Turkey: Fresh Hopes For A New Kurdish
Policy
24 November 2012By Amir Taheri
In politics, every move can produce unintended
consequences that could be far more important than any
initial objectives. This is what may be happening in
Turkey where a group of Kurdish political prisoners
are ending a 68-day hunger strike in exchange for
concessions from Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan's
government.
Started by a handful of prisoners, the strike quickly
developed into a cause celebre attracting support not
only from ethnic Kurds but also within broader Turkish
public opinion. Some public figures joined the strike
and many others, including opposition leader Kemal
Kilicdaroglu, expressed support and sympathy.
Erdogan's critics on the radical right claim that he
has been forced to end the crisis from a position of
weakness.
His critics on the left accuse him of having prolonged
the crisis solely to flatter his own macho image.
Turkish media are full of "who won, who lost"
speculation.
But what if this particular political stand off went
beyond the "who won, who lost" cliché?
Is it not possible that Turkish democracy might be the
winner in a game that has no losers?
It has taken Turkish democracy decades to develop a
credible mechanism for resolving political conflicts
through compromise rather than the use of violence and
counter-violence.
In its first decade, Turkish democracy hardly merited
the label, if only because a one-party system was in
place. In the second decade, a one-and-a-half party
system emerged in which one party governed while the
other made occasional noises in opposition. In the
third decade, a multi-party system was more or less
accepted with the proviso that ideological uniformity
be maintained. The armed forced acted as guarantors of
that uniformity, staging coups whenever they thought a
governing party was stepping out of line.
It was not until it was in its sixth decade that
Turkish democracy also accepted ideology, enabling the
crypto-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) to
form the government. However, AKP continued the
authoritarian tradition by trying to keep diversity
within strict limits while surreptitiously purging the
state from elements that did not share its ideology.
Nowhere has AKP's campaign against diversity been more
consistent than against the Kurds who account for at
least a sixth of the population.
To be sure, AKP's Kurdish policy has not been as
repressive as that of its predecessors. This is partly
because the party owes much of its electoral success
to support from the predominantly Kurdish areas of
southeastern Anatolia. And, yet, AKP has not been able
to shed the Pavlovian reflex of using force to deal
with the tougher aspects of the Kurdish issue. For a
decade it has ignored repeated appeals by the
imprisoned Abdullah Ocalan, the historic leader of the
Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), to initiate a process
of negotiations to disentangle this Gordian knot of
Turkish politics.
Erdogan's friends claim that Ocalan, an ageing
has-been, may well be fishing for personal relevance.
If that is, indeed, the case, one might wonder what is
the use of keeping an old and sick man in jail for
much longer?
Though some participants in this complex game of
brinkmanship may be adepts of the Machiavellian school
of politics, a number of points are clear.
First, there is ample evidence that a majority of
Turkey's Kurdish community do not want secession. Nor
to they share the PKK's anachronistic dream of
Proletarian Dictatorship. Many Kurds, perhaps even a
majority, who would never vote for PKK, are, at the
same time, not ready to endorse the policy of iron
fist in their regard. This is not unusual. A majority
of Corsicans in France reject the secessionist groups
but do not agree with the policy of crushing them by
force. This is also the case in Spain where a majority
of ethnic Basques protect the secessionists while
never voting for them.
Next, it must be clear that PKK's strategy of armed
struggle has failed. It has achieved nothing but
decades of war that have claimed 50,000 lives. That
strategy has also discouraged economic development in
Kurdish-majority parts of Turkey, making them the
poorest in the country that has enjoyed a dramatic
transformation in the past decade.
Third, the Turkish government's iron fist strategy has
also failed. The PKK and its allies among professional
bandits have shown their ability to continue a low
intensity war for as long as imaginable.
Intermittently backed by mischief-making neighbours
such as Syria and Iran, the PKK could pursue its
deadly business without great difficulty.
Prime Minister Erdogan should seize this opportunity
to unveil a new strategy for dealing with the Kurdish
problem. The first step in that direction is to accept
that such a problem exists.
Next, he should embark on a pedagogic campaign to
garner popular support for the new strategy.
He should tell his people that Turkish democracy is
now strong enough to regard diversity as a source of
strength rather than weakness. The Kurds' desire to
speak Kurdish and read official documents in their
mother tongue is no threat to Turkey's integrity as a
united republic. Spain has not been harmed by the fact
that a chunk of its citizens speak Catalonian. Nor is
France's unity undermined by the availability of
official documents in the Breton dialect. The
existence of over 500 languages, not to mention scores
of different cultures, has not weakened the Indian
democracy over the past six decades.
Democracy is also about the acceptance of the other in
a framework of citizenship under the rule of law.
Because Turkey is a democracy, even angry Kurds have
no excuse for taking up arms against it. For the same
reason, the Turkish government has no excuse to
respond to the peaceful demands of its citizens by
force.
If used properly, this new opening could deal a blow
to the double myths of revolutionary violence and
state-sponsored repression. And that could be good
news for the whole region.
Amir Taheri was born in Ahvaz, southwest Iran,
and educated in Tehran, London and Paris. He was
Executive Editor-in-Chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran
(1972-79). In 1980-84, he was Middle East Editor for
the Sunday Times. In 1984-92, he served as member of
the Executive Board of the International Press
Institute (IPI). Between 1980 and 2004, he was a
contributor to the International Herald Tribune. He
has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York
Post, the New York Times, the London Times, the French
magazine Politique Internationale, and the German
weekly Focus. Between 1989 and 2005, he was editorial
writer for the German daily Die Welt. Taheri has
published 11 books, some of which have been translated
into 20 languages. He has been a columnist for Asharq
Alawsat since 1987. Taheri's latest book "The Persian
Night" is published by Encounter Books in London and
New York.
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