Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
*
Amberin Zaman is the Turkey correspondent for The Economist and writes a weekly column for the Turkish daily Taraf. The views
expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the German Marshall Fund of the United
States (GMF).
Analysis
ranged from brutal beatings and sodomy, to prolonged subtitles, thereby preventing live broadcasts. Meanwhile, a
bouts of sleep deprivation and prisoners being forced to eat swath of liberal-minded bureaucrats was dispatched to the
their own excrement. Not surprisingly, Diyarbakir prison mainly Kurdish regions. In a bid to reduce rampant illitera-
became a prime recruiting ground for the PKK. It was not cy, cash subsidies and free school textbooks were distributed
until April 1991, some eight years after the generals had to poor families along with wheat, flour, and coal. Police
transferred power back to the civilians, that the ban on spo- were instructed to treat citizens with respect. The common
ken Kurdish was eased. Yet its use in schools, government bond of Islam was emphasized over ethnicity. And a state-
offices, and prisons remains a criminal offense. funded program to repatriate displaced Kurdish villagers
was accelerated. These and other changes persuaded the
The “Kurdish reality” EU to start long-delayed membership talks with Turkey in
2004. A year later, Erdoğan became the first Turkish leader
As PKK violence spiraled in the 1990s, so too did state re- to acknowledge that the state had committed “mistakes” in
pression of the Kurds. By the parliament’s own reckoning, at its treatment of the Kurds. All of this bolstered the AKP’s
least 800,000 Kurdish civilians were forcibly evacuated from standing in the southeast, where it clobbered the pro-Kurd-
their villages, their homes razed and livestock slaughtered ish Democratic Society Party (DTP) in the 2007 parliamen-
during the army’s scorched earth campaign against the PKK. tary elections in many of its strongholds.
Many migrated to Western cities, such as Istanbul and Izmir,
where a new generation of angry, jobless Kurdish youths The PKK strikes back
provided fresh cadres for the PKK. Meanwhile, the power
vacuum in northern Iraq resulting from Saddam Hussein’s Unnerved by its receding influence, the PKK ended its five-
loss of control over the breakaway Kurdish region during the year truce declared in 1999, agreed to by Ocalan who was
1991 Gulf War allowed the PKK to establish strategic bases desperate to elude the death sentence he was handed by a
there. It used these to launch increasingly effective attacks Turkish court. (Capital punishment has subsequently been
against Turkish military outposts across the border. Turkey’s taken off the books in line with EU demands). If the PKK’s
failure to stamp out the insurgency despite the capture of the calculation was to draw the army back into the fight and to
PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999 reinforced the grow- provoke the government—already fearful of a nationalist
ing realization among political and army leaders alike that backlash—into abandoning its reforms, the gamble appar-
military tactics were not enough to defeat the PKK. Suc- ently worked. A string of bloody PKK attacks that killed
cessive Turkish prime ministers began talking of a “Kurdish scores of Turkish soldiers cowed the government into ac-
reality.” Yet, little was done to address the Kurds’ grievances. cepting the army’s clamors to resume cross-border attacks
An increasing number tuned into the PKK’s glitzy news against PKK targets in northern Iraq. These began (with the
channel Roj (the word for “Sun” in Kurdish) broadcast via agreement of the United States) in December 2007. Erdoğan
satellite from various European capitals which bombarded espoused increasingly hawkish language against the Kurds
them with a steady stream of propaganda about the glories and shunned DTP lawmakers. Meanwhile, court cases
of Ocalan and his Kalashnikov toting “freedom fighters.” against DTP officials for “crimes,” such as issuing invitation
cards in Kurdish, started and continue to pile up. The Con-
Enter the EU and the AKP stitutional Court is expected to deliver its verdict soon on a
closure case filed against the DTP on the thinly supported
The elevation of AKP to overwhelming majority in the charge that it is threatening the unity of the Turkish state.
2002 parliamentary elections gave fresh impetus to Turkey’s Not a single AKP official has uttered a peep even though
efforts to bolster its shaky democracy. Erdoğan pledged early their own party narrowly escaped closure on similarly spe-
on to make EU membership his party’s primary goal. This cious grounds last year. And in an alarming turn, reports
began a blizzard of reforms, among them laws that eased of unprovoked attacks against Kurdish civilians in Turkey’s
restrictions on publishing and broadcasting in the Kurdish western provinces are on the rise.
language. Kurdish language courses were permitted for the
first time. Private television channels were authorized to air
Kurdish programming, albeit for a maximum of four hours
per week and on the strict condition that it carries Turkish
2
Analysis