Muslims and Liberals

Philadelphia Inquirer
July 8, 1999

Turkey’s “trial of the century” ended June 29 with a death sentence for Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan, convicted of treason and murder.

Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit hopes the verdict “will be auspicious” for the Turks and Kurds. Nearly 37,000 have died in the 15-year conflict between the Turkish military and Ocalan’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which initially demanded an independent Kurdish state but later indicated it would settle for cultural rights in a “democratic” Turkey.

Ocalan’s sentence must to go through an appeals process and is subject to ratification by the Turkish parliament. Whatever his fate, Turkey appears to be heading for a new form of Kurdish challenge even harder to tackle than Ocalan’s ragtag guerrilla movement.

That challenge, strangely enough, is democracy.

Mizgin Sen, spokeswoman for the PKK’s political wing in Europe, among other Kurdish leaders, is urging Kurds to wage a “peaceful struggle” for their demands in the democratic tradition. Some of Ocalan’s lieutenants, including his brother, Osman, disagree with this stance and advocate the continuation of the “armed struggle.”

But if the Kurdish movement meanders into the democratic track, that would be Ocalan’s most important legacy to the Kurds. Throughout his trial, he reiterated his plea for a “democratic solution” to the Kurdish question. It was dismissed by many Turks as a weak man’s entreaty to save his life. But he has called for a “peaceful, democratic” approach to the Kurdish issue since 1993, and reiterated that call many times before his arrest.

I helped publish the last media interview Ocalan gave before Turkish commandos captured him in Kenya. There, he repeated this theme over and over, using variations of the words democratic 16 times and peaceful six.

Last summer and fall, underground Kurdish activists in Istanbul explained to me that the former Marxist Ocalan was following the footprints of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and South African leader Nelson Mandela, who found peaceful democratic struggle more effective than violence. In the Anatolian city of Konya, another Kurdish activist, a high school teacher, argued that “the ballot box may become our Trojan horse.”

Many Turks agree. Ocalan’s “hypocritical gibberish” about democracy, said an official at the Turkish Foreign Ministry in Ankara, is intended to “destroy the Kemalist republic.” The republic is founded on a state ideology called “Kemalism,” coined from the name of the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk. Ataturk wanted to mold Turkey’s multi-ethnic, Islamic society into a single-culture secular nation. Islamic laws were replaced by the Swiss civil code, religious schools were shut down, Islamic dress code and cultural symbols were banned from many public places, and all minorities were ordered “Turkified.”

The Kurds are a fifth of the Turkish population of 64 million. Half of them live in the country’s southeast. But the laws ban Kurdish-language publications and exclude Kurdish from school curriculums. Forming any organizations based on Kurdish ethnic identity is a criminal offense.

Ocalan’s prognosis that democracy could prove to be the Kurds’ ultimate weapon appeared to have been reflected in the April 18 elections. The Kurdish People’s Democracy Party swept local elections throughout the southeast, winning almost all mayoral seats. So far the military, under emergency laws, has held the Kurds at bay. It has banned one Kurdish political party after another, besides overthrowing governments, making constitutions, participating in government policy-making – usually citing the Kurdish or Islamist threat to the Kemalist state.

Pressures for democratic reforms are mounting from outside and inside Turkey. Turkey is eager to join the European Union, which has cited the abuses of Kurdish human rights and military intervention in Turkish politics as main reasons for its rejection of Ankara’s membership. Soon after Ocalan was handed the death sentence, EU foreign affairs commissioner Hans van der Borek and a German Foreign Ministry spokesman reiterated that position.

Inside Turkey, the clamor for ethnic and religious rights is rising with the expansion of the middle class, which includes many Kurds. Thus, the Kurdish challenge to the Kemalist state has outgrown Ocalan. In the coming months, Turkey will have to make a tough choice. Or it can move toward acceptance of the Kurds’ cultural and political autonomy, allowing a “reformation” of Kemalism. It can let its state ideology continue to hold democracy hostage and deepen Turkey’s isolation from the West.