A Land Apart

Until recently, the state officially denied the existence of the Kurds as a separate ethnic group, identifying them euphemistically as “mountain Turks.” It banned the recording and performance of Kurdish-language songs until 1991, and between 1983 and 1991 even made it illegal to speak Kurdish in public. Elected officials in the southeast are still prosecuted for slipping Kurdish into the performance of their public duties.

Reforms introduced as part of the EU accession process have led to modest progress in recent years: for the first time, some schools are permitted to teach Kurdish, and the prohibition against Kurdish-language radio and television broadcasts was lifted in 2002. But the state still zealously monitors pro-Kurdish media such as Gündem and blocks access to popular websites, notably YouTube and ones using the blogging platform Wordpress.

The idealization of Atatürk, however, and the violence and censorship it justifies, fly in the face of the pragmatism he preached. “We do not consider our principles as dogmas contained in books said to come from heaven,” he once told the National Assembly. He feared the fanaticism inspired not only by religion, but by politics.

One could sense, in the wake of the pkk ambush, something more existential at stake than just the quarrel between Turks and Kurds. Militarily, the fight had mostly devolved into a low-grade regional conflict since the capture of pkk kingpin Abdullah Öcalan in 1999. Rather, the outrage on the street reflected deep-seated uncertainty about Turkey’s sense of itself and how it interacts with a globalizing world.

In May, just prior to the escalation of the pkk conflict, the country had emerged from a polarizing political crisis. The governing Justice and Development Party (akp), an organization with Islamic roots, had put forward Abdullah Gül, a former foreign minister, as its presidential candidate, prompting Turkey’s military leadership — enshrined in the constitution as the protector of the state’s secular character, and the instigator of four coups since 1960 — to contest Gül’s selection. The brass criticized him for comments he had made in the early 1990s questioning official secularism, and more symbolically for the fact that his wife wears the hijab. A constitutional court blocked Gül’s appointment, prompting new elections in July, but these returned the akp with an even larger majority, and increased the party’s share of the popular vote from 34 to 46 percent. The military boycotted Gül’s swearing-in.

Despite the akp’s Islamist bent, the party has proven itself to be the most adept and progressive manager of Turkey’s affairs in decades — a moderate, broad-based organization whose policies more closely resemble those of the centre-right Christian Democrats in Europe than Hamas or Hezbollah, and that draws support from across the political and ethnic spectrums. The akp has successfully wrestled with the chronic inflation that plagued the economy, dramatically increased foreign investment, and implemented the strongest steps yet to fight corruption in the public and private sectors. It also stepped up accession talks with the European Union and made substantive overtures to the country’s Kurdish population. In the symbolic debate over the hijab, meanwhile, it positioned itself as a defender of individual freedoms, overturning the law that prohibited women from wearing head scarves on university campuses.

Although Kemalists accuse the akp of secretly harbouring a radical Islamist agenda, the only evidence of this has been the implementation of dry zones in a few conservative neighbourhoods by local party officials, and a quickly rescinded attempt to criminalize adultery nationwide. Nonetheless, secular nationalists have gone to absurd extremes in their efforts to discredit the akp. A quartet of bestselling exposés last year asserted that the party’s leaders were in fact Zionist Mossad agents. More recently, after a statue of Atatürk astride a horse was vandalized in Denizli, the town’s mayor appeared at a press conference, holding up a photograph of the damaged statue. “As you see, the penis of the horse Atatürk sits on has been broken,” he said. “We think akp cadres have broken the penis.”

The pkk attacks, however, united the two sides. Wounded by its recent loss of face, the military saw an opportunity to reassert itself, while the akp had to demonstrate that it could handle a terrorist threat. The rest of the world, though, and particularly the United States and Europe, urged Turkey to proceed carefully. The Americans, who had reason to fear that a military incursion into northern Iraq would destabilize that country’s most secure region, agreed to provide intelligence about pkk positions there. But the perceived lack of support from Europe was more aggravating, and it fed into Turks’ frustration with the EU accession process. Leaders such as France’s Nicolas Sarkozy had already made alienating comments, while other officials had expressed fears that if Turkey were granted full membership it would become the second-largest nation in the EU after Germany, with 17 percent of the assembly’s vote. The West’s pressuring of Turkey to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, to improve treatment of its Kurdish citizens, and to back off from the dispute over Cyprus were also irksome. Turks have yet to work out these issues for themselves.

Over 70 percent of Turks once supported the bid for EU membership, but recent surveys indicate that fewer than half are still in favour. Proponents of EU membership, such as Sedat Laçiner, director of the Ankara-based International Strategic Research Organization, have grown discouraged by the EU’s inclination to move the goalposts for admission, and to undercut internal support for accession with meddlesome and untimely criticism. “The EU so crudely pressures and humiliates Turkey that the Turkish politicians cannot defend their pro-EU stances, and the non-democratic forces are emboldened,” he wrote in an op-ed column in the autumn of 2006.

Such critiques, Laçiner argued, undermine Turkey’s potential influence as a moderator between Islam and the West. For instance, the country’s most popular Islamic movement, Gülen, is expanding into such places as Nigeria, Indonesia, and Pakistan, where it serves as a moderate and modern counterpoint to extremist groups. “Turkey’s participation could have proved that the West is not solely a Christian Club and that the West could have genuine cooperation with the Muslim world,” he wrote. Instead, the perceived double standard Turkey faces has become a tool for radical Islamists and secular nationalists alike, each arguing that Europe will never deal with Muslims and Turks as equals.

A s yet another demonstration-filled day got under way in the streets below, an odd celebration was taking place in Gündem’s office. One of the paper’s younger reporters had just been convicted of “denigrating Turkishness,” thanks to a recent article he had written about Öcalan. “It was decided I will get one year in prison,” he told me. But everyone was smiles and laughter, as though this were merely another episode in an elaborate running joke. “Every day we publish a paper, they open another case against us.”

It was unlikely that the reporter would serve a day of his sentence; rather, he would seek refuge outside the country, as many do. Which is why it felt like a going-away party, or perhaps a rite of passage. Sezgin, however, wasn’t sharing in the good spirits. “I don’t wish anyone to go through what I went through,” he said.

Sezgin was seventeen years old when he was thrown in Diyarbakir prison, Turkey’s most notorious penitentiary. It was September 1980. The National Security Council had just dissolved the government in the hope of securing a country wracked by factional terrorism. In the aftermath of the coup, the army instituted a crackdown on Kurdish militants. The murder of two police officers in Diyarbakir spurred mass arrests that netted Sezgin as a suspect. On scant evidence, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Through the intervention of the EU, his sentence was commuted to twenty years.

Guards at Diyarbakir prison regularly asked new arrivals, “Do you want a room with television and shower or a regular room?” Sezgin soon learned that “shower” meant a hole in the ceiling that allowed sewage to pour constantly into the cell. To amuse themselves, guards sometimes ordered prisoners to roll around in it. This was the “television” part.

Sezgin estimates that about sixty of his fellow inmates died from hangings, hunger strikes, suicides, or fatal injuries due to torture. He wept as he recounted being ordered to clean an area where guards had stashed a friend’s dead body in the garbage for him to find. Survival, he said, was paramount. “The sense of belonging to my people gave me an aim, so that I wanted to live. They forced us to march to Turkish songs, put pictures of Atatürk in our cells. They try to make you a Turk, but you remain a Kurd.” During his sentence, Sezgin taught himself to read and write. He wrote a memoir of prison life, Hanging Nights, published pseudonymously, which eventually earned him some notoriety and launched his career as a journalist.

By the time he was released, in 1999, the struggle for Kurdish rights had changed. pkk leader Abdullah Öcalan had been captured and was trying to fashion himself, unconvincingly, as a Middle Eastern Nelson Mandela. The exodus of the Kurds from more than 3,000 villages during the fighting had transformed them from a predominantly rural to an urban people. Like many Kurdish activists from the 1970s and ’80s, Sezgin considered himself a Marxist and a separatist, but the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War shifted his ideology. “We were sad when the Soviet Union fell, because it was something we thought we were fighting for,” he said. “But then we all learned more about the kind of oppression the communist countries put on their people. Within such a society, it would have been no better for the Kurds.”

The pkk kept to its hard-line Marxism, but for moderate Kurds the ideological vacuum was filled by globalization, which they saw as an opportunity to build a more equitable society within Turkey while consolidating a pan-Kurdish identity beyond it. “As Kurds, we are happy to accept that borders should be less important,” Sezgin said. “We are living in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran. More open borders should make it easier for us to travel and visit our relatives, and to work. With technology, too, it should make it easier for us to discuss the issues that affect us. An open society is what many of us want.”

For a people often cited as the world’s largest ethnic group without a state of its own, scattered across four nations historically hostile to their interests, the notion of diminished borders still resounds. This is especially the case with EU accession, given that improvement of Kurdish civil rights is one of the conditions attached. As one former prime minister has commented, “Turkey’s road to the European Union goes through Diyarbakir.”



There were few signs on the city’s streets that it was a national holiday. A few perfunctory-looking flags flew on Diyarbakir’s office buildings and mosques, but the genteel morning bustle persisted as usual, oblivious to the Republic Day celebrations happening across the country, or the frequent thunder of jets taking off from a nearby military base — the primary staging point for reconnaissance and bombing missions into Iraq.