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A very good introductory article to the Kurdish Question in Turkey by a well-known Turkish academician.
Enjoy it!
Please note that this article is written before 2002 so it does not include the improvements in the Kurdish cultural rights backed by the reforms backed by the AKP goverment in Turkey.
Especially, "The Roots of the Problem" part is worth reading.
The Kurdish Question in Turkey
Dogu Ergil
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One of the greatest obstacles to the consolidation of democracy in Turkey has been the country's treatment of its Kurdish citizens. Although Kurdish is the mother tongue of as many as one in five inhabitants of Turkey, the government prohibits the teaching of Kurdish in schools and the broadcasting of Kurdish radio and television programs. These restrictions attest to a continuing refusal on the part of the Turkish state to recognize the cultural identity of its Kurdish citizens, a policy that has generated widespread discontent among the country's Kurds. Although about half the Kurdish population of Turkey now lives in other parts of the country, the rest are still concentrated in their ancestral region in the southeast, where they predominate. This region has had a long history of Kurdish insurrections, but none so deadly as the struggle waged during the past two decades by the Workers' Party of Kurdistan (PKK), led by Abdullah Öçalan. Though precise figures are difficult to come by, there is little doubt that more than 30,000 people have lost their lives in clashes between government security forces and PKK militants.
Turkey's inability to come to grips with its Kurdish citizens' demand for cultural recognition not only prevents a peaceful resolution of the Kurdish problem but also impedes the country's acceptance by, integration into, and identification with Europe and the West. The European Union (EU), which Turkey would like very much to join, has consistently maintained that improvements in Turkey's human rights [End Page 122] record are required if its candidacy for EU membership is to be successful. Following Öçalan's arrest and conviction in 1999, the European Court of Human Rights called for a suspension of his death sentence until it had reviewed the verdict, and Turkey has, thus far at least, conditionally complied. How Turkey proceeds in its treatment of Öçalan and its Kurdish population as a whole is bound to play a key role in determining the outcome of its efforts to join the EU.
The Kurdish problem is but one symptom of a more general weakness of Turkish democracy. Although the plight of the Kurds has tended to receive the greatest international attention, other groups outside the official mainstream of Turkish society--Islamic activists, ethnic and cultural minority groups, and intellectuals on both the left and the right--have all, at one time or another, been silenced by the Turkish state. The root of this intolerance is to be found not in the character of the Turkish people or their political leaders but in the very nature of the Turkish state. This state is based on a conception of "nation-building" that calls for standardizing the citizenry to make them Turkish in language and nationality, secular in orientation, and obedient to the state. Such a conception naturally leads to the denial of diversity and the repression of any other expression of group identity. The Turkish official mentality invariably confuses unity with uniformity. To understand why the contemporary Turkish state exhibits these features, it is necessary briefly to trace the origins of the Turkish republic in the decline, defeat, and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
The Roots of the Problem
Under the Ottoman Empire, nationalities were defined in terms of religious affiliation rather than ethnicity. Turks were part of the Muslim "nation," and Turkishness was not a political phenomenon. It was only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--when non-Muslims as well as non-Turkish Muslims began clamoring for independence and the Ottoman Empire became a hotbed of nationalist uprisings--that the notion of Turkishness assumed political salience: It may be said that Turks learned about their Turkishness from other ethnic groups struggling for sovereignty.
After fighting on the losing side in World War I, the Ottoman government was compelled by the victors to accept the Treaty of Se÷vres, which divided its former empire along ethnic lines. There was little opposition to the separation of Ottoman areas outside the Turkish heartland of Anatolia, but the invasion of Anatolia by Greek armies precipitated a popular national-liberation movement, led by General Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) and other officers of the dismantled Ottoman army. From the outset, Atatürk made it clear that he was seeking statehood for the multicultural entity of Anatolia, heir to the Ottoman [End Page 123] state, and he did not emphasize ethnic Turkishness as the basis of the new nation. His stance helped to gain him the support of Kurds and other minority groups who identified with Ottomanism. Despite the fact that the Treaty of Se÷vres offered Kurds the prospect of establishing a homeland and gaining self-rule, most of the Kurdish tribes and notables sided with the new Turkish government created in Ankara in 1920. This multicultural sense of solidarity fueled the national liberation movement and carried it to victory. Turkey's "War of Independence" (1919-22) rendered the Treaty of Se÷vres, which had called for the partitioning of Anatolia, inoperable. In 1923, it was superseded by the Treaty of Lausanne, which legitimized the territorial integrity and unitary nature of the newly declared republic.
The founders of the republic were Ottoman intellectuals, military officials, and civilian bureaucrats. Aware of the multicultural nature of their society, they chose to call their new state the Republic of Turkey, referring to the geographical region in which all the peoples of Turkey lived, rather than to name it after the dominant ethnic group. The same political consciousness was reflected in their choice of a name for the state's highest decision-making organ--the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.
Not long after the republic was established, however, its multicultural, pluralist basis was abandoned. It is unclear exactly why this happened, but there were several contributing factors. First, sizeable Ottoman minorities had been removed from the new republic. Most Armenians had been deported to areas outside the boundaries of the republic during World War I, and the Greek population of Anatolia, in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne, was exchanged for the Muslim population of Greece. Then in 1925, with Turkey engaged in a struggle with Britain to regain control over the oil-rich regions of what is now northern Iraq (whose fate was not settled by the Treaty of Lausanne), a major Kurdish rebellion erupted in southeastern Turkey.
The official Turkish view is that the Kurds were instigated by the British, and there is some truth to that, but the rebellion was also a reaction to the encroachment of the new government on the heretofore largely autonomous power of the local Kurdish notables. Since the inclusion of the Kurdish areas in the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ottoman sultans had granted considerable autonomy to Kurdish local leaders in return for their allegiance to the state. Now, however, the ruling elite established principles of governance that were secular, Western, progressive, and centralist, and Kurdish notables, viewing the new republican regime as a threat to their historical rights and privileges, rebelled. This helped convince Turkey's ruling republican elite to abandon its faith in multiculturalism.
For a variety of reasons, then, the new elite did not seek to develop national unity out of diversity--that is, by managing differences and [End Page 124] reconciling them--but instead adopted a policy of uniformity and standardization. After 1925, references to the "peoples of Turkey" were abandoned completely. With the exception of Istanbul's non-Muslim citizens (whose minority rights were guaranteed under the Treaty of Lausanne), all citizens of Turkey had to adopt a Turkish identity. Bosnians, Albanians, Georgians, Laze, Circassians, and other non-Turkish Muslims living in Turkey accepted Turkishness and became assimilated. By contrast, the Kurds, cut off from the rest of the country by their remote location in the mountainous southeastern regions, divided along tribal lines, and economically dependent on local landed elites, remained largely unaffected by the new regime's policies of assimilation and modernization.
Kurdish unrest and occasional rebellions rocked the country through-out the 1930s, with two consequences. First, the legal and administrative system evolved in a rather authoritarian fashion. Preoccupied with security (defined narrowly as the defense of the territorial integrity of Turkey), rather than with problem-solving and reconciling differences, the central government sanctioned official excesses, neglecting the human and consensual dimensions of politics. Basic freedoms, the rule of law, social justice, pluralism, and accountability were all sacrificed in the name of security.
Second, every agitation in the east resulted in the deportation of Kurdish groups from their ancestral lands in southeastern Turkey and their resettlement in the western provinces. Later, the economic hardships of subsistence farming drove more Kurds to the west, especially after the 1950s. In 1965, roughly 65 percent of Turkey's Kurds still lived in the southeast, but today that proportion has diminished to about 50 percent. Istanbul, a city of 11 million, is believed to harbor nearly 2.5 million Kurds, making it the largest Kurdish city in the world. Other areas with sizeable Kurdish populations include the wealthier cities of the Marmara in the northwest, the Aegean to the west, and the southern Mediterranean littoral.
As for the total number of Kurds living in Turkey, no one has a reliable figure. The government has been reluctant to count minorities in the belief that having an exact number would mean having legally to acknowledge minorities and thus meet their cultural or political demands. The authorities fear that such demands would threaten the territorial integrity of the country as well as the unitary nature of the nation and its administrative system. According to the 1965 national census--the last to reveal the breakdown of the population by mother tongues--Kurdish speakers numbered 2.37 million, but persuasive evidence suggests that the real figure was closer to 3.13 million. Today, given the high birth rates among rural Kurds, it is reasonable to estimate that Kurds constitute roughly 12 to 13 million (roughly 20 percent) of Turkey's 65 million inhabitants. [End Page 125]
The Kurdish language, which consists of several dialects, is related to Persian but heavily influenced by Arabic and Turkish as well. The official Turkish view is that Kurdish is not a distinct language but a border dialect. Kurdish was never a literary or administrative language under the Ottoman Empire; it was spoken mainly in the countryside, where it had little need to adapt itself to the realities of modern life. Even today, Kurdish is taught primarily in the intimacy of the home, mainly by poorly educated mothers (although efforts have been made to develop it in Kurdish communities in Europe and Iraq). In 1980, the Turkish government banned the public use of Kurdish; the ban was lifted in 1991, but everything published in Kurdish remains under close official scrutiny. The Kurdish language still may not be taught in school, and Kurdish radio and television remain illegal. These restrictions continue to thwart the development of the language.
All Kurds who attend school are taught only in Turkish, which they subsequently use in their public and professional lives. Obligatory military service provides another institutional venue in which Kurdish men learn Turkish. Two other factors have been instrumental in bringing Kurds closer to Turkish language and culture. The large-scale Kurdish migrations have led to the mixing of Kurds and Turks in the cities of western Turkey. The two peoples are indistinguishable in their looks and religious practices, and the difficulties that Kurds experience in assimilating into urban Turkish culture are not much different from those of Turkish migrants from rural areas. In addition, there are an estimated one million mixed families, further diluting ethnic identity. Turkey's political system has never made an issue of Kurdishness, unless it is declared publicly along with a demand for political rights. There is no discrimination against individual Kurds--who have risen to the ranks of generals and cabinet ministers and even to the presidency of the republic--so long as they do not politicize their ethnic identity. In fact, at least one-fourth of the deputies elected to the Grand National Assembly since 1923 have been of Kurdish origin.
Kurdish Political Forces
Until the 1960s, Kurdish movements were led by traditional elites, but the leftist and youth movements that rocked the world during that decade hit Turkey as well. For a brief period, a vibrant leftist political current united Turkish and Kurdish intellectuals and youth alike, but official repression (notably the military coups of 1971 and 198 and the left's inability to formulate realistic programs or rally popular support led to its demise by the early 1980s. The more intellectual, urban, and educated members of the Kurdish independence movement drained off, ceding their places to younger, inexperienced, resentful, and adventurist rural cadres who opted for armed struggle. [End Page 126]
The decision of the latter to engage in armed combat stemmed not only from their infatuation with firearms but also from the harsh treatment that they suffered at the hands of the Turkish security forces (a fact that is very little known by the great majority of Turks). In 1974, Kurdish fathers had voluntarily enlisted their sons in the army during Turkey's military operations on Cyprus; a decade later, Kurdish discontent was widespread and, among the most radical factions, extended to support for armed struggle against that same army. Clearly, the Kurds' trust in the government had plummeted and their sense of exclusion had grown in the interval, but there is still no serious debate in Turkey about why this occurred.
Immediately after the 1980 coup, the military administration (1980-83) banned the use of the Kurdish language and changed the names of Kurdish towns and villages. Kurdish families were forced to give Turkish names to their children. Although the Turkish press took almost no notice of harsh repression against Kurds accused of subversive activities, oral accounts suggest that official excesses cost the regime the trust of its Kurdish citizens in the southeast. It was in this climate of frustration that the PKK emerged. Founded in 1978 by Abdullah Öçalan, a dropout from the Faculty of Political Science of Ankara University, and several of his associates, the PKK preached a somewhat contradictory mixture of Marxism-Leninism and Kurdish nationalism. It launched its first terrorist attack in 1984, killing more than a dozen people.
After the 1980 military coup, Öçalan and his close associates sought refuge in Syria. Damascus sheltered, trained, and equipped the PKK, using it as a bargaining chip against Turkey with respect to territorial disputes and the sharing of the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. The PKK grew rapidly in size and popularity, thanks in part to the Turkish government's dismantling of rival democratic Kurdish organizations and its prohibition on all expressions of Kurdish identity. Trapped in a traditional society divided by tribalism and inequality, young Kurds found in the PKK an appealing and unifying cause. Young men and women saw the organization as a means to personal emancipation as much as a political movement. The PKK was ready to pay the price in persecution and sacrifice that armed struggle required, and it gained considerable support for its strategy of seeking control over territory inhabited primarily by Kurds.
At first, the PKK seriously hurt regular Turkish troops, who were inexperienced in and ill-equipped for guerrilla combat. By employing hit-and-run tactics from their hideouts in the mountains, PKK guerrillas were able to maintain military superiority over the Turkish security forces throughout the 1980s. It was only in 1995, after the Turkish army had trained commando troops and special police forces, equipped them with relevant gear, and obtained a sufficient number of helicopters, that the [End Page 127] army was able to gain the upper hand, first in the cities of the southeast and later in the rural areas. At the same time, Turkish military incursions into northern Iraq, facilitated by U.S. consent and the cooperation of Massud Barzani's Democratic Party of Kurdistan, thwarted the PKK's efforts to gain a footing or a broker's position there. Öçalan's entrenchment in Syria, however, made it impossible to eradicate the PKK completely.
In 1998, the Turkish army, having lost its patience with Syrian president Hafez El-Assad as well as its hope in Turkish politicians, threatened to attack Syria if it continued to harbor Öçalan. A recently concluded military agreement between Turkey and Israel left President Assad with little alternative but to comply, and Öçalan was evicted from Syria in the autumn of 1998. After a brief period as a "political wanderer" in Europe, he was captured in Kenya and brought to a Turkish prison in February 1999.
Every year, newspapers have published government-provided figures of the number of people killed in the Kurdish insurrection (officially labeled "PKK terrorism"). As of 1999, the newspapers indicated that there had been over 30,000 casualties in total--half of them PKK militants, one-fourth civilians, and the remaining one-fourth members of the security forces. Excluded from this number are almost 10,000 "mystery killings" by unknown perpetrators, a brutal method of eliminating politically active Kurds and intimidating the Kurdish intelligentsia. Civilians have been the primary victims of the fighting between the security forces and the PKK. Caught between the two, those who have sided with the government have been exterminated by the PKK, while those who have failed to take up arms against the PKK have been punished by Turkish authorities.
One form of punishment has been the evacuation and destruction of villages suspected of helping the PKK. The U.S. Department of State's 1996 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices asserted (based on the statement of the Turkish minister of interior) that 2,297 villages had been evacuated or destroyed. The same report claimed that 2 million Kurds had been forced to leave their homes or villages. As expected, these numbers are lower than figures put forth by Kurdish organizations. (For example, according to a 1996 report by the Kurdish political party HADEP, the figures were 3,000 villages and 3 million Kurds, respectively.)
Nevertheless, demands made in the name of the Kurdish people were kept from the public domain until 1990. In that year, the People's Labor Party (HEP) was founded as an explicitly Kurdish political party. Recognizing its inability to reach the 10 percent national threshold needed to get representatives elected to parliament, HEP formed an electoral pact with the left-of-center Social Democratic People's Party (SHP), and 22 HEP representatives were elected to parliament on the SHP ticket in the 1991 national elections. The HEP caused a huge commotion when [End Page 128] a newly elected female member, Leyla Zana, wore a headband consisting of the Kurdish colors (red, yellow, and green) and, along with her colleagues, used Kurdish when taking the oath of office at the parliament's swearing-in ceremony. Such actions by HEP deputies led to their expulsion from SHP and later to charges of collaboration with the PKK. The HEP was subsequently banned, and the Democracy Party (DEP) was formed to replace it in 1993.
The DEP aspired to be not only a Kurdish political party but also an interlocutor in a future negotiation between the Turkish government and the Kurdish people. Yet its hopes were short-lived. President Suleyman Demirel and former prime minister Tansu ¨iller, who were in power when the DEP was founded, both supported the military option, blocking the way toward any alternative solution. One DEP member of parliament, Mehmet Sincar, was assassinated in broad daylight in the southeastern town of Batman in September 1993. Just before the 1994 municipal elections, Prime Minister ¨iller claimed that the DEP was an extension of the PKK, leading the parliament to revoke the legislative immunity of some of its MPs. A few were prosecuted and sentenced to jail terms; five still remain in prison. Many other DEP members of parliament fled to Europe and became members of the Kurdish Parliament-in-Exile, and the DEP was banned by the Constitutional Court in June 1994. It was clear that the Turkish establishment was not going to show any tolerance toward a party dedicated to the Kurdish cause. Kurds were shocked and dismayed. The PKK stepped up its propaganda, claiming that conventional politics remained closed to the Kurds and that violence was the only way for them to have their voices heard.
Yet the need to have a legal Kurdish party in the system persisted, and in 1994 the People's Democratic Party (HADEP) was formed. HADEP took part in the 1995 national elections, polling only 4.2 percent of the nationwide popular vote. Although it did well in the southeastern provinces predominantly populated by Kurds, it fared poorly in large cities like Istanbul, Izmir, Bursa, Adana, and Mersin, where large numbers of Kurds live. It seems that Kurds living in "out of area" regions did not see Kurdish nationalism as a solution to their problems. Falling short of the 10 percent electoral threshold, HADEP failed to get any of its representatives elected to parliament. In local elections held in 1999, however, it won 36 municipalities, electing mayors in major southeastern cities like Diyarbakir and Mardin.
The government and many Turks under its influence regard HADEP as simply an adjunct of the PKK. In fact, all three Kurdish parties--HEP, DEP, and HADEP--have been heavily influenced by the PKK because they all shared the same popular base. This left the parties with little leeway to operate independently. As a result, they failed to formulate concrete programs or to rally Kurds and Turks behind them. What they expressed publicly was only part of their overall agenda, which included [End Page 129] the lifting of the state of emergency in the southeast, a return to civilian rule, legal protection of basic freedoms, legal recognition of Kurdish identity, cultural autonomy (as reflected in the right to teach and broadcast in Kurdish), and the decentralization of the administrative system, allowing localities more freedom to run their own affairs. All of these are steps toward broader political inclusion of Kurds within Turkey, but on the parties' own terms. This agenda, of course, was on a collision course with the PKK's goal (later repudiated by Öçalan after his capture) of an independent Kurdistan. Caught in the crossfire between Turkish officials and the PKK, the Kurdish political parties have achieved little success.
Today, the word "Kurd" is no longer taboo in Turkey, which has come a long way from the days when it officially denied the existence of millions of Kurds. Before ascending to the presidency, Demirel had spoken of the need to recognize the "Kurdish reality." Nevertheless, no serious action has yet been taken in this direction. The inclusion of the issue of Kurdish identity on the political agenda would mean changing the Turkish definition of the nation. Official recognition of cultural pluralism would definitely invite the demand for administrative decentralization. This, in turn, would mean opening up politics and dismantling the centralist-bureaucratic administrative system. The ruling elite in Turkey does not appear willing to surrender its privileged position that easily. Any public demand for greater political participation is still perceived as a threat to state security.
Two very recent examples are proof of the old guard's resistance to a new political order more in tune with global trends toward democratization and the rule of law. Many Middle Eastern, Caucasian, and Central Asian peoples, including the Kurds, celebrate Newruz (meaning "new day") as a holiday marking the advent of spring. On 24 March 2000, HADEP wanted to organize a Newruz festival in one of Istanbul's luxury hotels. The governor of Istanbul, however, refused to allow the event because Newruz was spelled with a "W," a letter that is nonexistent in the Turkish alphabet. Another example (to which I was a witness) was a visit by two officials to the family home of a Turkish Ph.D. candidate who was studying conflict-resolution in the United States and wanted to write his dissertation on the "Kurdish question." Informed of this fact, the officials made it clear to his family that, if he continued with the project, "unsavory things could happen to him." Given such attitudes on the part of the Turkish authorities, it appears that, for the time being at least, solutions to the Kurdish problem are more likely to come from outside the system than from within.
The Current Situation and Future Prospects
Today, Turkey is governed by a three-party coalition whose unifying force is nationalism. On this issue, the Democratic Left Party (DSP) of [End Page 130] Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit does not differ significantly from its ultranationalist coalition partner, the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), or from the remains of the late Turgut Özal's Motherland Party (ANAP), despite the latter's generally more liberal rhetoric. All endorse Atatürkism: nation-building by state initiative that does not permit the political expression or representation of ethnic and religious groups. At the time of the 1999 elections, it was widely believed that each body bag bringing a soldier home from the east brought added votes to the MHP, which emerged as the second largest party with 18.6 percent of the vote.
The opposition currently consists of the Islam-oriented Virtue Party and the dwindling True Path Party (DYP) of Tansu ¨iller. Both these parties have consistently advocated the execution of Abdullah Öçalan, whose death sentence by a Turkish tribunal is under review by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The Virtue Party, like its predecessor, the Welfare Party, sees the Kurds as Muslims and accepts them so long as they do not emphasize their ethnic identity, which it regards as running counter to Islamic brotherhood. The DYP is opportunistic and sees the delay of Öçalan's execution as an issue that it can use to score points against the government. While advocating Turkish entry into the EU, it insists on an initiative that would sever Turkey from Europe. In such a political climate, pressure for further democratization and for a solution of the Kurdish problem can only come from external sources like the European Union and the United States.
Öçalan's capture in Nairobi in February 1999 marked a new phase in Turkey's struggle with the PKK. During his trials, Öçalan did not offer a legal defense. "There are enough reasons to accuse me of wrongdoing," he stated, but added that "we must learn from our mistakes and learn to achieve peace." He declared that violence and fighting for an independent state were wrong and that Turks and Kurds, who had shared the same homeland for a thousand years, ought to work together toward reconciliation and democratization. He offered his services to the state in order to achieve these ends, noting that he could perform these services only if he were allowed to live. To add credibility to his statements, he ordered PKK fighters to lay down their arms, and a short time later called on them to leave Turkey. In response, a symbolic group of activists, headed by Ali Sapan, former PKK spokesman in Europe, turned themselves in to Turkish authorities at the Iraqi border on 1 October 1999. On October 29, a second small group flew in from Vienna and surrendered in Istanbul. The state chose to ignore these peace gestures, however, remaining adamant in its resolve not to bargain with--or even pay heed to--a terrorist organization.
In November 1999, the Turkish High Court of Appeals rejected Öçalan's lawyers' appeal of his death sentence. At the same time, however, EU recognition on 11 December 1999 of Turkey's candidacy for membership altered the government's attitude toward his execution. The [End Page 131] ECHR demanded that Öçalan's execution be suspended until it had completed its review of the verdict. Under heavy outside pressure and after long deliberation, Turkey acquiesced to the ECHR's demand on two conditions: that the PKK halt all hostilities against Turkish targets and that Öçalan stop speaking out from his prison cell. The government did not want any political competition, not even from a defeated guerrilla leader offering his services as a peacemaker.
Nonetheless, the government's decision and other signals raised hopes. Asked about Öçalan's execution, Chief of the General Staff Gen. Huseyin Kivrikoglu said, "The army should remain silent. We are a party to the conflict. When we are asked, we might respond emotionally." This statement was followed by President Demirel's receiving the 36 newly elected HADEP mayors at the presidential palace in August 1999. These gestures seemed to reveal a growing maturity on the part of the Turkish state.
At the same time, the government still has not taken a single solid step toward defining the problem more realistically or approaching it more constructively. Prime Minister Ecevit sees the Kurdish problem as wholly the result of poverty, social backwardness due to tribalism, and traditional large landholdings. Industrialization and growing affluence, he believes, would break down these traditional structures and emancipate the local people. For the other parties in parliament, the issue is basically one of externally incited terrorism. Despite statements like that of Motherland leader Mesut Yilmaz--"The road to Brussels passes through Diyarbakir," the largest provincial capital in the southeast--no relevant policy has been formulated, much less carried out.
To be sure, it is very difficult to undo the nationalist indoctrination to which Turks have been subjected for many decades. Any popularly elected government will be hard pressed to tell its people that citizens who are not Turks live in Turkey and that they must be legally respected as such. After sending two and a half million young draftees to fight in their own country over the past 16 years, it is not easy for a government suddenly to announce not only that the enemy is no longer suspected of seeking secession but also that it has been clamoring for inclusion and equality all along. It is hard to admit that many laws--including the constitution--need to be changed because they are the source of tensions between the state and society.
All this will take time. One factor especially likely to delay the consolidation of real democracy in Turkey is resistance on the part of the political elite, particularly the bureaucracy, to the mounting pressures for structural change. Two recent events made that resistance clear, disappointing liberals within Turkey and abroad. In March 2000, Kurdish mayors of three major southeastern cities were arrested and imprisoned for five days without regard to due process. Based on the statements of a former PKK member (now an informant), they were charged with [End Page 132] funneling money to the PKK from municipality accounts. The day after their arrest, the Ministry of Interior abolished their elected status. Five days later, however, they were released and reinstated in their positions. Experienced political observers interpret this chain of events as the old guard's way of making it known that it will allow change only on its own terms and in a time frame that it sees fit.
Another indication of elite resistance can be seen in the attitude taken by the governor of Istanbul in the same month. When members of the Parliamentary Human Rights Commission went to inspect an Istanbul police station, they found an instrument of torture called the "Palestinian hanger." The governor scoffed at the incident, saying, "Some people have found an obscure stick and are making a fuss about it. These are foreign plots." Once again, the old guard appears reluctant to abandon its old habits.
Democratic circles in Turkey and abroad are aware that the Kurdish question cannot be understood in isolation. The monolithic nature of Turkey's political culture, its authoritarian laws, the bureaucratic nature of its administration, the military's central role in politics, the relative underdevelopment of a society plagued by lingering tribalism and traditionalism, and the incomplete integration of the country's Kurdish regions are all part of a complex phenomenon. These features render the system incapable of dealing not only with the Kurdish question but with many other societal conflicts and tensions.
Are there forces within Turkey that can help bring about the needed changes that the state appears unable to provide? It is possible to point to two such groups: segments of the business sector that are competitive internationally and those members of the middle class who do not rely on government jobs or favors. The bulk of the business class, however, remains uncompetitive and continues to seek government favors. A large bureaucracy defends the state-led reform model. The vast numbers of people who live in relative stability in the countryside are unlikely to put their weight behind liberal democracy. The millions of former peasants who have swollen the ranks of the urban population over the past decades are hungry for status, power, wealth, and meaning in their new lives, and they see Turkey's membership in the EU as an opportunity for better-paying jobs and more comfortable lifestyles. Though they may express this longing as a desire for democracy, the liberties and democratic institutions that lie at the core of European civilization do not much concern them--at least not yet. They are more interested in privileges and exemptions for themselves than in equal rights for all. Given these circumstances, popular support for rapid and fundamental democratization remains slim. This is a pity because Turkey's long-standing goal of becoming a part of Europe is closer than ever to being realized. Recognition by the EU of Turkey's candidacy for membership has made democratization a practical matter, with nearly one hundred [End Page 133] thousand pages of EU rules and regulations needing to be adopted and applied.
What Turkey needs is leadership in mobilizing a national consensus behind a liberal democratic agenda, and this requires the contribution of civil society. In this regard, it is worth mentioning an effort currently underway to create such a consensus. A civic initiative supported by nongovernmental organizations from the EU, Norway, Switzerland, and the United States has facilitated contact among hundreds of Turks, Kurds, and members of other minority groups in Turkey. Opinion leaders from [End Page 134] various ethnic, religious, and social groups met numerous times both in and outside of Turkey between 1996 and 1999 to produce a "Document of Mutual Understanding" (see the box on p. 134). This document outlines a new constitutional framework for a democratic, multicultural regime that respects the rule of law and the ethnic pluralism of its citizens.
The "Document of Mutual Understanding" offers a number of concrete proposals for how such a pluralist structure might be achieved. Some of its key recommendations include:
official recognition and support of the Kurds' efforts to teach their mother tongue and to convey their traditional cultural values to the community's younger generations, as well as the extension of similar rights to other cultural groups;
the immediate elimination of such institutions and practices as state security courts, the state of siege, the evacuation of villages, and illegal executions;
adoption of more liberal laws concerning the election system, political parties, and freedom of expression and assembly; preparation of a new constitution safeguarding such laws based on the principles of multiculturalism, political pluralism, and participatory democracy; the elimination of all laws that are autocratic or clash with this new constitution or with the principles of human rights and participatory democracy;
the creation of an Assembly of Provinces under the umbrella of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey alongside the Assembly of Representatives; the election to this new body of two representatives from each province, regardless of size;
the empowerment of elected local governments with the financial resources and the organs of democratic administration; the creation of elected councils that can make decisions at the local-regional level without contradicting national laws and principles;
the legalization of all political parties that, in their views and programs, claim to practice nonviolent politics and adhere to the democratic principles of nonviolence and respect for different views.
This document and similar civic initiatives need the active support of Turkey's citizens. Yet the problem with Turkey is that its civil society, instead of fighting for its rights and freedoms, expects the government to hand them over on a silver platter. In a semideveloped country, most people see themselves not as the subjects but as the objects of politics. They play a dependent role as clients of the state, rather than an active role as citizens. As a result, Turkey lies somewhere between populist authoritarianism and popular democracy. How it handles the Kurdish question will ultimately determine whether Turkey stagnates in semiauthoritarianism--perhaps finally losing even those elements of democracy that it still possesses--or becomes a stable liberal democracy.
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Excerpts from the "Document of Mutual Understanding"
Turks and Kurds of Turkey are not the citizens of two inimical states. They are members of the same state. The root cause of the existing conflict is not the two parties/communities, but the official institutions, practices, and ideology. . . .
[T]he state has never really transferred power to the people. Despite official doubts, democratization is possible through the creation of a pluralist political structure without hampering the unitary nature of the state. . . .
The Kurds do not want to carve a second state out of Turkey. Division of the country is neither a political requirement nor a necessary result of current circumstances. The Kurds only want legal and concrete steps that would make them feel that this is their state too. Despite many events and policies that could create a rift between Turks and Kurds, the fact that neither community feels any enmity toward the other is a major achievement. However, this society has not yet been rewarded for the common sense it has heretofore demonstrated. This reward can be delivered only by ending the practices and conditioning that lead to ethnic and cultural discrimination and animosity.
The Kurds want official acknowledgment of their existence as a unique cultural group. They would like this acknowledgment to extend beyond oral commitments to include legal warranties having an effect on daily life, including being counted in censuses and the free exercise of their cultural identity.
The Kurds do not want these rights in order to distance themselves from the state or to divide Turkey. Neither do they want to alter the basic qualities of the state. Rather, they want to be able to preserve their cultural heritage and still live in safety as equal and respected citizens of Turkey. . . .
Freeing the cultural domain from intervention by the political institutions . . . preserves political equality. This condition must be met if "pluralist nationhood" is to be cultivated. Reductionist nationalism based on the ethnic identity and religious creed of a majority or of a privileged minority cannot ensure stability. It carries, in itself, the seeds of exclusion and segregation.
Institutionalising respect for all ethnic and religious values and strengthening democratic institutions (which safeguard cultural diversities and political freedoms) are necessary steps. We see these as effective measures to prevent further politicising ethnic and religious differences.
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Like the multinational world.
