discourse of compassion-
disregards the considerable transformation of Kurdish society. Until
the 1980s, Turkey's Kurds lived in predominantly rural, socially
conservative and parochial communities with little access to
education and to the outside world. Today, they are still relatively
poorer than the average. Yet, they live mostly in cities and are
presented on all levels of Turkish society, from the economic to the
cultural sphere. Young Kurds enjoy access to sophisticated
trans-national networks of Kurdish politics and identity, often
referred to as Virtual Kurdistan.29 The Kurdish Diaspora in Europe -
itself an outcome of Turkey's Kurdish policy in the 1980s and 90s- is
an additional resource for the transnational negotiation and
formation of Kurdish identity beyond the confines of republican
identity politics in Turkey.
It is hardly probable that the AKP's carrot and stick policy will
undo two decades of secular-nationalist Kurdish identity formation by
imposing the notion of Sunni-Muslim citizenship with a whiff of
depoliticized Kurdish traditions. In the medium-run, there appears to
be no credible alternative to acknowledgement and recognition within
a `European option'.
_________________
Dr Kerem Oktem is Senior Researcher at the European Studies Centre,
St Antony's College, University of Oxford. He works on contemporary
Turkish history and politics with a focus on Turkey - EU relations,
Turkey's minority policies and conflict resolution.
Stiftung Forschungsstelle Schweiz-Türkei/ Research Foundation Swiss -
Turkey, Occasional Paper February 2008
Stiftung Forschungsstelle Schweiz-Türkei and Kerem Oktem Basel,
February 2008 - http://www.sfst.ch
____________________________________________
1 At a debate in Parliament on 11 January 2008, DTP MPs criticised
the impeachment of Demirbas. Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin, in
turn, accused the DTP of ignoring the constitutional order and of
violating Para. 3 of the Constitution that stipulates: `Turkey is an
indivisible unity with its state and nation and its official name is
Turkish'
(Cf. http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?ene wsid`467).
2 For a partisan description of the Gulen's Kurdish strategy, see:
Mehmet Kalyoncu (2008), A Civilian Response to ethno-religious
conflict. The Gulen movement in Southeast Turkey, The Light,
Somerset, N.J.
3 When Erdogan met members of civil society during a visit, the Chair
of the Diyarbakir Bar, Szegin Tanrikulu, inquired whether reforms
allowing for education in the Kurdish language could help easing the
current conflict. He responded: `There are not only Kurds in Turkey.
What if tomorrow, the Cherkez or Laz ask for the same? Everyone will
demand it. How are we going to sustain unity then?'
(http://www.milliyet.com.tr/2008/01/06/siy aset/axsiy03.html)
4 This reform package also included the abolishment of the death
penalty that allowed for PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan's death sentence
to be commuted to life imprisonment.
5 The war left more than 37,000 dead, including civilians, and up to
2 million internally displaced in the Kurdish areas and western
Turkey. Not less than 2,000 villages were destroyed by security
forces or PKK units. It ended, tentatively, with the capture, by
Turkey, of Abdullah Ocalan in February 1999.
6 The last provinces, where emergency rule provisions were in place
until September 2002, were Diyarbakir and Sirnak, the former the
symbolic capital of Kurdish politics and the latter one of the
hotspots of Kurdish military resistance, situated on the Iraqi
border.
7 Zeynep Gambetti (2004), The Conflictual (Trans) Formation of the
Public Sphere in Urban Space: The Case of Diyarbakir, EUI Working
Papers, 2004/38.
8 The ongoing Ergenekon investigation suggests that a
tightly-organised network of retired generals, members of the army,
the security services and the mafia might have been behind many of
assassinations and nationalist murders of the recent years
(http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar. do?load=detay&link=132507).
9 Kerem Oktem (2006), Return of the Turkish `State of Exception',
Middle East Report Online, June
(http://www.merip.org/mero/mero060306.html)
10 Most of the casualties occurred in the Kurdish provinces, yet on
28 May 2007, six members of the public were killed in the centre of
Ankara by a bomb planted by a terrorist with PKK links.
11 First speculations on a cross-border operation on Iraqi territory
appeared in Turkish newspapers towards the end of May 2007.
12 Despite the heavy-handed allegations of treason, the eight
soldiers were acquitted of all serious crimes by a military court in
February 2008. The mainstream newspapers and TV, which had denounced
the captives as traitors, failed to follow up on the story and
referred to their acquittal only in passing.
13 Nicole F. Watts (2006): Activists in office: Pro-Kurdish
contentious politics in Turkey, Ethnopolitics (5/2).
14 The mayor of Metropolitan Diyarbakir, Osman Baydemir, argues that
the party and its members never had to face as much harassment as
under the two successive AKP governments (Interview, 10/01/2008).
15 DTP mayors believe that the Ankara bureaucracy discriminates
against them, when it comes to the distribution of funds and the
cooperation over projects. Baydemir suggests that state agencies have
suspended all projects that might ameliorate living conditions in
Diyarbakir (Interview, 10/01/2008). One should note, however, that
such discrimination is not limited to Kurdish municipalities but is
sometimes also employed against mayors of other opposition parties.
16 A particularly blunt example of such disengagement was the 2007
Chief of the General staff reception for the Victory day on 30 August
to which the DTP was not invited. When DTP Chair of the Parliamentary
group, Ahmet Turk, remarked that this exclusionist behaviour amounted
to `separatism', the Chief Prosecutor in Ankara started proceedings
to have his immunity revoked. Baskin Oran and other liberal
intellectuals took up the issue. (Radikal, 11/01/08,
http://www.radikal.com.tr/haber.php?habe rno=244132).
17 An interesting case is Osman Baydemir's new year's card in three
languages (Turkish, Kurdish and English) that also led to
prosecution.
18 Mayors in Tunceli (Songul Erol Abdil) and Diyarbakir (Abdullah
Demirbas, Osman Baydemir) complain that they are overwhelmed with
court cases that keep them from their daily commitments (Interviews,
9-10/01/2008). Osman Baydemir now has 150 investigations and fifteen
pending court cases. He has to attend the Prosecutor's office at an
average of twice a week (10/01/2008).
19 Cf. Meline Toumani's well-researched NYT article (17/02/2008).
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/
m agazine/17turkey-t.html?scp=1&sq=Demirbas& st=nyt).
20 After an appeal by Demirbas, the court reconsidered the case in
August 2007, yet validated the decision.
21 `...resmi dil olan Turkcenin disinda belde halki tarafindan
konusulan yerel dilleri kullanilmasi yukarida belirtilen Anayasa ve
yasa hukumlerine acikca aykirilik teskil ettigi gibi ulkemiz
gercekleriyle bagdasmamaktadir. ... Zira ulkemizde egitim ve ogretim
dili Turkce olduguna gore ve okuma yazma bilen Turk vatandaslari
Turkce okuyup yazabildiklerine gore Turkce disindaki dillerde
belediye hizmeti sunulmasinin hicbir makul gerekecsi olamaz... [Yerel
dillerinin] cok dilli belediyecilik gerekcesiyle resmilestirilmesi
Anayasal ve Yasal Kurallara acikca aykirilik teskil etmektedir.'
22 This is particularly interesting as Turkey has been an ardent
supporter not only of Kosovar independence but also of the
introduction of Turkish as official language in three municipalities
of Kosovo.
23 Baskin Oran defines the founding element of republican identity as
secular, Hanefi, Sunni, Muslim and Turkish
(http://www.sundayszaman.com/sunday/detayl ar.do?load=detay&link=1226).
24 AKP MP's are on record to have likened the DTP repeatedly as an
extension of the PKK. PM Erdogan has repeatedly urged DTP leaders to
disassociate themselves from the PKK, insinuating that there is no
place in parliament for a party that perceives of the PKK in terms as
a `political organization'
(http://www.milliyet.com.tr/2008/01 /08/son/sonsiy16.asp?prm=0,421890569).
25 Organizations close to the Fethullah Gulen, who is highly
influential on the government's Kurdish policy, play a particularly
important role. Charities like Denizfeneri (Lighthouse) and Insani
Yardim Vakfi (Foundation for Human Assistance) combine impressive
professionalism and efficiency with a mission to win people over for
Islam and allay their discontent. (Cf. http://www.ihh.org.tr/ and
http://www.denizfeneri.org.tr).
26 A week after a bomb attack in Diyarbakir killing seven, committed
by a man with links to the PKK, eight hundred businessmen close the
ruling party flew in to Diyarbakir to promise investment and
employment opportunities. This is a very effective and innovative way
of politics: Rather than promising state investment, businessmen
emerge as semi-autonomous actors for development.
27 Milliyet, 17/02/2007
(http://www.milliyet.com.tr/2008/02/17/ yazar/temelkuran.html).
28 This engagement with minority groups through the double bind of
denial of difference and patronising compassion is also traceable in
the AKP's Alevi policy (Cf. Kerem Oktem (2008): Being Muslim at the
Margins: the AKP and the Alevi, Middle East Report, 246).
29 Nicole F. Watts (2004): Institutionalizing Virtual Kurdistan West:
Transnational Networks and Ethnic Contention in International
Affairs. In: Joel S. Migdal: States and Societies in the Struggle to
Shape Identities and Local Practices. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2004.
http://www.kurdishaspect.com/doc030808KO.ht ml
March 8 2008
The patronizing embrace: Turkey's new Kurdish strategy
Kurdishaspect.com - By Kerem Oktem
The Sixth of October 2006 is not going to make it into the textbooks
of Turkish history. On this day, thecouncil of the central Diyarbakir
borough of Suriçi voted unanimously for a project called
`Multilingual Municipality Services'. The mayor, Abdullah Demirbas of
the Democratic Society Party (DTP) justified the proposal with a
reference to the district's majority of Kurdish speakers and the
prevalence of other languages such as Arabic and Armenian. Many of
the residents are indeed of rural origin and have fled to Diyarbakir
during the Kurdish uprising in the 1990s. Their Turkish is often too
patchy to fully benefit from services of the municipality. At the
same time, the idea went, Diyarbakir's multi-cultural and
multilingual past merits a publicity campaign that lives up to the
diversity of its past, exemplified by the surviving Armenian,
Chaldaean and Protestant Churches and the many historical mosques in
the old town.
Demirbas's experiment with `multilingualism' and public services in
Kurdish could have marked a departure from Turkey's assimilatory
policies towards its Kurdish citizens. It could have been a step
towards a genuinely inclusive policy based on the acknowledgement and
recognition of difference, a step in full conformity with the spirit
of EU-induced legal reform packages and with European standards of
human and minority right. Alas, it was not to be: Abdullah Demirbas
was dismissed from office and faced with a barrage of court cases.
The Council of State, the country's supreme administrative court,
deemed the municipality's project unconstitutional, while members of
the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) denounced it as an
attack on Turkey's territorial indivisibility.1
This essay examines Turkey's Kurdish policy since 2002 and discusses
the prospects of legal Kurdish politics under the current government.
It argues that after six years of reform politics by successive AKP
governments, two years of EU accession negotiations and heightened
expectations for progress, developments indicate a suspension of
reform and a shift towards polarization. Turkey's Kurds are now
caught between the promise of a better material life and Islamic
charity politics on the one side and the prospect of hardening
discrimination and exclusion on the other. To be admitted to the
emerging space of AKP-supported material wealth, Kurds are urged to
renounce the Kurdish nationalist movement and its identity-based
politics as presented by the DTP.
1. The mirage of reform: The AKP's Kurdish policy since 2002
Most analysts have expected that the Justice and Development Party
under Prime Minister Erdogan would depart from Turkey's traditional
Kurdish policy that has been wavering between assimilation and
clientelistic co-optation. A closer look at the period since the
AKP's first election victory in November 2002, however, suggests that
the party's greatest asset has been the absence of an explicit
Kurdish policy. What the AKP government did have was a different
rhetoric and an implicit policy: Less inspired by Turkish
ethno-nationalism than by a notion of Muslim solidarity, it followed
the Gulen movement's recommendation of moderate Islam as antidote to
Kurdish nationalism.2 Ignoring Kurdish demands ranging from the right
of education in Kurdish,3 to the termination of all regulations
limiting the public use of Kurdish, the government briefly considered
and then discarded the idea of a general amnesty for armed members of
the PKK. Rather than engaging with Kurdish representatives and
acknowledging the existence of a political conflict, it went for
pragmatic problem management, misunderstood by many as a major
softening in Turkey's security-minded Kurdish policy.
The introduction of limited broadcasting in minority languages and
private language courses, hailed as a first opening by liberals and
as a dangerous first step towards the erosion territorial integrity
by critics, was an important legal change with immediate relevance
for the Kurdish community. Yet, it was not the incumbent AKP
government that passed this key reform package, paving the way for
Turkey's EU membership negotiation, but the coalition led by the late
Bulent Ecevit, which voted in this package just before the November
2002 elections.4 The AKP government managed to take the credit and
create a narrative of democratisation that impressed liberals at home
and analysts abroad, while in reality it shied away from even the
most timid steps towards recognition of Kurdish concerns.
Normalisation or delusion? The first AKP government
November 2002 seemed to herald a new beginning: After almost two
decades of the Kurdish Uprising (Serhildan) and violent conflict
between the Kurdish-nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, Partiya
Karkeren Kurdistan) and Turkish security forces,5 a fragile peace was
taking hold. In place since the 1980 military intervention of 12
September, the state of emergency regime was abrogated in all Kurdish
provinces by the end of 2002, ending more than twenty years of
arbitrary rule by military and security forces.6 It should be noted
that the lifting of the state of emergency was a decision not of the
newly incumbent Erdogan government but of the preceding coalition
government under Bulent Ecevit.
Released from the tight grip of the `State of Emergency Regional
Governorate' (Olaganustu Hal Bolge Valiligi), residents of the
Southeast experienced, for the first time in almost a generation,
basic freedoms like traveling without regular identity controls and
road-blocks. In the large cities of the Southeast, where passers-by
disappeared from the streets at sunset -due to curfews or fear of
arbitrary detention-urban life was slowly restored to its pre-1980
vivacity, even though places like Diyarbakir or Batman were bursting
with hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people. Despite
the poverty, squalor and erosion of traditional social institutions
in these cities, however, there was a remarkable relaxation of
authoritarian policies and softening of attitudes among members of
the security forces.
The lifting of the state of emergency also opened the way for a more
self-conscious Kurdish associational life. The Kurdish
municipalities, through cultural activities, concerts, film festivals
etc. contributed to the emergence of a new public sphere.7 For the
first time in the history of the Turkish Republic, urban space
emerged as a venue for the negotiation and formation of Kurdish
identity. The images of incessant violence and bloodshed, with which
the region was hitherto remembered were replaced, at least in some
part of the Turkish mainstream media, with images of a cultural
revival beyond conflict. Some even thought that a substantive
settlement including a general amnesty for PKK combatants was in easy
reach.
The sense of normalization, even if in the absence of legal reform of
any consequence, was consolidated with the decision of the European
Union in December 2004 to begin accession negotiations. The
subsequent start of EU membership talks in October 2005 appeared to
be the final indicator that Turkey was on the path to reform, a
process that would ultimately benefit the Kurdish constituency. For a
brief period, a window of opportunity emerged, bringing together the
military establishment, the moderate Islamists of the AKP, Kurdish
Nationalists, Alevis and large segments of the Turkish electorate on
a platform for EU membership. Powerful as it might have seemed,
though, the zenith of this unexpected coalition was already
surpassed: A forceful nationalist backlash, orchestrated by rogue
elements within the state and the military, had been in the making
for some time. TV series, movies and historical novels began to
reinstate a sense of Turkish superiority that had to be defended
against internal and external enemies. Leading members of the
military got increasingly vocal about the risk of EU membership for
Turkey's integrity. Local chapters of extreme nationalist
organizations regrouped with retired generals, nationalist lawyers
and rightwing extremists to instill anti-Kurdish sentiment at the
funerals of Turkish soldiers killed by the PKK.8
End of normalization: The Diyarbakir events of 29 March 2006
Violence in the Kurdish provinces never ceased completely: Low-level
armed conflict in some areas continued after the end of emergency
rule, yet fighting was largely confined to rural areas. The most
serious blow to the feeling of normalization was the death in combat
of fourteen PKK fighters on March 29, 2006. It set in motion a circle
of violence that could well be defined as the `return of a state of
exception'.9 Security forces killed at least fourteen demonstrators,
all but one in Diyarbakir. Many of the victims were young men, yet
three were children under ten years of age, who got caught up in the
street fights. In the following wave of detentions and prosecutions,
two-hundred children were taken into custody and around ninety were
charged with participation in illegal protests.
The Diyarbakir events of March 2006 did not only mark the end of
normalization and the return to a politics of violence. They also
signify an important rupture for Kurdish legal politics. Osman
Baydemir, Diyarbakir's prolific DTP mayor had intervened together
with the deputy Governor to persuade the rioters to go home. Yet, he
was booed out. The next day, the Turkish mainstream media scolded him
for supporting the rioters. At the same time, dozens of local DTP
Chairmen and members were arrested on charges of terrorism.
Mounting crisis, elections and the Daglica affair
The March events were followed by a bomb blast in September 2006 that
killed seven in the city -mostly children- and a growing number of
casualties in armed conflict between the security forces and the
PKK.10 With increased conflict and attacks of PKK troops from the
territory of the Kurdistan Regional Government, the General Staff
prepared for cross-border operations to contain PKK action.11 Turkish
Prime Minister Erdogan, however, postponed the operations, giving the
impression to his potential Kurdish voters that his government was
opposed to the incursions. Subsequently, in the elections of July
2007, the AKP made substantial inroads into the Kurdish provinces,
where it trumped the DTP in all but the most nationalist strongholds.
Despite a Turkish - Iraqi security pact and increasing US -
mediation, PKK attacks continued after the elections. They culminated
in the killing of twelve soldiers and the capture of eight at the
Iraqi border near Daglica, in October 2007. Probably for the first
time in Turkey's recent history, centrally organized nationalist mobs
attacked and vandalized DTP party offices, Kurdish businesses and
neighborhoods in western and central Turkish cities. Yet, when the
eight soldiers were released in November, public opinion reacted not
with relief but with disdain. The Justice Minister accused the troops
of voluntary surrender to the PKK, while the media singled out
Private Ramazan Yuce as traitor, because of his Kurdish origins. 12
Following the handover ceremony including DTP Member of Parliament
Fatma Kurtulan, they were interrogated and detained. Kurtulan was
subsequently charged with membership in a terrorist organization.
Amid jingoistic media reports on the Daglica affair, the Turkish air
force began its attack on PKK positions in Northern Iraq on November
13.
2. The politics of disengagement: The DTP in isolation
Until the July 2007 elections, analysts continued to give credit to
the AKP's discourse of reform and democratization and to sympathize
with the party's struggle against the secular establishment. Yet,
Turkey's political prospects have changed significantly. Nationalism
and racism have made the country's western cities much less
hospitable to Kurds, Christians and immigrants. Parallel to the
growing anti-Kurdish and anti-minority sentiment and an increasingly
jingoistic mainstream media, the space for legal Kurdish politics has
become ever-more limited, both in the Parliament and the
municipalities.
Kurdish-interest politics in Turkey have always operated at the very
margins of the political system, and parties were subject to
exclusion, prosecution and often prohibition. The Constitutional
Court has so far closed down all parties with a Kurdish-nationalist
orientation, with a court case pending against the DTP since November
2008. Not unlike Sinn Fein and the IRA or Harri Batasuna and ETA, the
DTP and its predecessors have maintained organic links with the PKK,
which impeded its democratic credentials and its credibility in the
eyes of the Turkish mainstream. Yet as Nicole Watts13 argues, despite
the constant threat of closure on the one side and the interference
of the PKK command on the other, these parties have also provided a
resource for the Kurdish national movement and a potential avenue for
integration into the Turkish mainstream.
The Politics of Disengagement
The DTP, however, has had to face an exclusionary approach by state
agencies, the military and the government that amounts to a
disengagement of the state and the Erdogan government from a legal
Kurdish party.14 The politics of disengagement proceeds on a number
of levels:
On the level of state agencies: Non-cooperation with DTP
municipalities15
On the level of representatives of the military: Active
non-engagement with DTP members, especially during national
celebrations,16
On the legal level: Court cases against mayors for minor offences
like speaking Kurdish during public service17 and against Members of
Parliament.18
The Ministry of Interior has been following DTP municipalities
suspiciously, containing projects or policies that could have an
explicitly Kurdish agenda. An emblematic case is the aforementioned
project of `multi-language municipality services' by Suriçi Mayor
Abdullah Demirbas.19 His project was a modest step to make public
services more accessible for the poor and disenfranchised immigrants
in his district. Many of the residents arrived in Diyarbakir as
internally displaced people in the 1990s with almost no possessions
and no skills for the urban labour market. Especially older women
still speak only little or no Turkish. Much of the project including
information campaigns or wedding ceremonies in Kurdish were geared
towards them. To be fair, the municipality's children's journals in
Turkish and Kurdish, the Kurdish-language theatre and a children's
council did act on the notion of empowering Kurdish identity and
giving the language a higher level of visibility and legitimacy. Yet,
all these projects, one should stress, are in full conformity with
European human and minority rights and would have to be implemented
anyway, if Turkey was to stay on its course for EU membership.
Yet, the cooperation between the government and the judiciary that
led to the impeachment of Abdullah Demirbas shows that such reforms
will not be tolerated if attempted by the DTP. Investigators of the
interior Ministry prepared a file against the mayor. Three months
after the municipal council had voted for the multi-language project,
the Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu called upon the State Council
(Danistay) for the dismissal of mayor Demirbas and the dissolution of
the municipal council. In May 2007, the State Council's eighth
chamber decided in favour of the ministry's request, dismissing the
mayor and dissolving the council.20 The opinion of the court stated:
`... [the fact that the municipality] employed local languages used by
the district population other than the official language Turkish is
in clear violation of the constitution and other laws and is not in
conformity with the realities of our country.
Since the language of education in our country is Turkish and all
literate Turkish citizens can read and write in Turkish, there can be
no conceivable justification for the provision of municipality
languages in a language other than Turkish...
The attempt to turn local languages into official languages with a
project for a multi-language municipality is in clear violation of
the constitution and legal provisions (Translated from the opinion of
the Eighth Chamber of the State Council, 22/05/2007).21
The decision suggests that the judges have not taken into account the
spirit of the EU-induced reforms and EU human and minority rights
standards. They disregard the entitlement to public services and
education in minority languages, as stipulated inter alia by the
European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. It would be next
to impossible for the judges to uphold the ruling, if they reasoned
within the context of European legal norms. Yet, the ruling also
seems to sit uneasy with those reforms of the initial EU-reform
package of the Ecevit government that had paved the way for limited
broadcasting (by the public broadcaster!) and language education in
Kurdish and other local languages.22
3. The double bind of compassion and exclusion
Given the discussion in the preceding section on the limitations of
legal Kurdish politics, a set of questions emerges: Which political
space remains for the DTP under these circumstances? Is there a
strategy behind the politics of disengagement? And, how does this
strategy relate to the AKP's Kurdish policy?
In the eyes of a majority of the Turkish public and mainstream media,
members of the DTP, whether in parliament or local government, are
seen as the PKK's front office. The resulting isolation by Turkey's
political mainstream, despite its decidedly non-nationalist, even
conciliatory approach has also led to a weakening of the DTP's
legitimacy in the eyes of Kurdish nationalists. Prevented from
delivering in the realm of legal politics and unable to control
disenfranchised Kurdish rioters, the DTP has reached a point where
its politics are too accommodationist for its own constituency and
not sufficiently assimilationist for the Turkish mainstream.
It can be said with a degree of certainty that in the current
situation, there is an ad-hoc coalition between the military, the
conservative legal elites and the AKP regarding the disengagement
from the DTP and the Kurdish nationalist constituency it represents.
The military high command and the legal establishment are known for
their disdain towards the public expression of any ethnic and
religious identity that deviates from the republican identity
project,23 hence their attitude is not surprising. What is indeed
startling is that the AKP, who in the past has often presented itself
as critical of the military and lamented interference by the legal
establishment, would be so fully acquiescent.24 In fact, the AKP has
been actively supporting the politics of disengagement. The party's
main motivation seems to be to consolidate its inroads into the
Kurdish areas and to replace, in the 2009 local elections, the DTP
mayors. To achieve this goal, the AKP seems to be ready to squeeze
the DTP out of the space of legal politics by launching
investigations, by eroding the party's legitimacy and by creating
conditions under which a municipality cannot operate successfully.
Yet, this is only one aspect of the government's strategy that also
makes use of AKP networks25 and their `politics of charity',
targeting disenfranchised Kurds with services from Islamic charity
organizations, a discourse of Muslim brotherhood and a promise of
economic development.26 Commenting on a recent occurrence in Adana,
where a local police officer appeased rioting children by handing out
bananas, Ece Temelkuran coined the label `Islamist Banana
Politics'.27 She suggests that Kurds in the Southeast are cut off
their political struggle, while being subjected to a politics of
charity that turns Kurds into a needy and pitiable group.
Yet, the AKP social policy is not limited to symbolic acts of
charity: For a majority in the Kurdish provinces, as elsewhere in
Turkey, services ranging from the provision of social housing, free
schoolbooks and better access to the health system have had a
positive impact on people's daily life. While this is not a strategy
that responds to the demands of the Kurdish movement, it does have an
impact on the quality of people's every-day life, in Turkey in
general as for many in the region.
Conclusion: No alternative to Europe?
Turkey's Kurds, especially those living in the Southeast, have a
marginally better life today than at the beginning of the millennium.
Cities like Diyarbakir, Van or Batman, heavily affected by the influx
of hundreds of thousands of refugees are in the early stages of urban
normalization. New social housing projects, extended health and
educational services and social benefits are available to the urban
poor. At the same time, the progress towards broader human and
minority rights and a more deliberative democratic regime has come to
a deadlock. Many Kurds are left to choose between a Kurdish movement
that appears emasculated and the AKP promise of a better material
life in the bonds of Muslim brotherhood.
Having won the 2007 elections, the Erdogan government will not
resuscitate a reform process that would respond to the longstanding
demands of the Kurdish national movement and hence alienate the more
nationalist factions within the AKP. Without the prospect of EU
membership, the patronizing embrace through charity and limited
community rights seems sufficient, and hence even modest progress on
issues such as education in Kurdish unlikely. If the AKP delivers on
its promises of regional economic development and consolidates the
work of sympathetic Islamic charities, it could win over a growing
number of disaffected Kurds. This would be a return, albeit with an
Islamic flavour, of the republican policy of clientelistic
co-optation for those ready to foreswear the idea of a secular
Kurdish identity, and exclusion for those who do not.28
A darker scenario would see Turkey released from the universe of
mutual obligations with the EU, and a deterioration of the democratic
system, worsened by a continued ground and air offensive against PKK
positions in Northern Iraq. Under such conditions, the government
would loose its support base among Turkey's Kurds, and eventually
also its grip on Turkish politics. Further militarization of Turkish
society would almost certainly lead to increased levels of ethnic
conflict and terrorist attacks in western cities and coastal regions.
Radical Turkish ethno-nationalists with increasingly overt support
from the security and state apparatus would push disenfranchised
Kurds towards terrorist acts, recreating the cycle of violence and
retribution experienced in the 1980s and 90s. Such a rupture in
inter-community relations would be bound to have destabilizing
effects.
The `European option' would be based on a genuine recognition of the
Kurds as a political and cultural constituent of Turkey and the full
implementation of the EU acquis communautaire on minority and human
rights. It would allow for a decentralization of local government
true to the principle of `subsidiarity' and include the use of
Kurdish in public service institutions. The legal representatives of
the Kurdish movement would be encouraged to engage in Turkish
mainstream politics, while an amnesty for PKK fighters would
significantly reduce the PKK's military clout. Under such conditions,
the large majority of Kurds would be integrated into the political
mainstream, while only splinter groups would cling to armed struggle
and extremist violence.
Such a shift in perspective appears feasible within the kind of
post-modern, non-confrontational and consensual political culture,
which is at least partially characteristic of conflict-resolution
within the European Union. At the height of its EU hopes, Turkey
might have been on the trajectory towards such a `post-modern' state
of affairs. Without a firm EU perspective, Turkey will remain
committed to the logic of zero-sum games, power politics and
non-recognition, with only very limited incentives to reach out to a
minority group, whose aspirations can be contained by other means.
Yet, a policy that ignores the demands of secular Kurdish
nationalists and seeks to eliminate the conditions for their legal
representation -even if sweetened by the carrot of cientelistic
co-optation, charity politics and a discourse of compassion-
disregards the considerable transformation of Kurdish society. Until
the 1980s, Turkey's Kurds lived in predominantly rural, socially
conservative and parochial communities with little access to
education and to the outside world. Today, they are still relatively
poorer than the average. Yet, they live mostly in cities and are
presented on all levels of Turkish society, from the economic to the
cultural sphere. Young Kurds enjoy access to sophisticated
trans-national networks of Kurdish politics and identity, often
referred to as Virtual Kurdistan.29 The Kurdish Diaspora in Europe -
itself an outcome of Turkey's Kurdish policy in the 1980s and 90s- is
an additional resource for the transnational negotiation and
formation of Kurdish identity beyond the confines of republican
identity politics in Turkey.
It is hardly probable that the AKP's carrot and stick policy will
undo two decades of secular-nationalist Kurdish identity formation by
imposing the notion of Sunni-Muslim citizenship with a whiff of
depoliticized Kurdish traditions. In the medium-run, there appears to
be no credible alternative to acknowledgement and recognition within
a `European option'.
_________________
Dr Kerem Oktem is Senior Researcher at the European Studies Centre,
St Antony's College, University of Oxford. He works on contemporary
Turkish history and politics with a focus on Turkey - EU relations,
Turkey's minority policies and conflict resolution.
Stiftung Forschungsstelle Schweiz-Türkei/ Research Foundation Swiss -
Turkey, Occasional Paper February 2008
Stiftung Forschungsstelle Schweiz-Türkei and Kerem Oktem Basel,
February 2008 - http://www.sfst.ch
____________________________________________
1 At a debate in Parliament on 11 January 2008, DTP MPs criticised
the impeachment of Demirbas. Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin, in
turn, accused the DTP of ignoring the constitutional order and of
violating Para. 3 of the Constitution that stipulates: `Turkey is an
indivisible unity with its state and nation and its official name is
Turkish'
(Cf. http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?ene wsid`467).
2 For a partisan description of the Gulen's Kurdish strategy, see:
Mehmet Kalyoncu (2008), A Civilian Response to ethno-religious
conflict. The Gulen movement in Southeast Turkey, The Light,
Somerset, N.J.
3 When Erdogan met members of civil society during a visit, the Chair
of the Diyarbakir Bar, Szegin Tanrikulu, inquired whether reforms
allowing for education in the Kurdish language could help easing the
current conflict. He responded: `There are not only Kurds in Turkey.
What if tomorrow, the Cherkez or Laz ask for the same? Everyone will
demand it. How are we going to sustain unity then?'
(http://www.milliyet.com.tr/2008/01/06/siy aset/axsiy03.html)
4 This reform package also included the abolishment of the death
penalty that allowed for PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan's death sentence
to be commuted to life imprisonment.
5 The war left more than 37,000 dead, including civilians, and up to
2 million internally displaced in the Kurdish areas and western
Turkey. Not less than 2,000 villages were destroyed by security
forces or PKK units. It ended, tentatively, with the capture, by
Turkey, of Abdullah Ocalan in February 1999.
6 The last provinces, where emergency rule provisions were in place
until September 2002, were Diyarbakir and Sirnak, the former the
symbolic capital of Kurdish politics and the latter one of the
hotspots of Kurdish military resistance, situated on the Iraqi
border.
7 Zeynep Gambetti (2004), The Conflictual (Trans) Formation of the
Public Sphere in Urban Space: The Case of Diyarbakir, EUI Working
Papers, 2004/38.
8 The ongoing Ergenekon investigation suggests that a
tightly-organised network of retired generals, members of the army,
the security services and the mafia might have been behind many of
assassinations and nationalist murders of the recent years
(http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar. do?load=detay&link=132507).
9 Kerem Oktem (2006), Return of the Turkish `State of Exception',
Middle East Report Online, June
(http://www.merip.org/mero/mero060306.html)
10 Most of the casualties occurred in the Kurdish provinces, yet on
28 May 2007, six members of the public were killed in the centre of
Ankara by a bomb planted by a terrorist with PKK links.
11 First speculations on a cross-border operation on Iraqi territory
appeared in Turkish newspapers towards the end of May 2007.
12 Despite the heavy-handed allegations of treason, the eight
soldiers were acquitted of all serious crimes by a military court in
February 2008. The mainstream newspapers and TV, which had denounced
the captives as traitors, failed to follow up on the story and
referred to their acquittal only in passing.
13 Nicole F. Watts (2006): Activists in office: Pro-Kurdish
contentious politics in Turkey, Ethnopolitics (5/2).
14 The mayor of Metropolitan Diyarbakir, Osman Baydemir, argues that
the party and its members never had to face as much harassment as
under the two successive AKP governments (Interview, 10/01/2008).
15 DTP mayors believe that the Ankara bureaucracy discriminates
against them, when it comes to the distribution of funds and the
cooperation over projects. Baydemir suggests that state agencies have
suspended all projects that might ameliorate living conditions in
Diyarbakir (Interview, 10/01/2008). One should note, however, that
such discrimination is not limited to Kurdish municipalities but is
sometimes also employed against mayors of other opposition parties.
16 A particularly blunt example of such disengagement was the 2007
Chief of the General staff reception for the Victory day on 30 August
to which the DTP was not invited. When DTP Chair of the Parliamentary
group, Ahmet Turk, remarked that this exclusionist behaviour amounted
to `separatism', the Chief Prosecutor in Ankara started proceedings
to have his immunity revoked. Baskin Oran and other liberal
intellectuals took up the issue. (Radikal, 11/01/08,
http://www.radikal.com.tr/haber.php?habe rno=244132).
17 An interesting case is Osman Baydemir's new year's card in three
languages (Turkish, Kurdish and English) that also led to
prosecution.
18 Mayors in Tunceli (Songul Erol Abdil) and Diyarbakir (Abdullah
Demirbas, Osman Baydemir) complain that they are overwhelmed with
court cases that keep them from their daily commitments (Interviews,
9-10/01/2008). Osman Baydemir now has 150 investigations and fifteen
pending court cases. He has to attend the Prosecutor's office at an
average of twice a week (10/01/2008).
19 Cf. Meline Toumani's well-researched NYT article (17/02/2008).
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/
m agazine/17turkey-t.html?scp=1&sq=Demirbas& st=nyt).
20 After an appeal by Demirbas, the court reconsidered the case in
August 2007, yet validated the decision.
21 `...resmi dil olan Turkcenin disinda belde halki tarafindan
konusulan yerel dilleri kullanilmasi yukarida belirtilen Anayasa ve
yasa hukumlerine acikca aykirilik teskil ettigi gibi ulkemiz
gercekleriyle bagdasmamaktadir. ... Zira ulkemizde egitim ve ogretim
dili Turkce olduguna gore ve okuma yazma bilen Turk vatandaslari
Turkce okuyup yazabildiklerine gore Turkce disindaki dillerde
belediye hizmeti sunulmasinin hicbir makul gerekecsi olamaz... [Yerel
dillerinin] cok dilli belediyecilik gerekcesiyle resmilestirilmesi
Anayasal ve Yasal Kurallara acikca aykirilik teskil etmektedir.'
22 This is particularly interesting as Turkey has been an ardent
supporter not only of Kosovar independence but also of the
introduction of Turkish as official language in three municipalities
of Kosovo.
23 Baskin Oran defines the founding element of republican identity as
secular, Hanefi, Sunni, Muslim and Turkish
(http://www.sundayszaman.com/sunday/detayl ar.do?load=detay&link=1226).
24 AKP MP's are on record to have likened the DTP repeatedly as an
extension of the PKK. PM Erdogan has repeatedly urged DTP leaders to
disassociate themselves from the PKK, insinuating that there is no
place in parliament for a party that perceives of the PKK in terms as
a `political organization'
(http://www.milliyet.com.tr/2008/01 /08/son/sonsiy16.asp?prm=0,421890569).
25 Organizations close to the Fethullah Gulen, who is highly
influential on the government's Kurdish policy, play a particularly
important role. Charities like Denizfeneri (Lighthouse) and Insani
Yardim Vakfi (Foundation for Human Assistance) combine impressive
professionalism and efficiency with a mission to win people over for
Islam and allay their discontent. (Cf. http://www.ihh.org.tr/ and
http://www.denizfeneri.org.tr).
26 A week after a bomb attack in Diyarbakir killing seven, committed
by a man with links to the PKK, eight hundred businessmen close the
ruling party flew in to Diyarbakir to promise investment and
employment opportunities. This is a very effective and innovative way
of politics: Rather than promising state investment, businessmen
emerge as semi-autonomous actors for development.
27 Milliyet, 17/02/2007
(http://www.milliyet.com.tr/2008/02/17/ yazar/temelkuran.html).
28 This engagement with minority groups through the double bind of
denial of difference and patronising compassion is also traceable in
the AKP's Alevi policy (Cf. Kerem Oktem (2008): Being Muslim at the
Margins: the AKP and the Alevi, Middle East Report, 246).
29 Nicole F. Watts (2004): Institutionalizing Virtual Kurdistan West:
Transnational Networks and Ethnic Contention in International
Affairs. In: Joel S. Migdal: States and Societies in the Struggle to
Shape Identities and Local Practices. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2004.
http://www.kurdishaspect.com/doc030808KO.ht ml