Possibility of rebellion seen for Turkey’s Kurds

Arrests and torture of Kurds by Turkish forces in Turkey are rising sharply, according to human-rights officials in this city, which has the largest Kurdish population. The 950 arrests on political charges in January and February of this year were twice the number for all of 2002, they say.
Kurdish refugees trying to return to villages in southeastern Turkey that they fled during the 1984-99 civil war are being blocked, and some have been killed in the attempt. Promised reforms by the Turkish government to allow Kurds to use their language in public life have not been implemented. If Turkish forces cross the border into Iraq and clash with armed Kurds there, according to politicians, shopkeepers, lawyers, and refugees interviewed over the past week, it will be the last straw. The clash would trigger another civil war in Turkey.
Turkey has moved thousands of its special forces into the Kurdish area on the Iraqi side of the border, and is insisting that Kurds there be disarmed after the US-Iraq dispute ends. Iraqi Kurds say they will resist Turkish interference in their affairs.
A Kurdish uprising and the massive Turkish government counterattack that would almost certainly follow would be a nightmare for US officials trying to plan the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the future governance of Iraq.
Civil war between two of America’s few allies against Iraq would unleash fighting across a border over which the United States hopes to move more than 60,000 troops and massive logistical support for its forces. With 12 million to 17 million Kurds among Turkey’s 72 million people, it also could threaten Turkey’s stability.
”If Turkey invades Iraq, the Kurds here will declare war,” said a young Kurdish produce merchant in a southeastern town, after requiring a reporter to swear solemnly to protect his identity. ”If they go to Iraq and shoot our brother Kurds, we will shoot them here.”
He said he required the oath because ”we cannot talk without being arrested or `disappeared.’ If we make mistakes, we will be shot.” Such fears are widespread among Kurds in Turkey.
Emin Sirin, a member of the ruling Justice and Development Party who is deputy chairman of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said the danger of reigniting Turkey’s civil war is one of the reasons he and others rebelled against their leadership and voted down the first proposal made to parliament that Turkey support the anticipated American attack on Iraq.
”It’s not our war, so let’s not go in,” said Sirin. He said he voted against the first proposal to support the United States ”quietly, as a personal matter,” but now says he ”will say `no’ forcefully, and lobby against” an expected second proposal, in part because ”if Turkey crosses that border and Kurds are killed, what happens next will be terrible.”
The first proposal was defeated March 1, in a stunning setback to American and Turkish backers of the attack. A new proposal is widely expected to be made within the week, but incoming Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who spoke briefly with two American reporters yesterday in a hallway of party headquarters, said ”It is not clear, just now” when his government will try again.
US officials have stated publicly their opposition to any Turkish presence in Iraqi Kurdistan if Turkey decides not to support the US effort against Hussein. But they have agreed that under the proposed US-Turkish cooperative operation, Turkish troops would be able to enter the area to help police the border region and keep the peace .
A source close to US-Turkish negotiations, who spoke on condition that he be identified only as a Western diplomat, said that the United States believes ”if we go in together, the US presence will be significant enough, and there will be enough coordination that clashes won’t happen.”
Kurds stress that their simmering rebellion is not caused by the possibility of Turkish participation in a US war on Iraq, but arises from widespread disappointment and anger that life has not improved for them in the four years since Kurdish militants declared a cease-fire in the civil war.
Sezgin Tanriklu, a founder of the Human Rights Foundation of Diyarbakir, said that after 15 years of civil war, Kurds ”were very hopeful this cease-fire would encourage Turkey to take necessary steps” to end the oppression of the Kurds. ”Unfortunately, Turkey didn’t take advantage of the cease-fire, and now the future looks dark.”
Despite talk of eliminating discrimination against Kurdish language and culture, Tanriklu and other human-rights activists said, 30 families in Hakkari are facing prosecution for trying to register Kurdish names for their children. And dozens of members of Hadep, a political party that advocates equal rights for Kurds, are being prosecuted for using the Kurdish language in public during last fall’s national elections.
Hundreds of thousands of Kurds who were driven from their villages during the civil war now crowd southeastern cities in abject poverty, bereft of the flocks and fields that once provided their livelihoods, and with no hope of finding jobs in a region where unemployment in many municipalities exceeds 50 percent.
Sometimes, in desperation, they try to return to their former villages, said Serday Talay, director of the Social and Cultural Cooperation Association for Migrants, an organization working to restore the more than 3,500 Kurdish villages destroyed in the war. Often, they find that nothing remains, and they have insufficient funds to rebuild from scratch.
Talay said some villages are occupied by so-called village guards – Kurds who collaborated with the Turks during the civil war, many of whom are still on the government payroll.
”These guards drive off, sometimes they even kill, people who try to return,” Talay said. The most notorious incident occurred Sept. 26 when four Kurds were killed and three wounded while attempting to move back to their village of Ugrak, near Diyarbakir. In addition, ”most of the villages were mined,” Talay said.
Under pressure from the European Union, which demanded that Turkey improve its human-rights situation if it wanted to be considered for EU membership, the parliament last summer passed reform bills that legalized the teaching of Kurdish language and a limited amount of Kurdish-language broadcasting.
”After the cease-fire declared by the PKK” – the armed Kurdish resistance – ”people found some hope, and there were some positive developments,” Talay said. ”People were ready to put aside the past and prepare for a brighter future. But with this talk of war with Iraq, we have felt the old environment coming back.”