Shortly after Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit announced to the nation, in a shaky voice, that Öcalan had been captured, I flew to the US to promote “Turkey Unveiled: A history of modern Turkey,” the book I co-wrote with Hugh Pope.Everywhere I went I was asked: Will Öcalan’s arrest put an end to the Kurdish conflict? My answer at the time was that I hoped the Turkish government would seize the opportunity to introduce measures aimed at winning over Turkey’s Kurdish community, bruised by years of brutal fighting. But I also said that I didn’t see many signs of such a political turnaround.
Eleven years later, it has become even clearer that an opportunity to address the Kurdish question once and for all was indeed squandered in 1999. After its leader’s arrest, the PKK declared a cease-fire that lasted several years. Unfortunately, Ankara interpreted these developments as a sign that the war had been won and the problem successfully solved. The underlying grievances of the Kurdish community were left unaddressed.
Today, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government is trying to make up for the shortsightedness of the past. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has acknowledged that serious mistakes were made in the state’s approach toward the Kurds.
But after a promising start, the peace initiative appears to have lost momentum, partly because the government was intimidated by the wave of nationalist outrage that followed the Habur incidents, but also because it is currently caught up in an arm-wrestling contest with the army following the latest revelations of coup attempts.
Meanwhile, negative developments on the judicial front, which began with the closure of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) in December, are undermining the government’s moves and laying the ground for further escalation.
Prime Minister Erdoğan recently issued invitations to 160 artists to debate the Kurdish initiative. But after one of the personalities on the guests list, the Kurdish singer Rojda, was arrested a few days ago and charged with “making propaganda for an illegal organization” for singing a Kurdish song at a Diyarbakir gathering, it is hard to see how an honest and open discussion can take place.
The editor of the Kurdish newspaper Azadiya Welat has also just been sentenced to 21 years in prison for writings deemed to promote terrorism. This prison term, incidentally, is more than twice the length of the punishment imposed on Oğun Samast, the hit man who killed Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink.
When you also take into account the arrests in December of elected Kurdish mayors accused of being members of an urban arm of the PKK, and the pre-emptive detention of dozens of Kurds ahead of this week’s anniversary, it is easy to see why the mood is souring.
Kurdish politicians bear their share of the blame for their confrontational approach. But the cause of peace may not have been best served by the exclusion from the political scene of moderates like Ahmet Türk.
Parliament is still in a tizz over a legal amendment that would prevent minors from being tried as adults under counterterrorism laws. Rather than locking them up for their uncivil behavior, it would be more useful to analyze the cause of these youngsters’ pent-up frustration.
Most of them were born in the mid-1990s at a time when hundreds of thousands of people were forced out of their villages, losing their dignity as well as their livelihoods. The consequences of this dislocation are still visible today in the urban shantytowns where these families settled. It is perhaps not surprising that teenagers brought up in this depressed environment should feel a sense of hopelessness.
The government had taken steps in the right direction, but it now urgently needs to restore hope that a political solution can still be reached through dialogue. This inevitably involves allowing views that may be unwelcome to be aired: After all, if there were no differences, there would be no conflict to end in the first place. Trying to silence these opinions by returning to the crackdowns of the past only means more time, and possibly more lives, wasted.
