Kurds, Turks, and war

I spent my final two weeks in Turkey on a slow, directionless meander through the southeast. Turkey's poorest, least-developed, and most restive region is the home to the majority of its Kurdish population.

It's difficult to say just how many Kurds there are in Turkey; even the censuses here are political. I've met Turks who have said there are no more than two or three million Kurds, while some Kurds have claimed upwards of 30 million. No doubt, both these estimates are way off: a realistic number is probably around 15 million, or twenty percent of the the population.

There are other Kurds in Iraq, Syria, and Iran, but the majority live in Turkey. They speak four related but unintelligible languages which are written with two alphabets. Nationalism is a relatively new phenomenon among the Kurds--before 1923, they were united to the other Muslim peoples of the Ottoman empire by religion. Loyalty was to the clan and then to religious brothers--both those institutions declined following the establishment of the Republic in 1923.

A low-intensity war has plagued the southeast and Turkey as a whole since the mid-1970's, when the Kurdistan Worker's Party (or PKK) launched a campaign for an independent Kurdistan. As the name indicates, it was Marxist-Leninist, but it quickly gained the support of the Kurds, even those who disagreed with its godless ideology.

Today, the dream of an independent Kurdistan is largely dead. A few die-hards still hope for a Kurdish state made of up Turkish, Iraqi, Syrian, and Iranian territory, but most Kurds recognize that such a state would be desperately poor, isolated, and likely wracked by civil war. The new goals are simple: respect and recognition. (That's the official position of the PKK today, and is how most Kurds I spoke with feel as well.)

I spent last Friday night drinking tea and playing board games in a cafe in Batman, an obscure city in the middle of southeast Turkey. Like other cities in the region, its population has swelled during the last 20 years due to an influx of internal refugees: villagers have been forced to leave their homes by the constant fighting between the Turkish military and the PKK. In many cases, the PKK has targeted villages thought to be overly loyal to the Turkish government. However, the Turkish military's heavy-handed tactics have forced even more Kurds to flee to the cities.

Needless to say, I didn't win a single game in this smoke-filled tea house. I never do. I had met a group of guys around my age earlier that day, and had accompanied them to their favorite çayevi, where I quickly became a sensation. Person after person stopped by our table to say hello to me--they usually gave me a few game tips too. (Not that it helped.) As usual, people were surprised that I could speak decent Turkish, which prompted another question: ''Do you speak Kurdish?'' No, no Kurdish.

Around midnight, I got up to leave. As I shook hands on my way out the door, a solitary man called to me in English: ''Come here, I want to talk with you.'' So I walked over and sat down. ''You are a student?'' he asked. ''Studying what?'' History and politics, I said. I explained that I was in Turkey doing a project for my university. ''What do you know about the Kurds?'' he asked.

Truth is, I know a lot about the Kurds. But this is not a topic one discusses with strangers in Turkey: it is potentially dangerous to say the wrong thing to the wrong person, especially in the southeast. So I stalled, saying, ''not much.'' I figured I'd let him set the tone.

Turns out I was sitting in a cafe full of PKK sympathizers. Some of the men who gathered to talk with me--translation provided by my new friend--had lost brothers in the mountains. (And a few sisters. The PKK takes women as well.) To be sure, I asked if they supported the PKK.

''Of course,'' my friend said. ''We all do. They are the only option we have. No one would know about the Kurdish problem if it weren't for the PKK. I don't always like what they do, their tactics... but their struggle is ours too.''

''But who do you vote for?'' I asked. ''The DTP, of course. And before them, DHP. And before them, HDP. Before that, we voted DEP.'' He listed a few other parties--all banned today, except the DTP, which is fighting for its life in front of the Turkish supreme court right now. (Political parties based on ethnic identity are illegal in Turkey--this is usually why Kurdish parties are banned. The DTP case is based on allegations that the party has ''become a focal point of activities against the sovereignty of the state and indivisible unity of the country and the nation.'')

He had a point: the only consistent, reliable advocate for the Kurds has been the PKK. Kurdish political parties are inevitably banned, so no one puts that much trust in them. After all, they don't last long enough to accomplish much. The PKK has been around for 30 years, and doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

Banning Kurdish political parties has pushed moderate Kurds to the PKK because there are no other alternatives. I blame Kemalism--the national ideology of Turkey. No where is it more destructive than here.

One of the central premises of the Turkish national definition is that all Muslims living within the borders of the Republic are Turks. This is manifestly untrue. Millions of Kurds do not consider themselves Turkish, despite geographic location and a shared faith. Turkish is not their first language, and many do not even speak Turkish. (Almost all of the men do. They're more likely to learn it because they tend to contact ''Turkifying'' institutions--like the military--more than women do.)

Yet it simply cannot be that they are not Turkish. Recognizing that these people are not Turks would be tantamount to admitting that the Turkish national definition--as laid out by Atatürk--is not all-encompassing. At its heart, the Kurdish problem is a social one, but only a brave few Turks say as much. The media, government, and military all insist that it is a ''terrorist problem'': as if terror is motivated only by itself.

No, terror is motivated by a 75-year ban on the Kurdish language and 65 years of a denial of the Kurdish identity. Terror is motivated by an eternity of underinvestment and an unaddressed history of feudalism. Terror is motivated by 30 years of aggressive, counter-productive counter-insurgency tactics. Terror is motivated by villages razed by the army for ''non-cooperation.'' Terror is motivated by 85 years of marginalization, poverty, and bias.

While I don't want to endorse the PKK or its repugnant tactics, I can't entirely condemn the use of violence in this situation. Let my try to explain why.

The Turkish political world is a little box with six sides: one for each of Atatürk's principles. Those who pursue politics outside of that box--beyond the bounds of Kemalism--quickly find their parties banned and their leaders imprisoned. The Kurdish political ideology does not fit in that box, and thus, can't be discussed in parliament or civil society.

That does not make its goals illegitimate. Can we really blame the Kurds for turning to violence when the Turkish political establishment refuses to consider their demands? Attacks on civilians are beyond the pale, but military targets--well, that's war, not terror.

I'll return to the tea house in Batman: my friend said, perhaps correctly, that ''no one would know about the Kurdish problem if it weren't for the PKK.'' The high-profile violence of the 1980's and 1990's focused the world's attention on southeastern Turkey, and forced Turkey to make some political concessions. But now, the world knows of the Kurds, and some progress is being made.

Yet the PKK fights on. I question its motivations. Why does it still fight? The Turkish press has noted that every time political progress on the Kurdish issue is made, the PKK launches another attack--recently, they've killed dozens of soldiers along the Iraqi border. It seems that the PKK fears a political solution, as that would deny its raison d'etat and dry up its support. As my friend in Batman said, ''Happy people do not go to the mountains.''

Until quite recently, Turkish society and the ruling AK Party seemed to be growing more accepting of Kurdish demands, but a spate of attacks on Turkish soldiers appears to have reversed that trend. I suspect that this is exactly what the PKK was hoping for: war is in its interest. As Der Spiegel put it, ''The PKK loses when there is peace, and wins when there is war.'' Will the PKK let another group take its vanguard position?

Not without a fight: Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the PKK, became the leader of the Kurds because he killed all his rivals, not because he was best qualified. He's imprisoned for life on an isolated Turkish island, but is still the figurehead of the entire Kurdish movement. There's no way peace will ever come until a new Kurdish leader, untainted by the PKK, comes along. But the PKK won't willingly relinquish its leadership, and will continue to sabotage the peace process if it feels marginalized.

Likewise, I question just how committed the Turkish military is to finding a solution. The war in the southeast is used to justify massive military budgets and constant interference in government affairs. In short, the state of war allows the military to maintain its power. The generals lose their reason for political omnipotence if the war ends.

I don't think the day-to-day politics of the Turkish/Kurdish issue are that important: what matters are the slow, long-term shifts in public sentiment. This is not a problem that can be solved with a treaty. Although the PKK and the military are combatants, they're proxies for societies that define themselves based, in large part, on opposition to the each other. There will be no peace until Turks and Kurds begin to accept each other as equals and respect the other's culture and history.

Can Turks accept that Kurdish demands are not unreasonable? Can Kurds distance themselves from the PKK? And perhaps most importantly, can both sides find new leaders with a stake in peace, not war?