Muslims and Liberals

San Francisco Chronicle
July 6, 1999

TURKEY’S “trial of the century” ended last Tuesday with a death sentence for Abdullah Ocalan, who was charged with treason. He had been fighting for the cultural rights and political autonomy of 12 million Turkish Kurds, and was captured in Kenya by Turkish commandos on a U.S. intelligence tip.

Nearly 37,000 people have died in the 15-year conflict between the Turkish military and Ocalan’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas. The military has destroyed 3,000 Kurdish villages it suspected of being PKK hideouts, and uprooted about 3 million Kurds, three times the number of Kosovar Albanians expelled by the Serbs. The Turkish Kurds have lived in their homelands in Turkey’s southeast for more than 1,000 years, and have been resisting extermination of their culture.

Ocalan’s sentence is subject to ratification by the Turkish parliament, which is filled with anti-PKK Turkish nationalists.

But on Wednesday, Turkish Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk made an intriguing announcement: Because Ocalan has regretted his “crimes,” he could benefit from a plan to show leniency to repentant terrorists.

At his trial, Ocalan did apologize for the murders committed by his guerrillas. He also pleaded for his life, embarrassing many of his followers. But he stressed the need for “reconciliation” between Kurds and Turks in a democratic environment.

The justice minister’s statement sounds intriguing because, from the Turkish government’s view, Ocalan’s call for a “peaceful, democratic” reconciliation since 1993 was only to irritate Ankara. He was “making noises . . . for Western consumption,” a Turkish diplomat in Washington said.

Last fall, however, underground Kurdish activists told me that Ocalan was following in the footsteps of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and South African leader Nelson Mandela; those who had found peaceful struggle more effective than violence. And a Kurdish schoolteacher explained that the Kurds “can get with ballots what we probably can’t get with bullets. The ballot box may become our Trojan horse.”

Turkey’s Kurdish tragedy stems from its state ideology, called “Kemalism” after its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk wanted to mold his multiethnic, Islamic society into a homogeneous secular nation. He replaced Islamic laws and schools with secular versions. He banned Kurdish- language publications and excluded Kurdish from school curricula. Public assertion of Kurdish identity became a crime.

The military is the self-appointed guardian of Kemalism. It has staged three coups, had opposition parties banned, kept the southeast under emergency rule and brutalized people — all in the name of preserving the state’s unitary, secular character. Many Turks (and all Kurds) are wary of the military. The Turkish economy is growing fast, expanding a politically conscious middle class. Part of this class are the Kurds who have begun to assert their ethnic identity. In Istanbul, they trash the PKK before foreigners in the daytime, but gather at night to pore over PKK bulletins and gripe about Turkish “colonialism.”

Abuses of Kurdish human rights have nearly ostracized Turkey from Europe, Turkey’s largest trading partner. The European Union has said it would not consider Turkey’s application for membership until it stopped repressing the Kurds. With Ocalan’s death sentence, EU statesmen have also warned Turkey against executing him.

The Turkish state ideology not only justifies ethnic repression, but is holding democracy hostage and deepening Turkey’s isolation from the West. The alternative is to move toward conceding the Kurds’ cultural rights and perhaps political autonomy so that the 65 million Turkish citizens can also enjoy full democracy. Kosovo seems to have made the latter option more compelling than ever. After all, the dust has yet to settle from the war in which Turkey joined its NATO allies to stop the persecution of an ethnic group one-sixth the size of its Kurdish population. Perhaps the Turkish justice minister’s statement had a word for the Kurds from the Kosovar Albanians?