Kurdish News

[Hovik]

U.S. Doesn’t Approve Turkey's Plan for Kurdistan Workers' Party Elimination

U.S. Doesn’t Approve Turkey's Plan for Kurdistan Workers' Party Elimination

/PanARMENIAN.Net/

The U.S. doesn’t approve Turkey’s plan for the elimination of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Ross Wilson said remarking that the U.S. supports the struggle against the PKK. “However Turkey should reconsider its stand. The U.S. wishes Turkey’s support in the Iraqi issue,” Wilson said.

The American diplomat described Israel’s attack on Lebanon as “natural right of protection” and said it’s a struggle against terrorism. “We always stood for least harm to the citizens. However Turkey’s actions in the north of Iraq bear a different character. The fact is that the conditions of war on terror differ dependently on the regions. Turkey enjoys support in Iraq while Israel has no supporters in the Near East. Besides, the PKK functions not only in northern Iraq but also in Europe and Turkey. Consequently, the problem cannot be solved by carrying out military operations in the north of Iraq,” said the U.S. chief of mission in Istanbul.

For his part, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan accused Amb. Wilson of telling lies and said, “Decisions on such issues are taken not by high rank envoys but by the Turkish government and other bodies. We will take and implement our decision,” reported Turkish media.

[Joseph]

Turkish General plants bombs in S.E. Anatolia to stir up trouble

http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=50385

What a guy.

[Joseph]

Forgetting Themselves: The Republic of Turkey’s quest for the eradication of Kurdish Identity

Sunday, August 06, 2006
KurdishMedia.com - By Kiersten S. Zaza
Kurds have no friends. – Kurdish Proverb

Since the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the nationalist Kemalist government has been waging a war of attrition against the identity of millions of its citizens. It has attempted to erase the history, language, and culture of an entire people in order to solidify the homogeneity of Turkey’s inhabitants through legislation, military action, and propaganda. This battle it has undertaken has impacted the country both on a domestic level, and in the international arena. The victimized identity is that of the Kurds who have inhabited Anatolia for thousands of years. The Turkish government has ardently maintained that the Kurdish people are ethnically Turkish and it has used domestic policy to prove this for decades. This paper will serve to analyze the various strategies that the Turkish government has used in its efforts to wipe out Kurdish identity in favor of Turkish nationalism, and the effects these strategies have had on Turkey’s Kurdish population from the dawn of the Turkish Republic to the present.

Turkey became an official republic in 1923 after the demise of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. It quickly became fervently nationalistic in its domestic policies as it struggled to establish itself as a legitimate power of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Ironically, however, the nationalist sentiment that grew during the early days of the republic was not characterized by a proliferation of historically Turkish culture, but was characterized rather by a strong desire to assimilate to European ways of government, dress, and secularism. In 1925, Turkey ousted the traditional Islamic calendar in favor of the Western Gregorian calendar, and prohibited the Fez as part of its policy to promote European fashion. In 1928, the government declared the country secular and removed from the constitution the clause which stated Islam as the official national religion. Turkey was preparing itself to climb the global power ladder and was doing so through voluntary assimilation to Western culture. [1]

The father of this movement from the first days of the republic was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Standing at average height and medium build, Atatürk appeared more Caucasian than Turkish. Foreign officers would often comment on his unusually light hair and European features. He led a harsh life, most likely stemming from his fatherless childhood and extensive military experience. In his biography of the Turkish leader, A.L. Macfie remarks on Ataturk’s tough existence and character:

To the end of his life [Atatürk] remained an imposing figure, highly intelligent, shrewd, cynical, at times sarcastic and overbearing, unscrupulous and in his private life dissolute. A heavy drinker, he would frequently consume half a litre of raki (the Turkish national drink) a day, and sit up half the night playing poker or carousing with his cronies. [2]

For millions of Turks, Atatürk represented the future, and the future shown bright with promise and nationalist fervor. He aggressively pursued policies that would Westernize Turkey and make it a better fit in the global jigsaw puzzle.

Atatürk’s dream of cultural unity with the West carried into his determination to unify his own country through ethnic homogenization, but his concern lay not with legalities. Instead, Atatürk left legislation to his right hand man and future successor, Ismet Inönü. [3] Inönü made his position on ethnic diversity in Turkey clear from the start. “We are frankly nationalists,” he once said, “…and nationalism is our only factor of cohesion. In the face of a Turkish majority other elements have no kind of influence. We must Turkify the inhabitants of our land at any price, and we will annihilate those who oppose the Turks or ‘le turquisme.’” [4] At the formation of the Republic, Turkey’s population was slightly under 9.4 million and, according to recent studies, was littered with close to fifty distinct ethnic groups. [5] The most populous one was that of the Turks, followed by the troublesomely large population of the Kurds who resided mainly in the southeast of the country. This presented a huge problem for the president and his accomplice, but unfortunately the problem was not ominous enough to deter the two men from their goal of ethnic unity.

Given their size and concentrated population, the Kurds must have appeared to Ataturk and his government as a daunting, yet manageable population to assimilate. Objectively speaking, policy could be relatively simple to enforce because of the Kurds’ geographic location. Forms of domestic policies of assimilation that were either directly or indirectly implemented towards the Kurds involved restrictions and bans on Kurdish language, forced relocation, purposeful development of an anti-Kurdish sentiment, and economic dependency. In her demographic study of the Kurds in Turkey, Servet Mutlu divides ethnic markers into two groups: etic markers that are recognized by outsiders, and emic markers which are part of a group’s self-identification. She notes that, “the principal emic marker of Kurdishness has been the language” and that the “language has also been the principal etic marker.” [6] Because of the importance of language, this paper will focus largely on Turkey’s policies that involved Kurdish language education, public usage, and distribution, but will briefly attend to the other forms of legislation, as well. As this paper will show, policies involving the Kurdish language often directly or indirectly resulted in more hard-lined and militaristic ones.

Before delving into the actual policies that Turkey implemented, it is necessary to understand the reasons for which the government saw fit to negate Kurdish identity at the start. An eruption of scholarly literature on the subject of Kurdish and Turkish identity occurred at the time of the formation of the early assimilation policies and continued throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into the present. Turkish ethnographers began the task of proving that the Kurds were not of a separate ethnic group at all, but were rather ethnic Turks who simply migrated into the mountains and back down again. Using language as the major identification of ethnicity, these scholars presented linguistic evidence that they said shows the Kurdish language as simply a mélange of Indo-European and Arabic dialects, sprinkled into the original Turkish. By studying historical and modern Kurdish texts, Turkish linguists claimed that a substantial majority of the Kurdish language consists of Turkish, Arabic, and Persian diction. The “Kurdish” words they studied were not actually Kurdish at all, but were of a proto-Turkish dialect. Martin van Bruinessen writes of Turkey’s reaction to these conclusions when he states, “In the official Turkish view, the Kurds are of Turkish origin, but they have culturally and linguistically degenerated and now speak a gibberish comprised of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish and [are] incapable of expressing sophisticated thought.” [7] Hence, there was no actual Kurdish language, only a version of Turkish muddled with some Arabic and Persian words. [8] With what it saw as substantial evidence to negate the existence of a Kurdish language, the Turkish government could begin its task of transforming its “lost Turks” into ethnically Turkish nationalists.

Despite his government’s attitude, Atatürk was not keen on presenting himself as the oppressor of a national minority, but wanted his citizens and the world to see him as a unifying figure. He thus began with domestic policies that would technically apply to all Turkish citizens, but that were actually directed at the southeast. In 1924, Turkey passed its first law concerning language of the state. The law decreed the banning of “all Kurdish schools, associations and publications” by outlawing all verbal and written forms of expression that were not Turkish. [9] The law came on the exact same day the government banned the Caliphate in its efforts to create a European-like secular state.

It was not long before the government was dealing with Kurdish unrest in the southeast. If the new legislation was not enough to cause conflict between the Kurds and the state, it also served to aggravate an open wound that the Kurds had suffered only a few years earlier. After the Treaty of Sčvres in August of 1920 all but promised the Kurds a homeland of their own, the Kurds saw their dreams of a sovereign Kurdistan quickly dashed away in 1923. The Treaty of Lausanne superseded the Treaty of Sčvres and declared Turkey a sovereign state within the legitimate boundaries won during the 1922 Turkish War of Independence. Still on the defensive after the betrayal of the Treaty of Sčvres, the Kurds were immediately aware of the true intentions of Ataturk’s language policy. The combination of these two factors sparked a fire in the minds of the Kurds, who now faced the fact that they would not have the assistance of foreign powers in their quest for a homeland. The push for Kurds to become Turks commenced a movement to demonstrate and prove the existence and power of Kurdish identity. Christopher Houston expounds upon this idea by writing, “…the ongoing need felt by the state to both narrate and legislate Kurdish identity out of existence attests to a continual refusal by Kurds to become ‘docile bodies’.” [10] And “docile bodies” they would be no longer.

The first major Kurdish uprising took place in February 1925 in the heavily Kurd-populated province of Diyarbakir. Religious leader Sheikh Said of Piran led the revolt using traditional ideologies of Kurdish tribal allegiance. Though they practiced a more liberal form of Islam, Kurds in the southeast still governed themselves in a non-secular tradition. Thus, the rebellion that took place had feelings of Kurdish nationalism mixed with religious connotations as a result of the previous banning of the Caliphate. [11] Under the Sheikh’s leadership, the rebel Kurdish army captured and occupied one-third of the Kurdish southeast, but the state soon took action and used brutal military might to put down the rebellion. They could not, however, quell the sentiments that spawned it. Kurdish nationalism took on an anti-Turkish characteristic that spurred two more rebellions in 1930 and around 1937, both of which met the same end as the first. [12]

As previously mentioned, the Kurdish language and cultural bans were practically always followed by more militaristic policy decisions. In the 1930’s, these policies often dealt with the issue of relocation. The concentrated populations of Kurds in the southeast was proving to be more of a problem than a blessing for the government, and cultural oppression was spurring on more nationalist sentiment and group mentality in the Kurdish provinces. At first, deportations were the immediate effect of Kurdish rebellions, but they soon became part of the assimilation effort. The first law of this set of relocation legislation came in 1932 and stated that it the government would redistribute populations in “all those areas in which it is deemed desirable to increase the density of the culturally Turkish population.” [13] Deportations ensued immediately. To reinforce the government’s policy, Turkey made another decree on June 14, 1934 called the Law of Resettlement, which “made assimilation of all the country’s citizens to Turkish culture…official government policy.” [14] The Law of Resettlement made evident the government’s intention to pursue deportation practices and assimilation as a dual policy, and while it succeeded in breaking up the social cohesion in many of the southeast provinces, it reinforced the Kurds’ need to band together against their oppressor. As Houston aptly puts, “Like a jealous husband, nation-state paranoia often excites the very thing it fears.” [15]

Aside from policies that directly affected the daily lives of the Kurds, the Turkish government took subtle actions to undermine the Kurdish identity, along with all non-Turkish identities. This is apparent in the government’s four census reports conducted between 1945 and 1965. The censuses gathered information on native language, but not ethnicity, showing the reluctance of the Turkish state to initiate any debate of separate identities. [16] The censuses also prove the government’s fixation on language as a dividing factor within the state. By collecting information for these censuses, the government ignored ethnic boundaries, and focused on the “problem” of diversification of language, particularly Kurdish. The censuses were perhaps a vain attempt by the government to determine whether its language bans and Turkish language programs were having an effect on minority populations. Even though by the mid-1930’s, some say no Turkish town or city contained more than 10% ethnic minorities, Kurdish-speaking populations continued to grow in village areas. [17] This is certainly a result of the fact that the natural birth rate for Kurds is larger than that of ethnic Turks. Kurdish rural and Turkish urban settlement is most likely the reason for the differences in birthrates. [18] The government appeared to be content with its progress, however, since in towns and cities, Kurdish language had, for all intents and purposes, disappeared.

In 1950, there was a new prime minister in Turkey to whom these more subtle ways of assimilation were due. Adnan Menderes began to focus on the international scene, creating bonds with the West that were based on Turkey’s “resentment and distrust” of the Arab world. [19] Domestically, order was fragile but present in the southeast as Kurdish tribal leaders were established by the government to keep peace in the area. Ismet Inönü had since taken the place of Atatürk after his death in 1938, and establishing Turkey’s place in the international arena for a while took precedence over the Kurdish question that still lingered, ever so quietly, in the southeast.

This brief decade of peace and order was replaced by a revival of government activism in 1960 when a coup overthrew the Turkish government. While previously quiet on the domestic front, the aggrieved Menderes now spoke out against the Kurdish leaders that, he claimed, had been given too much authority in the southeast during the previous decade, and had been plotting to undermine the Turkish state by pursuing goals of an independent Kurdistan. [20] These sentiments were exacerbated by the Kurdish freedom fighter Mullah Mustafa Barzani’s progress in neighboring Iraq. After having been forced into exile for his rebellions against the Iraqi government under King Faisal II, the Kurdish leader had since been invited back to Iraq after the coup d’etat of Abd el-Karim Qassem in 1958. [21] Talk of Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq was making the Turkish government weary, and the new leaders were assumingly looking for another reason to reinstate assimilation policies on the Kurds.

[Joseph]

Part II

To the benefit of the oppressed, however, poor policy planning prevailed and the new government drafted a constitution that actually allowed for more freedom for the Kurds. Political associations and trade unions, once banned under Ataturk and then Inönü started to form, and more press freedom meant less restriction on the Kurdish language. These new liberties did not come soon enough for the Kurds, however, who had already begun to establish nationalist groups and strong pro-Kurdish sentiments. Left-leaning Turks took advantage of the liberal atmosphere and created the Worker’s Party of Turkey, or WPT. The WPT began to bring the Kurdish question into academic arenas by publishing scholarly works on the issue and even going so far as to make the problem invariably ethnic in nature, instead of the Kemalist view that trouble stemmed exclusively from economic disparities. Literature appeared that was “devoted entirely to the history, folklore and economic problems of Kurdistan.” [22] The government responded to these publications in 1967 with a law banning “the distribution in Turkey of any material of foreign origin in the Kurdish language,” but the Kurds had already caught a glimpse of independence and they were prepared to fight to see its arrival. [23]

The proliferation of Kurdish nationalist sentiment continued into the late 1960’s and into the 1970’s as organizations promoting Kurdish culture and identity sprouted up in areas all over the country. They were usually made up of Kurdish elite and urbanized students. In 1969, these elites established the Revolutionary Cultural Society of the East in Ankara, making it the first legal Kurdish organization in the Republic’s history. “‘The East’ meant ‘Kurdistan,’ as everyone knew, but in order to maintain legality no open reference to Kurdistan or Kurds could be made.” [24] By 1970, the organization had split into a group devoted simply to cultural awareness, and a more leftist wing which was led by an ambitious young academic named Dr. Sivan. Sivan’s goal was unquestionably Kurdish independence. A movement by his militaristic followers into the Kurdish southeast provoked a Turkish military intervention in 1971 that quelled the uproar for only a short while. [25] The establishment of and increase in more such groups characterized the rest of the decade, as Ankara watched with fear.

Perhaps the most notable of these Kurdish nationalist groups formed in 1978. They called themselves the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or in Turkish acronym form, the PKK. The importance of the formation of the PKK cannot be overly-expressed for it continues to be a crucial factor in the fight for Kurdish independence in Turkey to this day. In its early days, however, the organization was only able to focus on small-scale guerilla operations in the southeast as it worked to recruit new members. The PKK, along with its founder and leader Abdullah Öcalan, was intent upon using physical force to secure its place in the Kurdish national movement and to obtain its demands for an independent Kurdistan. [26] The changes in government that were soon to take place after the group’s establishment, would only serve to increase the PKK’s size and efforts as a means of retaliation against the oppression of the Kurds.

Though the government seems to have all but forgotten about the Kurdish question during the 1960’s and early to mid-1970’s, political instability that was plaguing Ankara eventually found its way to the Kurdish southeast. The questionable intentions and power of the Turkish government was one of the reasons for the creation of so many Kurdish political movements and organizations. Süleyman Demirel had become Prime Minister of Turkey in 1965 –a position he would hold seven times. Demirel at first did not have clear objectives for the southeast, but his political wavering on the Kurdish question would become an issue for the government and the Kurds in the times to come. In 1980, finally fed up with the government’s lack of domestic legitimacy, the military staged a coup, ousting Demirel for the time being and imposing martial law on the country. [27] The oppression of martial law excited the fervor of the newly-formed PKK, as well as other smaller leftist Kurdish organizations. As the military began to brutally crack down in the southeast, the PKK sought refuge and regrouped in Syria. They would soon return, however, with a mission and arms.

Breeding social repression, the new martial law also spawned massive migration of the Kurdish population from the southeast to the urban western areas of the Turkey, as well as to Europe. Kurds were looking for economic opportunities in these metropolitan regions, but usually had to hide their Kurdish identity to secure positions. Many younger Kurds growing up in families who had migrated or emigrated from the southeast learned to be ashamed of their Kurdish identity. The ease with which Kurds could “become” Turks in these urban areas facilitated this new view of Kurdish identity. The Turkish government, along with Turkish and Kurdish civilians alike, viewed Kurdish ethnicity as one of “‘ignorance, incivility, superstitiousness (religiousness) and backwardness’ until that ethnicity was rebuked and replaced by Turkish nationality.” [28] Since the Turkish government insisted that the Kurds and Turks were one and same racially, the differences between the two consisted of spoken language. This allowed for a Kurd to convert to Turkishness by simply decreeing it. That is, by speaking Turkish.

This perceived progress in assimilating Kurds in urban areas was not mirrored in the southeast, however. The PKK continued to grow in numbers and efforts against the military regime, and guerilla warfare broke out between the two sides in 1983 after a series of legislation by the new government. General elections had taken place that year, with Turut Özal securing his place as prime minister of Turkey. [29] Özal and his conservative party wasted no time and began to reinstate direct bans on Kurdish language and expression. In 1983, Law 2932 effectively illegalized the Kurdish language, and the following Articles 141, 142, and 163 all served to illegalize the promotion of communism, Kurdish separatism, and theocratic government. [30] The PKK moved back into Turkish Kurdistan and resumed military operations in the southeast. Turkish military presence in the region increased due to the fighting, as more Kurds fled the countryside to seek asylum in the cities of western Turkey, Europe, and, to a lesser extent, the United States. [31]

It is important to stress, here, the government’s thought process concerning the laws on language. The Turkish government had never forgotten the struggle it endured during the Turkish War for Independence in 1922, and the state viewed Kurdish independence as the definite end to national cohesion and security. The language that connected the Kurds was thought to undermine and break apart the Turks. The destruction of the Kurdish identity, therefore, was intended to soften, and eventually kill off, any Kurdish nationalist sentiment and replace it with a stronger Turkish nationalism. Ankara’s insistence upon military and legal persuasion to adopt Turkish in favor of Kurdish was the policy’s ultimate demise, however, for it only really served to increase the Kurds’ need to define themselves as a separate ethnic group. If Turkey had been able to see itself as a diverse nation and use that attitude to strengthen its nationalism, the state would have benefited from the Kurdish human capital rather than having to employ money, manpower, and time to the “Kurdish question.”

The government remained firm in its stance, however, and continued to fight the PPK in the Kurdish provinces. This insistence upon using physical force was supplemented by the military’s strong hang in policy-making in the southeast. In 1985, Özal initiated a program using civilian militias to counteract the guerilla strategies of the PKK. His intention was to prove to “outsiders that the Kurds in the southeast were far from united in their opposition to the Turkish state.” [32] Two years later in 1987, the prime minister declared a state of emergency in ten Kurdish provinces, which was to be extended every four months. Continuing economic disparity in the southeast lent its hand to empowering the PKK army, as more and more Kurds joined the rebel ranks. To reinforce Law 2932, the government adopted Kararname 413 –a cluster of legislation that extended the government’s power to censor media and other forms of expression. [33] Each new language law was met with more resistance in the southeast. Ankara’s fear fed also on emerging Kurdish-Iraqi relations to the east. Barzani’s peshmerga army had been making progress with diplomatic efforts in northern Iraq. This was a foreign situation that only served to push the PKK to fight harder.

The 1990’s started off better than did the 1980’s for the Kurds. In April 1991, the government repealed Law 2932 and Articles 141, 142, and 162 were stricken from the Turkish Penal Code. The Kurdish language could now be legally spoken and written, although Kurdish media broadcasts and education were still prohibited. [34] In October of the same year, the relatively more liberal Demirel was reelected as prime minister and sought to solve the Kurdish issue. As Philip Robins notes, “[Demirel] was prepared to go on record as saying that Turkey had ‘realized the reality of its Kurdish population’, [and this was] not [an] inconsiderable statement in view of the state’s past approach to such matters.” [35] Robins goes on to list three mains reasons for why this government stance unfortunately never came into reality. First, the Kurds in the southeast had been plagued for too long with poor economic conditions, constant military presence, and brutal violence coupled with relocation. The discourse of the new prime minister was positive, but was still only discourse –not action. Secondly, Robins states, “rather than nurturing the transformation in the political atmosphere in Turkey in 1991, a handful of [Kurdish nationalist] members seemed determined to give offence to the symbols of the Turkish state at every opportunity.” [36] Lastly, the government still consisted of enough hardliners to curb any effective liberalization of Kurdish policy. In the end, the Kurds lost the support of Demirel due to these reasons, and a bloody Nevruz holiday the following year further negated the government’s fragile compassion. Demirel and his government seemingly washed their hands of the Kurdish situation and it was left, yet again, to the military. [37]

Despite the less-than-promising atmosphere in Turkey, the decade of the 1990’s presented the Kurds with a new outlet: satellite television. The PKK, now established in countries throughout the Middle East and Europe, was able to launch a television station in 1990 that ran out of the United Kingdom. MED-TV was the new global source for PKK news and information. And, although pirated television was and is still highly illegal to receive in Turkey, it was and is not impossible to get. Kurds in the southeast, and especially those in Kurdish diasporas in Istanbul and Ankara, still use MED-TV to watch leftist Kurdish programming and news. The station “is concerned to nurture ‘Kurdish’ folk dance, national costumes and music,” all of which were outlawed by the Turkish government for the same reasons it restricted language. [38] As Robins puts it, for the Turkish government “[Kurdish] cultural rights would inexorably lead to demands for political rights, then leading to federation, statehood and eventually union with adjacent Kurdish lands.” [39] Hence, the government sought to outlaw any outlet for Kurdish culture and information such as MED-TV.

While the PKK had its freedoms in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, it was still struggling with the government back home in Turkey. In March 1993, Abdullah Öcalan declared a unilateral ceasefire with the Turkish military, after many had described 1992 as the “bloodiest year in the PKK insurgency.” [40] The ceasefire did not last very long, however, since many hardliners in the PKK viewed the act as a sign of weakness and submissiveness towards the government. The meek external pressure to improve human rights in the country did little to influence domestic military policy in the southeast up through 1995. Violence and imprisonment ran rampant throughout the state as outspoken Kurdish journalists continued to be arrested, beaten, or simply “disappeared.” [41] In 1995, the Turkish government launched a “major military offensive” by sending roughly thirty-five thousand Turkish troops to the southeast.

Violence between Kurdish militia and Turkish forces carried on throughout the rest of the decade and into the new millennium, but a change of government policy commenced as Turkey began to look seriously at membership in the European Union. After having officially applied for membership in 1987, and joining the EU Customs Union in 1995, Turkey desired full recognition as a European state –an aspiration befitting of Atatürk’s European leaning. For Europe, the problem with Turkey lay greatly with its very poor human rights record. Turkey responded with a series of twenty-first century legislation that would serve to benefit the Kurds, if only on the surface. With Öcalan now in a Turkish prison after being captured in Kenya in 1999, Ankara’s fear of Kurdish separatism may have mildly subsided. In any case, the Turkish parliament passed reform legislation that lifted bans on Kurdish education and broadcasting. The sincerity of these measures must be questioned, however, since less than a year later the government authorized the dispatch of military forces into the Kurdish provinces once again. The parliament continued in 2003 to pass laws that softened restrictions on “freedom of speech, Kurdish language rights, and on reducing [the] political role of [the] military.” [42] Despite these legal actions, the PKK insisted that the state was continuing efforts to viciously destroy PKK forces in the southeast. Continuing with its trend, Turkey released four prominent Kurdish activists from prison, and launched its first ever Kurdish television station in 2004.[43] This policy move was smart because it now gave Kurds in Turkey a source of Kurdish culture that differed from the leftist, and admittedly violent, media perspective that the PKK’s MED-TV offered. Ironically, Turkey’s need to assimilate to European civil freedoms required it to ease its assimilation policies toward its own people.

The situation for the Kurds of Turkey now glimmers with hope, even though it still shakes with sporadic but violent PKK activity. The opening of the media continues to expand in attempts to meet EU requirements. In 2005 the EU nodded toward Turkey’s efforts but remained clear that more needed to be done by the government to promote and safeguard civil liberties. The Kurdish progress in Iraq no doubt leaves the Turkish state weary of a sovereign Kurdistan. An independent state for the Kurds is exactly what Turkey has tried for decades to prevent, as it sees a Kurdish state as the ultimate threat to Turkish national security and unity. In the end, Turkey has failed to wipe out the Kurdish identity. One could go so far as to say that through its repressive policies, the Turkish government succeeded only in adding gasoline to the fire in regards to Kurdish independence. The new legislation may be considered too little, too late by many Kurds. If the language bans of the early republic had not been, the Kurdish people would not have had to fight so hard for their identity. As it stands, the fighting is a habit they have yet to break.

[Joseph]

Local guards divide Turkish Kurds
By Meriel Beattie
BBC News, Sason, Turkey


With the mountain rain dripping inside the collar of his ill-fitting camouflage jacket, Sefik Tiryaki is in an uncomfortable position.
He is a Village Guard, part of a controversial militia force which patrols the rocky, treeless hillsides of south-eastern Turkey.

For decades, this region has been the battle ground in fighting between armed Kurdish separatists from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Turkish military.

Over the years at least 30,000 people are thought to have died in the conflict and hundreds of thousands of mainly Kurdish villagers forced to abandon their homes.

State police force

Like Sefik, most Village Guards are themselves Kurds, armed by the state to police other Kurds. Set up originally as a temporary militia group 22 years ago, the Village Guards are still operating, with more than 58,000 members.


We would like more money, and we'd like to have social security
Sefik Tiryaki, Village Guard
It is a system which has long been criticised by human rights organisations for exacerbating mistrust and ethnic divisions in an already troubled region.

Despised as traitors by many other Kurds, the Village Guards' relationship with the state is also ambiguous, with a lower standard of equipment, pay and benefits than the Turkish military or police.

"We would like more money, and we'd like to have social security," Sefik said, cradling his ageing Kalashnikov rifle outside his damp, windowless hut on a mountain road.

"We are no different from civil servants, but we get much less. We were always waiting for an improvement, but no one has done anything so far."

Loyal to Ankara

What village guards do have, on a local level at least - is power. And they are wary of any process - including EU accession - which might take it away.


In his upstairs headquarters, overlooking the mountain town of Sason, the local Village Guard commander, Mahsum Batu sits at a polished desk festooned with Turkish flags. On the wall beside him is a large marble tablet engraved with the words "Our Martyrs".

Glazed onto it are the passport size photos of some of the 41 local Village Guards killed in service, many in clashes with the PKK.

"During the mid 90s there were about 50 terrorists in each region, but today, not even a bird can fly round here without us knowing about it," Mr Batu says. "I am not in favour of joining the EU, "he adds.

"I would like to make it clear to them that no terrorist organisation is ever going to get even a small piece of this land. I took up this gun to defend my nation, my family and my honour."

Among the tribal Kurdish communities of the south-east, there are families, even entire villages which, like Mr Batu, are fiercely loyal to the Turkish state and firmly oppose any kind of Kurdish autonomy.

Opposition

But not all Village Guards share this kind of patriotism.




Away from the watchful gaze of anyone in uniform, a former Village Guard, who does not want to be named, told me what happened 13 years ago, when fighting broke out between the military and the PKK in the hills around his village.

"It happens because people are pressured into it," said the former Village Guard, who now collects paper from city-dwellers' rubbish bins to make a living.

"The military came and said that if we did not join the Village Guards, then we would have to evacuate the whole village. They would not allow our village to remain without a Village Guard."


"I think [the system] should be abolished. It makes everything worse. At the end of the day, Village Guards are Kurds. And who are the others we're fighting? They are Kurds, too."

"The Kurds have been deceived. And they're mixed up in a conflict with other Kurds."

Over the last 20 years there have been numerous allegations of Village Guards abusing their position, seizing for themselves the choice properties in evacuated villages and threatening, even killing, Kurdish villagers who try to return.

The international organisation Human Rights Watch has called Village Guards "a corrupt and corrupting system".

Local obstacle

The European Commission, in a recent report on Turkey's progress towards EU accession, has described it as one of the major outstanding obstacles to villagers being able to return home safely. UN officials have also expressed concern.

"What I see is that at least Village Guards are perceived as an obstacle, and even perceptions are important when it comes to return" said Walter Kalin, UN Special Rapporteur for Internally Displaced Persons, on a trip to Turkey earlier this year.

"I think it will be important for the government to take these fears seriously and to take the steps necessary to remove the obstacle."

Just what the Turkish government intends to do about the Village Guards is unclear. No new guards have been recruited for the last six years. There have recently been proposals for improved pay and conditions.

But plans for a commission to oversee the disarming and disbanding of the militia seem to have come to nothing.

Thanks to a new compensation law, some of the displaced Kurdish villagers are slowly starting to return to the mountains to try to rebuild their homes and their communities.

But many of these returnees are still resentful of those fellow Kurds who chose to work for the state security forces.

And without any state provision for their future, their reintegration or their long-term safety, the Village Guards may end up having the most to lose.

[Hovik]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060829/ap_on_re_mi_ea/turkey_explosions_25

[Joseph]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060829/..._explosions_25

They reap what they sow.

[Hovik]

They reap what they sow.

The sickest part is that when Turkey violated Iraqi airspace last week(?) to bomb the crap out of a Kurdish town it wasn't a media headline like this...

the effect is more important than the cause I guess... rediculous...

[Joseph]

The sickest part is that when Turkey violated Iraqi airspace last week(?) to bomb the crap out of a Kurdish town it wasn't a media headline like this...

the effect is more important than the cause I guess... rediculous...

Probably because this killed and injured some British tourists as well.

The tactics of the Kurdish militant groups have grown increasingly effective. I've been following what's going on with the PKK, and whereas they used to be disorganized and largely inept, they now seem better equiped, better led, and much more effective. I'm not praising them but it seems as though they've picked up on some of the tactics used by the insurgency in Iraq (or as it can be reffered to now - Terrrorism University); more hit and runs attacks, widespread use of improvised explosives, etc). Instead of attacking better armed and numerically superior forces head-on as they used to, and lose about 20 troops for every 1 they kill, they've more or less evened the odds; they are sniping at the easy targets and fading away. Whether the PKK's numbers are bigger or smaller, they have made huge gains. First they should go after the Village Guards, much like the Hezzbollah were able to target the puppet South Lebanese Army before taking on Israel.

If ever of you have seen the Godfather II, there is a scene at Hyman Roth's birthday party in Havana (immediately before the revolution) where he asks Michael about the revolution and Michael tells Hyman about seeing some rebels blow themselves up and kill an army officer. Hyman asks Michael what the significance is and Michael responds that the rebels "will win"

[Joseph]

Check this thread out!

http://www.kurdmedia.com/articles.asp?id=13127

See what Kurds have to say.