Jumping through fire

    What about other people's holidays? Tonight is New Year's Eve but not exactly an occasion for a bottle of bubbly and a chorus of "Auld Lang Syne."

    It is Nevruz or Nowruz in Kurdish and Persian. The end of winter and start of spring seems a much more sensible time to mark the end of the old and the beginning of the new than January 1st. Yet there was nothing very sensible or even fun about the way Nevruz was celebrated in the southeast of Turkey in the early 1990s and it has become a day which journalists here anticipate with an excited sort of dread.

    In 1993, some 50 people were killed in Cizre, Şırnak, Nusaybin -- small towns where Turkey borders Syria and Iraq -- including women, children, a young newspaper photographer and a policeman lynched to death. The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) provided the provocation and the security forces jumped at the bait. Most fatalities occurred when the security forces used live rounds to disperse demonstrators proclaiming loyalty to the PKK's leader Abdullah Öcalan.

    I was, at the time, in the nearby town of Lice watching gangs of youths set fire to rubber tires as they dodged the  troops. The palls of black smoke and the foul smell of burning rubber invoked the grand guignol of a Devil's Night in Detroit or a Soweto necklace party of township vigilantes in the old South Africa. There was of course an element of defiance about these bonfire parties but they had had an additional and more innocent intent.

    Lighting a fire and then leaping through the flames is a New Year ritual, a way of breaking with the past, purifying the old and embarking on the future. It was strange to think this scene of small town desolation had its origins not as an act of desperation but as an ancient ceremony of hope.

    A lot has happened since then. An escalating PKK guerrilla war was stymied by an equally determined counter-insurrection. There is a world of difference between Abdullah Öcalan issuing orders from his Syrian and Lebanese hideouts and his lawyers sending strands of his hair to French chemists on the somewhat bizarre proposition that their long-imprisoned client has been subjected to heavy metal poisoning. Yet in one sense the conflict is far from over. Human Rights Watch, the New York based group, cites 378,335 villagers still displaced by the conflict and the number of lives disrupted by the conflict is certainly much higher.

    A common observation of editorials on this page is that Turkish nationalism is on the rise, a phenomenon explained in part by Ankara's sense of isolation. Europe and America are, in their different ways, proving unenthusiastic allies and events on the other side of the Iraqi border remain unpredictable. Far less commented upon is that this rise of nationalism risks being reflected, like the distorted image in a fairground mirror, by a rise in Kurdish nationalism and therefore reinforced.

    This is why, on this particular New Year's Eve, attention is again focused on how peacefully the current Nevruz celebrations will be conducted. One measure of progress in the southeast of Turkey is how successful a new generation of local politicians can be in taking responsibility for the well-being of the population. Another is how mature the central authorities will be in allowing this to happen.

    It is a theory recently endorsed by the unlikely figure of one of the architects of the 1980 military coup, General Kenan Evren, who described the further decentralization of administration in Turkey as inevitable. Ultra or ethnic nationalism is an attempt to escape those responsibilities -- a bit liking counting hairs (even Abduallah Öcalan's) rather than children in school or kilometers of roads paved.