Surprise! Turkey is nice to Kurds

[kurds at gn.apc.org]

This article is imported from mideast.general where it was posted
by igc:lgsax  mideast.general 10:04 pm  Feb 28, 1991

It was originally posted 4:57 pm  Feb 24, 1991 by cc433336 in
cdp:soc.culture.greek

* ---------- "TURKEY: A CHANCE TO BE NICE" ---------- 
             From our Turkey correspondent

The following article appeared in the 9 February 1991 issue of
The Economist. I thought you might find it interesting.


The fog of war can be used to distract as well as to obscure. 
The Soviet Union has found in the world's obsession with the Gulf
an opportunity to get tough with its fractious republics. Turkey
too is learning to use external diversions to deal with internal
controversies.  The difference is that Turkey is not cracking
down, but looseing up. The government has decided that now is the
time to try to free itself from a swathe of objectionable and
embarrassing legislation.

Up to now, it has been an offense in Turkey to mumble in a tongue
other than "the official, primary languages of countries
recognised by Turkey".  The intention of this measure, passed
when Turkey was emerging from martial law in 1983, was not to
encourage police raids on classes in Esperanto, or to stop Gaelic
recitations at some local ceilidh; it was to prevent Turkey's
Kurds from expressing a separate cultural and ultimately
political identity.

>From now on Turkey's Kurds are to be allowed at least a private
voice. There will still be no place for Kurdish in public
meetings, schools, or even the written page. But people will no
longer be committing a crime when they speak Kurdish at home,
sing in Kurdish at weddings or listen to Kurdish music cassettes
in their cars.

"it is a warm gesture to Turkey's Kurds," says Nurettin Yilmaz, a
deputy from the ruling Motherland Party and himself an
unintimidated Kurdish speaker. Others believe that the reform was
the least Turkey had to do if it were to present itself as a
credible guarantor of a future Iraqi federation.  Even Saddam
Hussein, who tested his chemical weapons on the Kurds of northern
Iraq, allows Kurdish universities, television and printing
presses.

The Turkish government has, in addition, promised to do something
about Articles 141 and 142 of the country's penal code --
regarded be democrats in Turkey with as much enthusiasm as East
Germans once summoned up for the Berlin Wall. Contemporary with
the criminal laws of fascist Italy, the articles have been used
to prosecute those who propagate class-based ideologies. 

Human-rights activists maintain that the laws are used to
interrogate, detain and occasionally sentence people guilty of
"crimes" of thought and conscience. Although no one bothers to
arrest Stalinists any more, there is still no official registered
Turkish communist party.

The government is also to amend Article 163, which keeps religion
out of politics. But just as the Turkish right worries about
giving rein to communist and Kurdish enemies of the state, so
some of Turkey's armchair liberals are reluctant to give their
blessing to religious fundamentalists.  At the moment, however,
the left and the religious right are in temporary alliance in
their opposition to Turkey's support of the war.

That Turkey waited for the war before it acted is an indication
that the push for a more liberal society still requires hard
work. (To reassure hardline critics, the government is promising
a new law on anarchy and terror.) Turkey believes that, when the
war is over, it will by virtue of its democracy be the one
credible and stable power in the region. Yet it is still unsure
whether it has confidence in the democratic instincts of its
people. That hardly convinces others to be more trusting.

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               Constantinos A. Caroutas
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