Yet despite its growing regional prestige Turkey has yet to find a solution to its most daunting domestic problem: the Kurdish question. In fact, there are signs that dynamics are going from bad to worse on Turkey’s Kurdish front. Last month alone 35 Turkish soldiers were killed by Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants. Perhaps most troubling is the fact that the PKK is now determined to carry the war outside Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish Southeast.
There are already troubling signs of Kurdish-Turkish nationalist polarization in western Turkey. Only half of Turkey’s 15 million Kurds live in the Southeast of the country. The rest have migrated to the more prosperous cities like Adana, Mersin, İzmir and of course İstanbul. In fact, İstanbul is probably the largest Kurdish city in the world. It is estimated that 2 million out of the 10 million inhabitants of the city are of Kurdish origin.
Not surprisingly, Turkey’s far-right nationalist opposition party, the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), is on the rise in cities that receive the highest levels of Kurdish immigration in western Turkey. Such trends of Kurdish-Turkish polarization do not bode well for a country that increasingly sees itself a regional superpower in the Middle East. The Kurdish issue remains Turkey’s Achilles’ heel. It is therefore high time for a country that pursues a “zero-problems” policy with its neighbors to focus a little bit more on its major domestic vulnerability.
A basic question needs to be asked: What went wrong in the last 10 years on Turkey’s Kurdish front?
The arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1999 (after Turkey put serious military pressure on Syria) and EU-oriented democratic reforms between 1999 and 2004 helped create an era of relative calm in Turkey. In the last six years, however, violence has resumed and the PKK has once again emerged as the most popular movement in the eyes of Turkey’s Kurds. A number of reasons contributed to this recent deterioration. Perhaps the most important one is the fact that Kurdish nationalism is now out of the bottle. Cosmetic cultural reforms no longer satisfy Kurdish political and national aspirations for decentralization and autonomy. It is also clear that dynamics in northern Iraq, where a quasi-independent Kurdish state has emerged, set a precedent for Turkey’s own Kurds.
Finally Öcalan is still able to mobilize Kurdish masses. He is considered a national hero for millions of Kurdish youth whose political and national consciousness was formed during the PKK years. There is no point in denying that most Turkish Kurds have a sense of loyalty to Öcalan. They believe it is thanks to the war waged by the PKK that the Turkish military came to recognize the mere existence of Kurds in Turkey.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s 2009 “Kurdish opening,” aimed at improving Kurdish cultural rights and a partial amnesty for junior PKK militants, was too little too late. This opening led to nowhere and the process quickly unraveled due to Turkish public fury against released Kurdish rebels who received a hero’s welcome by fellow Kurds, the closure of the Kurdish nationalist party by the Turkish Constitutional Court and the arrest of dozens of elected Kurdish mayors. The only good news in the otherwise gloomy horizon is that Ankara has mended fences with Iraqi Kurds, whose leader, Massoud Barzani, recently visited Ankara. But only time will tell if such good relations with Iraqi Kurdistan can be maintained as domestic PKK violence escalates at home. In short, 87 years after its foundation the Turkish Republic is still struggling to find a peaceful solution to its Kurdish problem. And despite Ankara’s growing self-confidence and regional soft power, the PKK remains a daunting domestic challenge.
