SO WHERE IS KURDISTAN?

There's no such place, says Turkey's government. It has a point

Source: Economist, 06/10/2000, Vol. 355 Issue 8174, Special section p10, 2p

AT THE time of the Kosovo crisis last year, Anna Lindh, the Swedish foreign minister, mused on the sort of human-rights abuses that might lead to the horror of ethnic cleansing. The first example she chose was that of the Kurds in Turkey, who, she said, ``are denied their language, cultural identity and democratic rights''. So is Turkey an incipient Serbia, and are the Kurds future Kosovars awaiting their Armageddon?

Not exactly. Under Turkish law, people can be sent to jail for broadcasting in Kurdish, teaching Kurdish in schools or running a political campaign on the basis of ethnicity. Since 1984, the army's bloody war against the PKK in south-eastern Turkey, where perhaps half the country's Kurds live, has cost at least 30,000 mainly Kurdish lives and driven several million Kurds from their homes.

But that leaves out millions more Kurds who go about their business in the rest of Turkey, apparently integrated and prosperous. Many successful businessmen are Kurdish, such as Aga Ceylan, one of Turkey's biggest construction barons, or Halis Toprak, a prominent industrialist and financier. About a quarter of Turkey's MPs claim some sort of Kurdish ancestry. People openly identifying themselves as at least partly Kurdish have served as mayor of Istanbul, prime minister, president, even army chief of staff. Nor do they necessarily play down their Kurdishness: Hikmet Cetin, a former foreign minister and speaker of parliament, likes to parade his fluency in Turkey's main Kurdish dialect.

Hadep, the largest Kurdish political party, polled only 4.7% of the national vote (or about one Kurdish vote in five) at the last election. Party leaders complained that the authorities stopped them from running a proper campaign in the south-east, but the millions of Kurds who live in western cities are perfectly aware of Hadep; they simply choose not to vote for it. The PKK, too, is unpopular with many Kurds. Its Marxist dogma turns off upwardly mobile ones in the western cities and conservative ones in the south-east alike. Its terrorist tactics, such as murdering schoolteachers and postmen for ``collaborating'' with the enemy, must have alienated many more. The Kurds of Iraq are helping the Turkish government to fight the PKK, as are Kurdish landowners and Islamists within Turkey. Indeed, many of the soldiers sent to fight the PKK over the past 20 years were Kurdish themselves.

Turkish nationalist ethnographers used to claim that Kurds were simply wayward Turks who had forgotten their true language and culture. That claim is clearly fanciful, but it is true that Kurds do not constitute a coherent group. They speak several different, often mutually unintelligible, dialects, and espouse different forms of Islam. The traditional tribal ties and the remote and mountainous landscape of the south-east have made it hard to develop a collective consciousness. Intermarriage with Turks is common, although never quantified. Even at the Hadep headquarters in Ankara, party functionaries speak Turkish amongst themselves.

Go west, young man

For decades, Kurds in the south-east have been voting for assimilation into Turkey with their feet. In 1996, the government calculated that the average inhabitant of the largely Kurdish province of Mus lived on less than a tenth of the income of a resident of Kocaeli, a western manufacturing centre. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Kurds have been moving west, at the rate of perhaps half a million a year. Whole Kurdish quarters have sprung up in western cities such as Izmir and Bursa.

True, the government bears much of the blame both for the lack of development in the south-east and for the fighting that has spurred the exodus from it. In the past, at any rate, Turkish leaders viewed mass emigration as one way to cure their south-eastern headache. But whatever prompted the outflow, it has become irreversible.

In a rare poll conducted on the subject in 1992, almost half the Kurds interviewed in Istanbul said they had come to stay. In all the big cities, young, chic, Turkish-speaking women can be seen shepherding their veiled, Kurdish-speaking mothers on to buses with an air of embarrassment. The (acute)emigr(acute)e Kurds of Ankara and Istanbul like to sing uplifting songs about their people's struggle, their resentment fostered by restrictions on the Kurdish language and petty harassment from the police. But for all their grumbling, they have no wish to go back to their villages, let alone into the hills with a gun.

That makes it all the more baffling that the government should be so determined to suppress the slightest pro-Kurdish peep. The courts regularly interpret a law against promoting ``hatred between ethnic groups'' to include any mention of a Kurdish problem. Last year, for example, they confirmed a two-year jail sentence against Akin Birdal, a human-rights campaigner who rashly spoke of a ``Kurdish identity'' in public. Around the same time, Vural Savas, the public prosecutor, closed down a small Kurdish party on similarly flimsy grounds, and started proceedings against Hadep for good measure. The courts even prevent parents from giving their children Kurdish names. The effect, naturally, is to ensure that politically apathetic or moderate Kurds turn more extreme.

In Diyarbakir, the capital of the south-east, the atmosphere is even more repressive. Many of the residents are refugees, living in fly-ridden tenements since the army burnt their villages as part of a scorched-earth campaign against the PKK. Locals at a teahouse worry that they will get into trouble for speaking to journalists. The security services, they say, make no distinction between law-abiding Kurds and PKK supporters. Everyone has a tale of arbitrary arrest, torture or disappearance. An old man in a frayed suit accuses the police of routinely raping their male prisoners. ``We accept torture,'' he says. ``The state has the right to torture you--but some methods are too shameful.''

Some 60,000 people, about a tenth of the province's adult population, have been tried in the special emergency-rule courts since 1989. Yet local human-rights lawyers say they have not managed to get a single torture case heard in 15 years. ``To whom should we complain?'' asks the sister of a torture victim. ``Even members of parliament can be tortured in Turkey.'' The American government's report on Turkey's human-rights situation in 1999 bears her out: ``The rarity of convictions and the light sentences imposed on police and other security officials for killings and torture continued to foster a climate of impunity.''

Throwing money at the problem

The government seems to think that a dash of prosperity will take the locals' minds off such concerns, but that is easier said than done. Refugee farmers cannot earn any money until they can return to their land, yet Diyarbakir's governor says there are no funds to rebuild their villages. The military campaign, meanwhile, is costing perhaps $8 billion a year. The benefits of GAP, a $30 billion hydroelectric and irrigation scheme designed to win Kurdish hearts and minds, have so far flowed disproportionately to the state electricity company and to wealthy landlords. Local businessmen complain that the many incentives for investment in the area help only west Turkish carpetbaggers with capital.

The atmosphere has improved somewhat since Mr Ocalan's capture and the PKK's subsequent ceasefire last year. The army was gaining the upper hand even before that; by now, claims the governor of the ``emergency-rule'' area, there are only 500 guerrillas left within the country. Even a PKK splinter group that was defying the ceasefire is said to have given up. Instead of barricading themselves indoors at dusk, locals feel secure enough to stroll home from restaurants late at night. But the chief of staff has ruled out any reduction in forces. At Diyarbakir airport, fearsome Apache attack helicopters still sit on the runway, ready for take-off.

The government's military success has also translated into a more relaxed political atmosphere. The head of the provincial bar association says the number of extra-judicial killings and disappearances has fallen, although torture remains widespread. As a gesture of goodwill, the government this year permitted public celebrations of Nawroz, the Kurdish new year, for the first time in more than a decade. Many television and radio stations are now able to broadcast non-political Kurdish songs. At a recent Hadep get-together in Diyarbakir, Kurdish singers even crooned the word ``Kurdistan''.

But staunchly Kemalist bureaucrats resist even such faltering steps. The governor of Istanbul, for example, prohibited the city's Kurds from celebrating Nawroz, on the ground that they had not transliterated the word correctly into Turkish in their application. Feridun Celik, the Kurdish mayor of Diyarbakir, sees his sudden arrest and then release in March as intended ``to sabotage the peaceful atmosphere''. Plenty of people, from government-sponsored paramilitary squads to arms- and drug-smugglers, stand to lose if the region returns to normal.

Moreover, officials still present any concessions as part of a general effort to improve human rights, not something aimed specifically at the Kurds. Mr Gurel, the government spokesman, insists that the government does not consider the Kurds a minority, and therefore has no plans to grant them the minority rights by which the EU sets so much store. Instead, he says, the ``social and economic problems of the south-east will lead the agenda.'' That will not reassure the teahouse customers of Diyarbakir.