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Turkey's New Kurdish Strategy The patronising embrace: Turkey’s new Kurdish strategy Kerem Oktem ! Stiftung Forschungsstelle Schweiz-Türkei and Kerem Oktem Basel, February 2008 – http://www.sfst.ch Kerem Oktem The patronising embrace: Turkey’s new Kurdish strategy The patronising embrace: Turkey’s new Kurdish strategy The Sixth of October 2006 is not going to make it into the textbooks of Turkish history. On this day, the council of the central Diyarbakir borough of Suriçi voted unanimously for a project called ‘Multilingual Municipality Services’. The mayor, Abdullah Demirbas of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) justified the proposal with a reference to the district’s majority of Kurdish speakers and the prevalence of other lan- guages such as Arabic and Armenian. Many of the residents are indeed of rural origin and have fled to Diyarbakir during the Kurdish uprising in the 1990s. Their Turkish is often too patchy to fully benefit from services of the municipality. At the same time, the idea went, Diyarbakir’s multi-cultural and multi- lingual past merits a publicity campaign that lives up to the diversity of its past, exemplified by the sur- viving Armenian, Chaldaean and Protestant Churches and the many historical mosques in the old town. Demirbas’s experiment with ‘multilingualism’ and public services in Kurdish could have marked a depar- ture from Turkey’s assimilatory policies towards its Kurdish citizens. It could have been a step towards a genuinely inclusive policy based on the acknowledgement and recognition of difference, a step in full conformity with the spirit of EU-induced legal reform packages and with European standards of human and minority right. Alas, it was not to be: Abdullah Demirbas was dismissed from office and faced with a barrage of court cases. The Council of State, the country’s supreme administrative court, deemed the municipality’s project unconstitutional, while members of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) denounced it as an attack on Turkey’s territorial indivisibility.1 This essay examines Turkey’s Kurdish policy since 2002 and discusses the prospects of legal Kurdish poli- tics under the current government. It argues that after six years of reform politics by successive AKP governments, two years of EU accession negotiations and heightened expectations for progress, devel- opments indicate a suspension of reform and a shift towards polarisation. Turkey’s Kurds are now caught between the promise of a better material life and Islamic charity politics on the one side and the pros- pect of hardening discrimination and exclusion on the other. To be admitted to the emerging space of AKP-supported material wealth, Kurds are urged to renounce the Kurdish nationalist movement and its identity-based politics as presented by the DTP. 1. The mirage of reform: The AKP’s Kurdish policy since 2002 Most analysts have expected that the Justice and Development Party under Prime Minister Erdogan would depart from Turkey’s traditional Kurdish policy that has been wavering between assimilation and cliente- listic co-optation. A closer look at the period since the AKP’s first election victory in November 2002, however, suggests that the party’s greatest asset has been the absence of an explicit Kurdish policy. What the AKP government did have was a different rhetoric and an implicit policy: Less inspired by Turk- ish ethno-nationalism than by a notion of Muslim solidarity, it followed the Gulen movement’s recom- mendation of moderate Islam as antidote to Kurdish nationalism.2 Ignoring Kurdish demands ranging from the right of education in Kurdish,3 to the termination of all regulations limiting the public use of 1 At a debate in Parliament on 11 January 2008, DTP MPs criticised the impeachment of Demirbas. Justice Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin, in turn, accused the DTP of ignoring the constitutional order and of violating Para. 3 of the Constitution that stipulates: “Turkey is an indivisible unity with its state and nation and its official name is Turk- ish’ (Cf. http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=93467). 2 For a partisan description of the Gulen’s Kurdish strategy, see: Mehmet Kalyoncu (2008), A Civilian Response to ethno-religious conflict. The Gulen movement in Southeast Turkey, The Light, Somerset, N.J. 3 When Erdogan met members of civil society during a visit, the Chair of the Diyarbakir Bar, Szegin Tanrikulu, in- quired whether reforms allowing for education in the Kurdish language could help easing the current conflict. He responded: “There are not only Kurds in Turkey. What if tomorrow, the Cherkez or Laz ask for the same? Every- one will demand it. How are we going to sustain unity then?” (http://www.milliyet.com.tr/2008/01/06/siyaset/axsiy03.html) Stiftung Forschungsstelle Schweiz-Türkei/ Research Foundation Swiss - Turkey, Occasional Paper February 2008 2 Kerem Oktem The patronising embrace: Turkey’s new Kurdish strategy Kurdish, the government briefly considered and then discarded the idea of a general amnesty for armed members of the PKK. Rather than engaging with Kurdish representatives and acknowledging the exis- tence of a political conflict, it went for pragmatic problem management, misunderstood by many as a major softening in Turkey’s security-minded Kurdish policy. The introduction of limited broadcasting in minority languages and private language courses, hailed as a first opening by liberals and as a dangerous first step towards the erosion territorial integrity by critics, was an important legal change with immediate relevance for the Kurdish community. Yet, it was not the incumbent AKP government that passed this key reform package, paving the way for Turkey’s EU mem- bership negotiation, but the coalition led by the late Bulent Ecevit, which voted in this package just be- fore the November 2002 elections.4 The AKP government managed to take the credit and create a narra- tive of democratisation that impressed liberals at home and analysts abroad, while in reality it shied away from even the most timid steps towards recognition of Kurdish concerns. Normalisation or delusion? The first AKP government November 2002 seemed to herald a new beginning: After almost two decades of the Kurdish Uprising (Serhildan) and violent conflict between the Kurdish–nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan) and Turkish security forces,5 a fragile peace was taking hold. In place since the 1980 military intervention of 12 September, the state of emergency regime was abrogated in all Kurdish prov- inces by the end of 2002, ending more than twenty years of arbitrary rule by military and security forces.6 It should be noted that the lifting of the state of emergency was a decision not of the newly in- cumbent Erdogan government but of the preceding coalition government under Bulent Ecevit. Released from the tight grip of the ‘State of Emergency Regional Governorate’ (Olaganustu Hal Bolge Valiligi), residents of the Southeast experienced, for the first time in almost a generation, basic free- doms like travelling without regular identity controls and road-blocks. In the large cities of the South- east, where passers-by disappeared from the streets at sunset –due to curfews or fear of arbitrary deten- tion- urban life was slowly restored to its pre-1980 vivacity, even though places like Diyarbakir or Batman were bursting with hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people. Despite the poverty, squalor and erosion of traditional social institutions in these cities, however, there was a remarkable relaxation of authoritarian policies and softening of attitudes among members of the security forces. The lifting of the state of emergency also opened the way for a more self-conscious Kurdish associational life. The Kurdish municipalities, through cultural activities, concerts, film festivals etc. contributed to the emergence of a new public sphere.7 For the first time in the history of the Turkish Republic, urban space emerged as a venue for the negotiation and formation of Kurdish identity. The images of incessant violence and bloodshed, with which the region was hitherto remembered were replaced, at least in some part of the Turkish mainstream media, with images of a cultural revival beyond conflict. Some even thought that a substantive settlement including a general amnesty for PKK combatants was in easy reach. 4 This reform package also included the abolishment of the death penalty that allowed for PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan’s death sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment. 5 The war left more than 37,000 dead, including civilians, and up to 2 million internally displaced in the Kurdish areas and western Turkey. Not less than 2,000 villages were destroyed by security forces or PKK units. It ended, tentatively, with the capture, by Turkey, of Abdullah Ocalan in February 1999. 6 The last provinces, where emergency rule provisions were in place until September 2002, were Diyarbakir and Sirnak, the former the symbolic capital of Kurdish politics and the latter one of the hotspots of Kurdish military resistance, situated on the Iraqi border. 7 Zeynep Gambetti (2004), The Conflictual (Trans)Formation of the Public Sphere in Urban Space: The Case of Di- yarbakir, EUI Working Papers, 2004/38. Stiftung Forschungsstelle Schweiz-Türkei/ Research Foundation Swiss - Turkey, Occasional Paper February 2008 3 Kerem Oktem The patronising embrace: Turkey’s new Kurdish strategy The sense of normalisation, even if in the absence of legal reform of any consequence, was consolidated with the decision of the European Union in December 2004 to begin accession negotiations. The subse- quent start of EU membership talks in October 2005 appeared to be the final indicator that Turkey was on the path to reform, a process that would ultimately benefit the Kurdish constituency. For a brief pe- riod, a window of opportunity emerged, bringing together the military establishment, the moderate Is- lamists of the AKP, Kurdish Nationalists, Alevis and large segments of the Turkish electorate on a plat- form for EU membership.
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