Basından

ANALYSIS - Turkey tackles Kurdish taboo in EU membership drive

ANALYSIS - Turkey tackles Kurdish taboo in EU membership drive

HDN | 8/2/2002 12:00:00 AM |

At the height of the battle with Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militants in the southeast 10 years ago, anyone who suggested allowing Kurdish television or education was labelled a fellow-traveller of the PKK. Now, the idea that Turkey's estimated 12
At the height of the battle with Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militants in the southeast 10 years ago, anyone who suggested allowing Kurdish television or education was labelled a fellow-traveller of the PKK. Now, the idea that Turkey's estimated 12 million Kurds could be allowed to study and broadcast in their own language is no longer universally considered "separatist propaganda".
Steve Bryant

A few years ago, merely suggesting some of the reforms that Turkey's parliament is now debating was landing scores of leftists and Kurds in jail.

Now, the idea that Turkey's estimated 12 million Kurds could be allowed to study and broadcast in their own language is no longer universally considered "separatist propaganda".

Instead, it is a central electoral pitch for many parties campaigning for the November 3 election and an essential plank of their drive for European Union membership.

The outcome of the debate on a package of EU-inspired human rights reforms will show to what extent Turkey has managed the transformation from a country ultra-sensitive about its national identity to a serious, self-confident EU candidate.

At the height of the battle with Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militants in the southeast 10 years ago, anyone who suggested allowing Kurdish television or education was labelled a fellow-traveller of the PKK.

More than 30,000 people died in the conflict, most of them PKK members, according to official statistics. Many Kurds were jailed. Many others suspected of PKK sympathies were killed in mysterious circumstances.

Turkey's establishment has long argued that allowing the Kurds cultural freedom would encourage separatism, and a stern nationalism that put down roots during the fighting burns on brightly -- even though the conflict has all but ended since the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.
"Language threat"

"I think the (Kurdish) language will threaten our social cohesion. Social cohesion is very important and these instruments have been used by the PKK," says Oktay Vural, a senior government minister in the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), the reforms' prime parliamentary opponent.

"We cannot give any instruments to these terrorist groups to be used as a leverage. We have to think of the security and unity of Turkey."

Even those who champion the reforms cast themselves as servants of national founder Kemal Ataturk's desire for Turkey to match the best of the West, rather than friends of the Kurds.

Vural may avoid using the word "Kurdish" -- but so does Mesut Yilmaz, the conservative who has done most to champion the reforms, and who spoke only of "mother tongue" and "traditional languages and dialects" when he defended the package last week.

Although the Kurdish problem can now be debated with, for Turkey, surprising openness in the press, the generation who served long jail terms for criticising Turkey's treatment of its Kurds are not greatly impressed yet.

"These reforms have nothing to do with any desire to change Turkey's militarism or the culture of intimidation. These changes are political acrobatics," said Haluk Gerger, one of those who went to prison for "subversive" pro-Kurdish writings.

"What happens to the years that people like (writer) Ismail Besikci spent in jail after the political acrobatics of Mesut Yilmaz?"

But he and other campaigners say it would be churlish not to welcome the proposals and the changes that made them possible.

"I believe that, compared to yesterday, there are amazing changes in Turkey," says Murat Bozlak, chief of the People's Democracy Party (HADEP), the leading legal Kurdish party.

One of those changes gives HADEP some protection from bring shut down for separatism like its two predecessors.

Another, part of the EU reform package, would almost completely abolish the death penalty -- just three years after a huge popular clamour for Ocalan to be hanged.
Too little support?

But there lies the main problem with the reforms. Many of the leftists and radicals who campaigned for them fear that too little has been done to anchor popular support for the shift outside the wealthy, educated, pro-European suburbs.

"The steps Turkey is taking are not real steps on the road to democracy. Everything done in recent years has been to meet EU standards and is premature, and in a way cosmetic," said Kerim Yildiz of the London-based Kurdish Human Rights Project.

"Turkey has never made a single one of these reforms because it wants to.

"But even if they are premature, we have to see them as positive. We could not have dreamed of this 10 years ago and many people have paid a very high price for them."

From his office on the front line of the development of a literary and academic Kurdish culture, Hasan Kaya is unsure what to make of the rapid change in mood and legal atmosphere.

His Kurdish Institute, which works to develop Kurdish through research and producing dictionaries, was closed for four months earlier this year on a legal technicality.

"Actually we are very confused, we don't know what to believe," he said.

"They always used to say 'Turkey will be divided' (if the Kurdish language is allowed to flourish). They knew it was wrong, but Turkey has always been responsive to such conservative arguments, particularly in Anatolia (Turkey's rural heartland) -- and the parties fed that and encouraged it.

"They knew it was wrong and now they find that Turkey's interests are at stake for the European Union -- but they still face the contradiction."
Istanbul - Reuters