Kurdish Question in Turkey

von: Jule Jürgens

Introduction

Since August 1984, the Republic of Turkey has been suffering from an increasing virulent guerrilla/terrorist insurgency led by the Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan (PKK), the Kurdistan Workers Party, headed by Abdullah (Apo) Öcalan. Military confrontations between the state′s forces and Kurdish guerrillas have led to a deep rift in Turkish society with more than 30,000 people that have been killed, another 2,000,000 internally displaced and more than 2,000 villages destroyed. Until the beginning of the 1990s the fight against the PKK in the southeastern provinces could be regard¬ed as an internal affair with only marginal repercussions beyond Turkey′s borders. Within the 1990s, however, Turkey′s struggle to keep its national and territorial integrity by fighting the separatist Kurdish rebels has be-come an international affair that reverberates through the country′s domestic developments. How best to cope with the Kurdish challenge has become an ongoing controversy between Kemalist and nationalist groups on one side and more open-minded liberals on the other plus a small group of Kurdish politicians who try to make their voice heard despite strong state repression of any form of Kurdish political expression. Turkey′s Kurdish Problem leads back to the suppression that the Kurdish community has been facing since the found-ing of the Republic in 1923. The Kemalist state elites stubbornly defended the doctrine of the unity and indivisibility of the Turkish state, its territory, and its people. It has become a central element of modern Turkey, firmly inscribed in the constitution drafted under mili-tary supervision after the coup of 1980 and accepted with a large minority in a referendum in 1982. According to the doctrine, there is only one people in Turkey, and it compromises the totality of the country′s citizens, who all enjoy the same rights and have the same obli-gations. Claims based on ethnic difference are unjustified because every Turkish citizen is supposed to be a first-class citizen, a sentiment that has become the established reason for politicians and state officials to refuse Turkish demands for minority rights. Only these groups are recognized as minorities in Turkey that were explicitly assigned minority status in the Treaty of Lausanne, which internationally recognized the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Thus the only – religious – minorities are Armenian Christians, Orthodox Greeks, and Jews. A Kurdish identity was denied, Kurds were regarded as ancient Turks who had lost the awareness of their real ethnic roots and who had to be reeducated about their Turk-ishness. To that end the use of the Kurdish language/dialects was forbidden, as were Kurd-ish names for children, and Kurdish villages got new Turkish names. The state policy of spreading Kemalist norms among the people of Anatolia slowly but constantly deviated from creating a “new Turkish citizen” to assimilating members of different ethnic back-grounds, that is, creating “new Turks”. Due to the paramount concern of the Turkish au-thorities to protect the integrity and the indivisibility of the state and the “nation”, they feared that the granting of certain rights to an acknowledged ethnic or national minority would inevitably lead to further demands, including ultimately calls for secession in the name of self-determination. This fear of secession among Turkish officials is known as the “Sevres syndrome”, tracing back to the Sevres Treaty of August 1920. This peace treaty that was concluded after World War I between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies granted “local autonomy for the predominantly Kurdish areas” and looked forward to the possibil-ity that “the Kurdish peoples” might be granted “independence”. It was accepted by the government of Sultan Vahdettin (Mehmet VI) at Constantinople, but in the end rejected by the government of Mustafa Kemal at Ankara.

In discussing the Kurdish Conflict since the beginning of the 1990s, I will first refer to domestic factors and secondly to external influences on the Kurdish struggle in Turkey, namely the widespread campaigns of the PKK since 1992. Fighting reached unprecedented heights of intensity and casualities. By the summer of 1996, more than 21,000 people had been killed since the PKK insurgency had begun in 1984.
Internal Factors to the Kurdish Problem

Until the 1990s, Turkish officials, denying a Kurdish reality, pursued a policy of repression and co-option. Mentioning the words “Kurd” or “Kurdish” in public was generally re-garded as breaking a taboo. The person who did it consciously ran the risk of being taken into custody and prosecuted for propagating separatism. Law 2932 had effectively banned the use of the Kurdish language in public until its repeal in 1991. All public vestiges of Kurdish identity were banned, including schools, associations and publications. Anyone who had insisted on keeping his or her identity as a Kurd suffered from state repression. This held true for all who openly demonstrated their Kurdishness or advocated the official recognition of a Kurdish identity in Turkey with cultural and perhaps even political rights of their own. Prominent examples of such persons are the social scientist İsmail Beşikçi, who has been sentenced to 200 years in prison for defending the Kurdish case in his socio-logical writings, or Yaşar Kemal, who has several times faced trial for “making separatist propaganda” in press articles.

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