The San Francisco Chronicle Sunday,

[kurdeng at aps.nl]

Subject: The San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, September 24, 1995



                       TURKEY'S KURDISH CONUNDRUM
  TURKS AND KURDS HAVE LIVED IN PEACE FOR 900 YEARS, BUT 11 YEARS OF FIGHTING
 BETWEEN TURKISH SOLDIERS AND MILITANT KURDS MAKE SOME PEOPLE WONDER HOW LONG
                              THAT CAN LAST


Nicole Watts, Chronicle Foreign Service



Ankara

High on a dusty hill nudging the wall of the old Ankara castle is a
small shop piled from floor to ceiling with colorful patterned carpets
collected from such exotic locales as Azerbaijan, Dagestan,
Turkmenistan and the ancient Turkish cities of Van and Kayseri.

The Angora Bazar, as the shop is known, is run by two friendly men
with a firm grasp of the art of bargaining and a clear passion for
their trade. One of them, Muammer Uslu, is Turkish. The other, Ahmet
Burtur, is Kurdish.

Between customers, over cigarettes and tea, the pair's conversation
often turns to Turkey's ``Kurdish Problem,'' as the state's quest to
suppress Kurdish nationalism is commonly called.

The business partners emphasize that their different ethnic
backgrounds have never created personal problems between them.

``We're no different from each other,'' said Burtur, a tall man of 35
with dark eyes and a traditional bushy mustache.

Uslu, 47, nodded in agreement. ``Turks and Kurds intermarry. They have
the same traditions. We've been in this land together for 900 years.''


But how Turks and Kurds will manage to live even the next decade in
peace together is a problem Turkish society is finding increasingly
troublesome. The country's struggle to cope with rising Kurdish and
Turkish nationalism is proving a crucial test for its democracy,
straining as-yet mostly peaceful relations between ethnic groups and
raising gloomy comparisons with nearby Yugoslavia.

Longtime state dogma denying that the Kurds constituted a separate
ethnic group -- supported by a combination of outright repression and
education that downplayed ethnic differences -- has crumbled in the
face of 11 years of fighting between Turkish soldiers and the
Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), an outlawed militant group demanding
some form of Kurdish independence.

The conflict has cost the lives of about 20,000 guerrillas, soldiers
and civilians, according to government figures, and has hardened many
Turks against any acknowledgment of Kurdish rights.

About a quarter of Turkey's 60 million people are of Kurdish origin,
but Kurdish-language education and broadcasting are banned, and
promoters of Kurdish culture and folklore still risk being prosecuted
as separatist traitors.

There is no consensus even among Kurds themselves on what their legal
status should be within the Turkish state.

Many, like Burtur, view the PKK as nothing but a group of terrorists
and think English-language schools would be more useful than classes
taught in Kurdish.

An increasingly vocal segment of Kurdish society, however, insists
that Kurds need specially guaranteed minority rights. Their cause has
been championed by politicians like Mahmut Alinak, a 43- year-old
Kurdish member of parliament jailed last year for his outspoken
Kurdish sympathies.

``The Kurdish people want security,'' said Alinak. ``They don't want
to be treated as potential criminals. They want to be able to express
their identity, and their cultural rights should be defined by
legislation.''

Open discussion of things ``Kurdish'' is, in fact, tolerated in ways
unimaginable a decade ago, when the word ``Kurd'' was taboo and use of
the Kurdish language publicly banned. Today, Kurdish- language
cassettes boast their own legal section in mainstream music stores,
bookshops prominently display Kurdish grammars and political tracts,
and the ``Kurdish Problem'' is popular fodder for late- night TV talk
shows.

``Let's imagine there's an independent Kurdish state,'' said Uslu, who
talks to hundreds of people around the country in his search for
handmade carpets. ``What will happen to those 3 million Kurds living
in Istanbul? Will they be told to move?''

``I won't go,'' Burtur interrupted passionately, striding across the
small shop. ``I'm a Kurd, and I won't go.''

This vigorous new social debate, however, takes place in the shadow of
legal and constitutional restrictions that give the government
sweeping power to imprison those it considers a threat to much- touted
national unity.

Thousands of journalists, professors and political activists like
Alinak have been jailed for writing and talking about the Kurdish
issue.

Last month, Safyettin Tepe, a 27-year-old reporter for the pro-
Kurdish newspaper Yeni Politika, died in police custody. The police
claimed he hung himself, but his family says he was tortured. Tepe was
the cousin of Ferhat Tepe, another journalist who Kurdish activists
say was killed after being detained by police in the same town,
Bitlis, in 1993.

In the rugged Tunceli region, government ``special teams'' prowl
through mountain villages searching for PKK supporters and are often
less than discriminating about whom they attack, according to numerous
reports. There and in 12 other southeastern provinces, the military
rules with a nearly free hand, courtesy of an Emergency Rule Law
recently extended by Parliament.

All of this has created havoc with Turkey's relations with the West,
threatening to scuttle plans for a valued customs union with Europe
and jeopardizing foreign aid from the United States.

Turkey is a democracy in the sense that its leaders are legitimately
elected, but three military coups since 1960 and a long tradition of
an authoritarian state have allowed generals and justice-system
appointees to wield considerable influence, especially on sensitive
issues like the Kurds.

``There isn't any constitutional system based on human rights,'' said
Akin Birdal, chairman of the Ankara-based Human Rights Association.
``Such a situation cannot be called democratic.''

Many conservative politicians, especially those in Prime Minister
Tansu Ciller's True Path Party, equate granting Kurds more ethnic
freedoms with caving in to the PKK's demands.

Earlier this year, hard-liners turned back an effort to change Article
8 of the anti-terror law, which allows the state to prosecute writers
and political activists for ``propaganda crimes'' in the
military-dominated state security courts.

Amending the article would be ``tantamount to giving people the right
to march with PKK flags,'' thundered one conservative member of
Parliament.

Turkey's rulers are still haunted by the memory of the disintegration
of the Ottoman Empire, which first lost much of its once- vast
territory to a succession of nationalist movements and then barely
escaped further carving up by victorious foreign powers after World
War I. Turkish nationalism was a concept more or less invented in 1923
by Kemal Ataturk to bind the new country, and its myriad minorities,
together.

Today, many Turks continue to regard Kurds as ``first-class citizens''
who do not need special rights.

``In the eyes of non-Kurds, Kurds have never been considered a
different ethnic group,'' said Professor Metin Heper, chairman of the
political science department at Bilkent University in Ankara. His
views reflect the attitude of many conservatives in government.

``This wasn't part of a `policy of assimilation,' as some people say;
it was genuinely believed,'' Heper continued.

``In the Ottoman Empire, the difference was between Muslims and
non-Muslims. That was all that mattered. If you ask a Turk today if
his friends are Turkish or Kurdish, he won't know -- people just
haven't thought that way.

``Therefore, the government has been very reluctant to start drawing
these distinctions.''

Turkish officials insist that Kurds have open access to any position
of political power.

Hikmet Cetin, deputy prime minister until a few weeks ago, is Kurdish
although he has never drawn attention to the fact. Former President
Turgut Ozal was reputed to be half-Kurdish. About 100 deputies in the
450-member parliament are Kurdish.

But many Kurds -- and Turks -- challenge the government's assertion,
noting that Kurdish equality has only come with the price of total
cultural assimilation.

``People thought, looking at Hikmet Cetin and people like that, that
Kurds could rise to the nth level politically,'' said Cem Boyner, 39,
the charismatic leader of the New Democracy Movement.

``That's not the truth. There is not one person who could rise to an
important position while claiming . . . that he was a Kurd.''

Boyner is no radical. A rich businessman, he heads a movement that
offers a mainstream alternative to Turkey's long-entrenched political
parties -- but is particularly critical of the government's reluctance
to grant full Kurdish rights.

Ironically, while the PKK has successfully forced the Kurdish issue
onto the national agenda, it has also provided ample fuel for
arguments against granting more political freedom.

Said Boyner: ``If the PKK were not in the picture . . . there wouldn't
be so much awareness of Kurdishness. But the PKK is using violence,
and that's a big block against granting Kurdish rights.

``I can say thanks to the PKK, but it's been a very expensive
lesson.''

While the PKK's main target is soldiers, it also murders
schoolteachers, bombs tourist resorts and shoots the families of
suspected government sympathizers.

The loosely Marxist group, which the government claims has about 3,500
armed members operating on Turkish soil and another 4,000 in
neighboring Iraq and Syria, has capitalized on the grinding poverty
and an oppressive system of quasi-feudal land ownership in the arid,
predominantly Kurdish southeast to elicit support.

Local villagers have found themselves forced to take sides in a war
between young Kurdish guerrillas and the heavy-handed Turkish
military, a conflict that offers little room for moderates.

A recently released study on the southeast commissioned by the
respected Turkish Chamber of Commerce reported that 35 percent of the
approximately 1,200 Kurds interviewed by researchers claimed they had
relatives with links to the PKK. About 42 percent favored some kind of
autonomy for the area, and 46 percent approved of the PKK's current
policies and tactics.

The state's refusal to grant full Kurdish rights and its emphasis on a
purely military solution to the Kurdish problem aid the PKK's cause by
radicalizing the population, critics say.

``The government's policies are increasing support for the PKK,'' said
Birdal. ``The rights of the Kurdish people have been denied, and the
government's politics of assimilation and oppression . . . make
polarization worse.''

So long as young Turkish conscripts come home in coffins and Kurds
head to western Turkey to compete for scarce economic resources, the
potential for inter- communal conflict builds, said prominent
historian Murat Belge. He cited several unreported incidents involving
armed clashes between different ethnic groups.

``The danger is rising that this will turn into a conflict between the
Turkish and Kurdish people,'' Belge said. ``There's a lot of hidden
tension.''

This summer the National Assembly, pressured both at home and abroad,
finally amended the country's military-era constitution in an effort
to make it more democratic and ease political tension. Professors and
unions may now associate with political parties, and the age
requirement for voting was dropped from 21 to 18.

Ciller spoke of a ``historical turning point for Turkey,'' but there
were complaints that the changes were too little, too late -- and did
not take any steps toward acknowledgment of Turkey's multiethnic
society.

``The amendments were ridiculous, they were so insignificant,''
complained Uslu, who wants to see an entirely new constitution.

Birdal agreed. ``The crisis that exists in Turkey today doesn't derive
from the age limit of voters. This constitution should include the
rights of all of Turkey's political, ethnic, cultural and religious
identities.''



---
 * Origin: APS Amsterdam (aps.nl), bbs +31-20-6842147 (16:31/2.0)