How Turkey fails its Kurds

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/...on/edpower.php

How Turkey fails its Kurds
By Jonathan Power International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2005

BUCUK TEPE, Turkey This is the edge of tomorrow's
Europe, at least if Turkey gets its way. A desolate
mud-built village, close to the Syrian border, reduced
to rubble by the Turkish Army when it was battling the
rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, is
slowly being repopulated by a brave few.

The families are understandably nervous. The PKK has
recently restarted its insurgency, breaking a
five-year truce, angry with the government's slow
delivery on its promises to allow Kurdish in the
primary schools, full-scale broadcasting in Kurdish
and to invest in economic development. "This violence
is what we don't want," says one man, living with his
extended family under nothing more than a homemade canopy.

Five minutes drive from the river Tigris, which
farther downstream watered the first of humankind's
civilizations, we engage in what seems an almost
surreal conversation. On the one hand, the
grandfather, who has fathered 12 children, explains
how they make a living with their herd of sheep out of
what appears to be stony, barren land without a blade
of green grass to be seen. On the other, he says,
although in their hearts they feel Asian they want to
enter the Europe Union. "Europe will give us peace and
give us Kurds our rights," he says. "And give us food
and jobs," one of his sons adds.

A few kilometers away is another larger, more
prosperous, village that escaped the war unscathed.
The villagers grow wheat and lentils, and although
they say the water is of poor quality, every house has
a television and half the men of the village, as they
converse with me in a large circle, show me their
cellphones. The refrain is the same, even from the
young men who hover standing at the back: "We don't
want to fight again. We Kurds want Europe to accept
Turkey. We feel deep in ourselves Asian, but now we
want to be European."

But how can modern Europe swallow all this? The
poverty, the ignorance (girls are rarely educated out
here), and now the renewed boiling of war. This is not
the civilization of contemporary Europe, and probably
not even of ancient Mesopotamia. This is life almost,
if not quite, at its most elementary and unsparing.

The Turkish government is desperate to cement on Oct.
3 the agreement to begin negotiations for entry to the
European Union, but as one senior official told me,
Ankara "seems never to miss a chance to shoot itself
in the foot." This year Turkey has witnessed the
police beating up women demonstrators in Istanbul, the
indictment of Turkey's best-known novelist, Orhan
Pamuk, for writing that the Armenian accusations of
Turkish genocide in the days of the Ottoman Empire
need to be looked at openly and, most important, the
bureaucratic go-slow on implementing what was promised
to the Kurds - thus providing the kindling for a
renewal of the insurgency.

Some of Turkey's liberal voices are driven to wonder
what is really going on behind the scenes. Inur Cevik,
who was once a prime minister's senior aide and now
publishes the English-language newspaper The
Anatolian, is described by one senior European
ambassador as someone who "is pretty damned true." He
told me that he is convinced that parts of the army
are conniving with the PKK to restart the fighting in
order to derail the Turkish approach to Europe. But,
for all the ineptness of the Turkish government that
gives rise to such conspiracy theories, the likelihood
is that these are rogue elements.

Moreover, apart from the fact that the high command of
the Turkish Army is firmly pro-Europe, as their mentor
Ataturk would have expected them to be, the PKK itself
is also split on Europe, with some elements appearing
to realize that an anti-European stance is not popular
in this southeastern corner of Turkey.

Neither, for all its romantic allure, is the PKK's
occasional talk of a united Kurdistan. Kurds are
impressed with the degree of political and economic
autonomy that the Iraqi Kurds have won during the
recent negotiations on the Iraqi constitution, but
they are also aware that it is a precarious autonomy
and that the government of that province is still,
despite elections, essentially feudal, dominated by
two families.

Most of Turkey's Kurds want to be European and are
neither seriously tempted by the PKK or a united
Kurdistan. But Turkey still doesn't know how to bring
its Kurds up to the starting line. And in making this
grave mistake it is probably delaying the chances of
Turkey of entering the Europe Union as quickly as it
wants to.

Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune |
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Uwe Hayek.

--
To be controlled in our economic pursuits,
is to be controlled in everything -- F.A.Hayek.

Magna est veritas et praevalebit
(great is truth, and shall prevail)
-- Del Kennedy

Government is not the solution,
government is the problem.
-- Ronald Reagan.

Once a government is committed to the principle of
silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way
to go, and that is down the path of increasingly
repressive measures, until it becomes a source of
terror to all its citizens and creates a country where
everyone lives in fear.
-- Harry S Truman (1884 - 1972), August 8, 1950


Wie het kleine niet eert, valt op negers.
-- Karin Bloemen

Ik geloof niet meer in Evolutie !
-- Huize Hayek te Heist.