Sunday, September 5, 2010
 
On Friday I saw Yigal Schleifer's post on Henri ("aspirate the H, please") Barkey's recent article in Foreign Policy on the Kurds, then read the article itself. Piggybacking the other Turkey blogs appears to have become a new habit for me. 



There were a number of things about Barkey's article that interested me, some of which form part of the Barkey passage quoted in Schleifer's post but about which Schleifer makes no comment.

Here's the first (not in Schleifer):

To its credit, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan decided to initiate in 2009 a "Kurdish opening," an attempt to acknowledge that the Kurdish problem is one that defies military solutions and requires political, cultural, and economic remedies. Unfortunately, it also mismanaged the effort: It did not prepare the public for the initiative, did not consult any Kurdish leaders, and was thoroughly ill-equipped to respond to the reaction of the Kurds and the Turkish public. Faced with a backlash and the prospect of impending elections, the AKP backtracked, and the opening was shut down in everything but name. Both the party and the prime minister have retreated behind the safety of a combative nationalist discourse that has only served to further aggravate tensions.

The reason why the AKP did not work with Kurdish leaders, I think, is that the AKP was attempting to use the "Kurdish initiative" as a means to win political support from Kurds away from the Kurdish political leadership. This is something I've discussed elsewhere.

Am I wrong?

I was also struck by Barkey's observation that "the atmosphere is thick with stories of daily humiliations, minor taunts, and discrimination in housing and employment."

When I was living in Turkey in the 1990s, many people I knew would argue against Kurdish nationalism in much more inclusive ways than is the case today. In the 1990s, (mainly ethnic) Turks would say things like "we've been together so long, we're brother nations" or would attribute Kurdish separatism to "kids" getting their "heads turned the wrong way." People weren't terribly open-minded about the issue, but they argued from a perspective of sorely tested liberal-minded patience (Kurds were "backward," what could you expect?).

Since I started returning to Turkey on a yearly basis in 2004, I've noticed much less reticence among people in Turkey to speak in derogatory, racist, and otherwise awful terms with respect to Kurds. Whereas in the 1990s people were perplexed, today they're angry.

And this is problematic, because, as Barkey points out, Kurds are everywhere in Turkey today, and Istanbul is home to the largest concentration of Kurds worldwide. In lots of places around the southern Marmara region, for example, on the far west of the country, attacks on Kurds and fights between ethnic Kurds and non-Kurds are taking place on a level that, I imagine, is far higher than it was in the 90s. At any rate, it sure seems that way.

So, if these communities are mixed to this degree, something has got to be worked out, right? What good is it to the Kurds of Istanbul if a geographic approach focusing on the southeast is introduced?

But the Turkish state and Turks are going to have to at least start seeing things from the perspective of Kurds—even if not agreeing with them—to get to this point.

But anyway, back to Yigal effendi....

Schliefer quotes three paragraphs immediately following the one I pasted above, and I also found these paragraphs interesting. Here's the first:

The end of the Kurdish opening has also served to consolidate Kurdish attitudes toward the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), the primary legal Kurdish political organization. The BDP has close ties to the PKK and increasingly sees itself as the Turkish equivalent of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army.

Is this true? Does the BDP really see itself this way? Is this something that everybody involved in Kurdish politics in Turkey thinks? 

Here's the second paragraph:

In the absence of political progress with the government, the BDP and Kurds in general are also beginning to put together the rudimentary institutional structures of self-governance in the southeastern provinces. The prosecution's 7,500-page indictment against members of the BDP, largely resting on conjecture and unsubstantiated allegations, nevertheless manages to sketch the contours of a parallel self-governance structure the Kurds have been attempting to put into place — independent of Ankara.

This was something I hadn't heard of, but then found some articles (here, here, and here) on it—I guess I missed the news cycle.

But is this declaration in favor of "self-governance" really so sinister? After all, the Turkish government was undertaking a "Kurdish initiative." Why shouldn't the de-evolution of administrative power not be part of the conversation? Isn't finding a way to climb back, slowly, from the statism of early Kemalism without tearing everything apart the goal (well, lets say one of them) of most of the folks involved in making decisions these days?

Here's another paragraph quoted by Schleifer: 

For most activist Kurds, the PKK's armed insurrection is of secondary importance. The PKK, and especially its imprisoned leader Ocalan, is a symbolic force that they admire for raising the Kurdish issue to the forefront of Turkish politics. "Without the PKK, no one would be talking of Kurdish rights today," goes the refrain. At least in the southeastern provinces, Kurds now have an important advantage: control of the municipalities. This provides them with organizational capabilities to deepen their political struggle for recognition. Psychologically, the Turkish state may have already lost these provinces.

This is something I've heard many times, too: without Ocalan and the PKK, nobody would have even heard of the Kurds.

Unfortunately, it's true: terror does get people's attention. Whether the response comes in the form of Bush's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq or Obama's Egypt address to the Muslim world, terrorism tends not to be ignored.

Which is a good reason, I think, for not waiting until people go to such extremes before we decide to stop ignoring them and the issues that concern them.