The announcement this week of the personality chosen by Turkey’s opposition parties to run for the office of the President of the Republic has taken the majority of the Turks by surprise.

Following tight and discrete negotiations, the Republic People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) have appointed the 70-year-old former Secretary General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Ehmeleddin Ihsanoglu, as their joint candidate for the country’s highest political office.

Ehmeleddin Ihsanoglu. Credit: www.kremlin.ru

With 56 Muslim member states, the OIC is the largest international organisation after the United Nations. Its headquarters are in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

For the first time in the Turkish republic’s history, the presidential elections – which are scheduled for 10 August 2014, with a second ballot two weeks later in the event of a tie – will be held by direct popular vote, instead of traditional election by members of parliament.

The nomination of Ihsanoglu has finally endowed the opposition with a plausible representative to the contest. However, members of the CHP and MHP have not yet expressed enthusiasm for the choice, because Ihsanoglu’s doctrine seems to be incompatible with the parties’ historical role in local politics.

The emergence of Ihsanoglu as a challenger to their own candidate is also bad news for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which had speculated that the march towards the presidential palace would have been uneventful.

The AKP had said a week earlier that the name of their nominee would be announced just before the July 3 deadline for candidate registrations. AKP’s leaders may now have to show their card earlier than they hoped.“Political forces should not put pressure on religion. Similarly, pressure should not be put on politics through religion” – Ehmeleddin Ihsanoglu [presidential candidate for Turkey’s opposition parties], commenting on Turkey’s status as a secular state

The general public and observers, local as well as international, were until the beginning of this week convinced that current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan would be the man to seek and obtain the presidential position, against a cosmetic competitor from the opposition, running for the sake of democratic practices. IPS has leaned that such certainty is now being called into question.

The CHP is the party founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who established the Turkish Republic. Its followers are generally referred to as ‘Kemalists’ and aspire to a socialist, pro-western society. Ataturk is widely revered to the present day as the father of the nation.

The MHP was founded in 1965 on an ultra-nationalist and pan-Turkish doctrine, which contemplates the unification of all Turkic ethnic groups in the Caucasus and the Middle East under Ankara’s rule. It has a record of anti-leftist and anti-Kurdish activities.

Both parties support the secular state, as designed by Ataturk and his successors, although in certain periods MHP has had radical Islamists amongst its members and MPs. Ultra-nationalism and activist Islam have often coexisted in the Turkish political universe.

This is where the controversy with Ihsanoglu’s appointment begins.

Ihsanoglu’s appointment in 2003 as Secretary-General of OIC was proposed and sponsored by Erdogan’s government.  In his ten-year tenure as the organisation’s head, he has cultivated an image of a discrete, but committed, Islamist whose vision of Turkey’s future as a secular society is unknown.

In reality, most CHP voters had never heard of Ihsanoglu until this week. Those who did believe he belongs to those among the AKP followers who would like to progressively erase Ataturk’s memory from public life.

Although his manners and interpersonal skills project him as a smooth transnational diplomat with a broad world-view, his persistent lobbying for a decade of U.S. and European governments to pass legislation that would limit freedom of expression by their respective citizens in issues relating to Muslim immigrants, on the grounds of fighting ‘Islamophobia’, has made an increasing number of CHP cadres reluctant to welcome his nomination.

In a meeting with CHP executives on June 18, the party’s former chairman, Deniz Baikal, expressed his reservations on the rationality of the decision, but asked them to support any presidential candidate that the current leadership of CHP would confirm.

In an attempt to reassure his critics, in an interview with the daily Cumhurriyet on June 18, Ihsanoglu said that “Ataturk has a special place in the hearts of the Turkish nation” but that he “should neither be consecrated nor rejected.”

Commenting on Turkey’s status as a secular state, he stressed that “political forces should not put pressure on religion. Similarly, pressure should not be put on politics through religion.”

In past presidential elections, the CHP and the MHP have always presented separate candidates. In the municipal elections of March 2014 they changed their electoral strategy and presented a single candidate in Ankara. The experiment was positive, with their common representative losing the contest by only a few dozen votes.

This strategy may be more rewarding in the presidential elections. Taking as a basis the national results of March, an AKP candidate is likely to receive 43 to 44 percent of the total votes in the first round, while the CHP/MHP joint ticket is likely to secure 44 to 45 percent. The winner, however, needs 50 percent plus one vote in order to claim victory.

With the two pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy (BDP) and People’s Democratic (HDP) parties also planning to present a common candidate, it is unlikely that a winner will be proclaimed after the first round. The BDP and the HDP received an aggregate of 6.28 percent of the votes in the March elections. A merger of the two formations is likely to occur later in June.

This factor confers upon the pro-Kurdish parties the power of king-makers in the second round of the elections. The AKP has understood this for some time and has tried to lure Kurdish voters through a process of political resolution of the 30-year-long armed conflict between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the state. No tangible results have been obtained so far, however.

The BDP and the HDP are aware of their bargaining weight ahead of the elections and will try to extract a maximum of concessions from AKP and CHP/MHP. These include, but are not limited to civic freedoms for the Kurds, equal citizen rights with those enjoyed by the Turks, autonomous-region status for the south east of Turkey, amnesty for PKK fighters who live in exile, and freeing PKK’s founder Abdullah Ocalan, who has been sentenced to life imprisonment and is kept in solitary confinement on Imrali island.

CHP and MHP leaders have already shown moderate support for the reconciliation process between PKK and the state, but they will have a hard time to persuade their respective members on Kurdish autonomy and Ocalan’s future status.

Still, the direction and eventual outcome of the August elections lies on one key factor only: who will be the AKP candidate?

If Erdogan puts his name forward, the game is over for all other aspirants to the throne, according to the most seasoned local analysts. The Prime Minister’s personality attracts followers by the millions, in spite of the flawed policies of his government and corruption allegations about his close entourage since December last year.

But Erdogan, who has so far not commented on Ihsanoglu’s nomination, seems to be prudently weighing all the implications of his candidacy. These are directly related to his political future and to the future of his party.

If he is elected president of his country, he will have to step down from the chair of AKP and also leave the Prime Minister’s job to someone else. Under the current Constitution, the Prime Minister is the head of the executive, while the president’s role is ceremonial.

Erdogan’s goal is to vest the presidency with full executive powers. This would require a new or revised Constitution, the process towards which will take time and face strong resistance from the other parties and even from certain MPs of AKP.

The possibility of a presidential, rather than parliamentary, regime is also likely to discourage other AKP leaders from accepting the role of prime minister, because it will consist of merely executing decisions made by Erdogan.

In the event that Erdogan announces his intention to run for president, the forthcoming elections will be no longer a contest between two men, but a vote for choosing between regime change and status quo.

Turkish media close to Hizmet, an Islamist movement formerly supporting AKP but critical of the party’s leadership since the end of 2013, have also expressed support for Ihsanoglu. The number of voters loyal to Hizmet is unknown, but estimates evaluate their influence to be 3-8 percent of the total. They come from the educated middle class, including judges and civil servants.

The CHP/MHP leadership is speculating on Erdogan’s participation. If the majority of citizens remain attached to the parliamentary regime and to the separation of powers, Ihsanoglu seems to have the right profile to represent them.

Moreover, he reassures the Islamist part of the electorate, he is not an immediate threat to the secularists, and he has the know-how and network of powerful personalities around the world to restore Turkey’s image as a balanced and neutral regional power.

While still the OIC Secretary-General, Ihsanoglu fell apart with Erdogan, with the latter and his inner circle in the government accusing the organisation as ‘incompetent’ and with a Turkish minister asking for Ihsanoglu’s resignation from the OIC.

The dispute was over OIC’s silence in respect to Egypt’s July 3, 2013 ‘revolution’ which removed the Muslim Brotherhood from power.

These abilities confirm Ihsanoglu as a °politically correct° future president for Washington and Riyadh, which have been increasingly concerned with Turkey’s recent foreign policy in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

Kurds in Diyarbakir: a generation lost in conflict. Credit: Brian Dell/Wikipedia

By Jacques N. Couvas
ANKARA, Jun 16 2014 (IPS)

Eighteen months after a ceasefire between the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Turkey’s security forces took effect, clouds of trouble are gathering in the country’s south-east.

In early June, a series of violent events in the area that surrounds the key Kurdish city of Diyarbarkir gave a wake-up call to a nation, which for a year and a half was being reluctantly persuaded that its 30-year-long inter-ethnic conflict was on its way to a durable settlement.

After two weeks of unrest in regional towns, initiated by PKK supporters, the death on June 7 of a demonstrator has revived resentment towards the state.

This is an unwelcome development for Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, which has been trying to convince the large Kurdish minority of the country that its ethnic identity will be officially recognised, and to which, consistent with international conventions and European Union (EU) law, human rights will be conferred.The Kurdish problem has been, and still is, the main concern of Turkish citizens, who are weary of the protracted conflict but are also resistant to independence, or even autonomy, of the ethnic Kurds.

The recent deployment of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to the zone that extends from eastern Syria to north-western Iraq now provides a clear warning that the status of the Kurds in Turkey needs urgent and consistent attention by Ankara.

On January 3, 2013, the Turkish government began a series of indirect contacts with PKK’s founder Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving a life imprisonment sentence for subversive activities that have so far cost the life of 40,000 Kurdish fighters, security forces and civilians.

Although behind bars in solitary confinement on an island off the coast of Istanbul since 1999, Ocalan has remained the de facto leader of PKK, an organisation that has been listed as a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.

In 2006, Ocalan entered into discrete talks with the Turkish authorities, promoting dialogue rather than violence from both sides. He also advocated an autonomous status for the Kurdish-majority populated region of Turkey’s south-east, instead of the creation of an independent state, which had been the aspiration of his movement since 1978.

But these talks went nowhere and in 2010 the dialogue stopped. PKK leaders in exile on the mounts that separate Turkey from northern Iraq resumed armed assaults against state security units. They demonstrated on a number of occasions that they had improved their warfare capabilities on a larger scale than in past operations.

The initiative in January 2013 to find a negotiated, rather than military, solution to the conflict therefore met the interests of the government and of the political branch of PKK. For the first time, ethnic Kurds who are elected members of the Turkish parliament were allowed to visit Ocalan and carry his views and recommendations back to Ankara.

The shuttling between Ankara and the island of Imrali, where Ocalan is guarded by more than 1,000 counter-terrorism troops, has resulted so far in 18 such exchanges. on April 25, 2013, the military arm of the PKK agreed to suspend harassment of the Turkish security forces and launched the withdrawal of armed PKK fighters from Turkish territory to the neighbouring Qandil mountains, which fall within the jurisdiction of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), an autonomous province of Iraq.

Prime Minister Erdogan seized the political opportunity to label the unofficial talks between the parties a ‘Peace Process’. The Kurdish problem has been, and still is, the main concern of Turkish citizens, who are weary of the protracted conflict but are also resistant to independence, or even autonomy, of the ethnic Kurds.

Similarly, the more nationalistic amongst the Kurds are suspicious of the government’s intentions, which they associate with mere quest for short-term political gain by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party ahead of the forthcoming presidential and legislative elections, in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

Although the ‘Peace Process’ has generated strong activity, through round table discussions, consultative committees, and the involvement of civil society and the media in public debate, there has been no substantive progress in addressing the true issues that are core to the Kurdish grievances.

But, since August last year, the PKK commanders in exile seem to have changed their stance. Disillusioned with the lack of tangible developments, they have resumed recruiting young Kurds who may constitute an enlarged fighting force if the vision of autonomy does not take flesh.

The events since the beginning of June are deemed to be part of the manifestation of this attitude.

Observers in the past two weeks have also begun questioning the actual status of the process, and the true motives of the parties.

It is obvious that the prospect of a peaceful solution of the Kurdish problem provides a strong card to a government before impending elections, in respect to both ethnic Kurds and Turks.

The concessions to be made and rights to be granted to the Kurdish community are, on the other hand, a double-edged sword. Opinion polls have in recent months shown that the opposed parties are rather firm in their positions. Changing the status of the Kurds by decree is unlikely to be acceptable to the majority of the Turks.

The resolution of the Kurdish problem can, therefore, only take root in a new Constitution, which should address the sensitive issues of minorities, equal citizenship and human rights.

To date, timid attempts to revise the 1980 Constitution, written under the auspices of military coup, have brought no fruits, mainly because they have approached the issue as a tinkering rather than as overhauling exercise.

A fundamentally new Charter, inspired by modern constitutional concepts, is unlikely to be attempted before the 2015 parliamentary elections. This time gap may have serious implications for the disposition and goodwill of ethnic Kurdish public opinion.

The increasingly assertive stance of KRG with respect to Baghdad’s authority, manifested a fortnight ago through oil exports via Turkey unauthorised by Iraq’s central government, and the occupation on June 12 by KRG soldiers of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, nominally within Baghdad’s jurisdiction but over which Iraq Kurds have territorial claims, may be flares fired across the bow of the Iraqi ship that mark the intention of KRG’s leadership to proceed with full independence in a not so distant future.

Signalling of such intention is likely to provide ammunition to the separatists in the neighbouring countries: Syria, Iran and Turkey, whose ethnically Kurdish inhabitants form a society of 30 to 35 million people. Turkish ethnic Kurds represent approximately one-third of this group.

KRG’s ambitions are currently enhanced by the occupation on June 10 of Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, by ISIS, a Sunni jihadist organisation affiliated until recently with Al Qaeda.

KRG has used ISIS’s aggression as a justification to annex Kirkuk, in order to spare it from jihadist rule. As the central Iraqi government is weak and its army in decomposition, it is unlikely that KRG will ever return Kirkuk to its former status.

According to experts in the fossil energy industry, the combined revenues from its own and Kirkuk’s oil production would endow KRG with enough financial resources to survive as an independent state. Political analysts in the region already speculate that in such a scenario, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel may eventually support the creation of a stand-alone Kurdistan, granting it legitimacy and status.

An outcome of this kind bears high probability that Turkish, Iranian and Syrian ethnic Kurds will be tempted to join their cousins of northern Iraq and get a taste of the prosperity that comes with petro-dollars, although KRG leaders will most likely temporarily dissuade such a rush to transnational independence movements in their region.

KRG needs Turkey at present, and may need Syria in the future, for its oil exports and economic viability.

A PKK soldier stands in front of a crowd gathered in the Qandil mountains. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Jacques N. Couvas
ANKARA, May 13 2013 (IPS)

The peaceful withdrawal from Turkey of combatants from the Kurdistan’s Workers Party (PKK) began last Wednesday but is already at risk of being compromised following a twin car bomb explosion on Saturday afternoon. The terrorist attack in Rayhanli in the Syrian border province of Hatay caused 46 civilian deaths and at least 155 injuries.

Authorities’ initial reaction indicated a high degree of confusion, bias and lack of genuine intelligence as to the perpetrators of the explosions. No groups have claimed responsibility yet, but two Turkish deputy prime ministers and several ministers were quick to point to the Syrian regime.

However, Turkish media has favoured the possibility that the attacks were the next in a series of hostilities between Syrian refugees, the local population and Turkish security forces since the beginning of the year.

The ministry of interior has tried to dismiss this explanation, which could exacerbate tensions in the province. However, the arrest of nine Turkish citizens Sunday afternoon reinforces the likelihood of a local conflict between refugees and Hatay residents.

Meanwhile, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Saturday night cautioned against jumping to conclusions. In a press statement, he implied that the incident may be linked with the PKK’s pulling out of Turkey.

“We have started a resolution process [of the PKK problem] in our country, and there are those who don’t accept this new era, or do not consider the air of freedom to be positive, who might have been involved in such [attacks],” Erdoğan said.

Erdoğan’s mind was on the “deep state”, various clandestine nationalist organisations allegedly sponsored by loyal followers of the doctrines of Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey.

An overview of Kurdish history

The Kurds, an Indo-European ethnic and linguistic group, have long inhabited what is now south and southeastern Turkey but never created an independent state. In the sixteen century, the Kurds formed an alliance with the Ottoman Empire, whose administrative documents referred to vilayet-i Kurdistan (state of Kurdistan), which was composed of small emirates.

For the next 500 years, the Kurds enjoyed autonomy in the Ottoman territories, as did other minorities, particularly religious ones. Most Kurds are Sunni, but many are Alevi, a Shia Muslim denomination.

But the creation of the Turkish Republic following World War I deprived the Kurds of such autonomy. They had been loyal to Ottoman rulers, with the exception of a revolt in the late 1890s over tax collection issues, but the new government in Ankara headed by Ataturk was not prepared to let ethnic identities flourish.

During Treaty of Lausanne negotiations in 1923 between Turkey and the Allies, victors of the war, the British insisted on including Kurds in the ethnic groups that the new state would protect. The Turks, in turn, made clear that they would only accept a religion-related definition of minorities, as it had been the practise in the Ottoman Empire.

Yet the Kurdish community supported the Turkish view. Recent academic research has claimed that this position was motivated by a fear that ethic minority recognition in the Treaty would give reclaim rights to the Armenians, who had been ousted from southeastern Turkey in 1915 by the Ottoman government with help from the Kurds.

In the end, three communities were recognised in Lausanne as minorities: Armenians, Greeks and Jews. The Kurds missed their chance.

Following the adoption of Turkey’s new constitution in 1924, the Kurdish community realised that their previous autonomy and rights had been abolished. The charter recognised one national identity and one language: Turkish. At the end of that year, the Kurds began resorting to armed resistance, with varying success for the next decade.

A sustained revolt began in January 1937, but the state put an end to it in 1938, occupying and destroying Dersim, an Alevi city in eastern Turkey. The clashes resulted in 40,000 deaths on both sides, according to British intelligence estimates.

Dersim’s surviving population was forced to relocate around the country. Renamed Tunceli, the city was virtually erased from the map and a long period of relative calm followed, until a military coup in 1980, when the junta revived absolute nationalism, persecuting ethnic and religious minorities.

The Kurdistan Worker’s Party

The PKK, formed in 1978 by Abdullah Ocalan, launched its guerrilla warfare against the state in 1984. Because the PKK has also assassinated civilians, particularly dissident Kurds and collaborators with security forces, Turkey and other countries consider it a terrorist organisation.

Ocalan was arrested in 1999 and sentenced to life imprisonment, although he was indirectly involved in a process to negotiate peace between the PKK and the state, even as hostilities between the two continued, with periodical ceasefires.

From his solitary confinement on the island of Imrali, in the Aegean Sea, Ocalan agreed to cooperate and ordered his troops to pull out of Turkey. The retrieval began on May 8, with the departure of 2,000 fighters. There are still an estimated 15,000 dispersed in Turkey, who will need to find safe passages to cross the border to Kurdish Northern Iraq.

Although half of ethnic Turks are favourable to the peace process, politicians doubt how effective it will ultimately be. “Cautious optimism is essential,” Mustafa Akyol, a prominent editorialist with Hurriyet daily and a historian, told IPS.

The deal with PKK was not negotiated with the government, and public opinion is fiercely against any granting of special rights to the Kurds. Recent opinion polls indicate that 93 percent of Turks consider PKK members to be criminals. And in the absence of an official agreement, the terms around the process are opaque.

Akyol described the PKK’s expectations as major changes including “recognition of the Kurdish identity in the future Constitution, rights going beyond recent minimal gestures, such as state-controlled radio and TV stations, amnesty for PKK combatants, and commitment for the creation of a Kurdish autonomous region over time”.

Ibrahim Anli, a director of the Turkish Journalists and Writers Foundation, meanwhile, told IPS, “The main concern of the Turkish establishment is still a strong fear of partition of the country.”

The Iraqi government is also concerned over PKK’s withdrawal, as these fighters will join autonomous Northern Iraq, which may seek independence, during troubled times between Baghdad and Iraqi Kurds. Iraqi Kurds and Turkish Kurds total 19.5 million, with another 9.5 million living in Iran and Syria.

Kurdish rebels in Turkey have released eight hostages after their jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan called for a prisoner exchange.

The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) freed the eight soldiers and civil servants on Wednesday as part of a peace process with the Turkish government that it hopes will lead to a ceasefire by August. The hostages were freed in Iraq and they were back in Turkey on Wednesday afternoon.

According to reports, Ocalan began secret talks with Turkey to end the 29-year conflict in October.

Al Jazeera’s Omar Al Saleh, reporting from Antakya in Turkey, said the deal to release of the hostages was considered a gesture of goodwill in a proposal made by Ocalan.

‘Ceasefire’

“Now this takes us to the more important step we could see by next week, this is according to Ocalan, we could see calling for the PKK to announce a ceasefire,” Al Saleh said.

The hostages met their families in Zakho, northern Iraq, and then entered Turkey from the border at Habur.

Al Saleh said Ocalan’s plan was for a ceasefire to begin in the next few months, up to the middle of August.

“Then the PKK will call on its fighters to leave the Turkish territory and withdraw and then lay down their weapons,” Al Saleh said.

Turkey has yet to announce what it has offered in return, but there has been speculation that it will make some changes to the Turkish constitution. These include recognition of the existence of the ethnic Kurds, which is one of the main demands by Kurds in Turkey.

The hostages have been named as Zihni Koc, Abdullah Sopceler, Kemal Ekinci, Nadir Ozgen, Kenan Erenoglu, Resat Cacan, Ramazan Basaran, Hadi Gizli.

The number of hostages held by the PKK have been disputed. Turkish media has reported numbers that vary from 10 to 20.

Delayed release

They had been kidnapped in various dates in Diyarbakir, Van, Mus, Bingol and Sirnak provinces in eastern and southeastern Turkey.

The release was expected to take place on Tuesday but was delayed because of “technical reasons”, according to the BDP.

A spokesman for the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), Cemal Coskun, told the pro-Kurdish Firat news agency that the BDP-led delegation had travelled to the northern Iraqi city of Arbil for the expected release.

“We hope the powers longing for peace and democracy will see the gesture and speed up the steps for peace,” he told Firat.

Representatives from the interior ministry and two non-governmental groups were also in Arbil for the release, which both sides say should be interpreted as a confidence-building measure in new efforts to end the 29-year-old Kurdish insurgency.

Leader’s call

The promised release follows a call the Kurdish leader Ocalan made from in prison in Turkey last month.

He said that both sides held prisoners and he hoped to see them “reach their families”.

Besir Atalay, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, said the initiative should be regarded as a gesture of goodwill in the ongoing process. But he ruled out speculation that the government made secret concessions for the release.

“There is big public support, expectation and hope,” Atalay told the state-run Anatolia news agency.

Peace talks resumed late last year between Ocalan and the Turkish state with the ultimate aim of ending the nearly three decades of violence that has claimed around 45,000 lives since the PKK took up arms against Ankara in 1984.

Ocalan has been in prison for 14 years for treason. He is expected to call on his outlawed PKK to abide by a ceasefire due to start on Mar. 21, the Kurdish New Year.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

There was a sigh of relief in Ankara as Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), on Sunday put an end to the 68-day hunger strike of 682 Kurdish prisoners and nine members of the Turkish Parliament.

The strike began on Sep. 12 among Kurds detained on terrorism charges, and quickly spread to 67 prisons around the country. In November, it was joined by MPs of the Peace and Development Party (BDP), whose constituency is in the ethnically Kurdish southeast of Turkey.

Ocalan’s decision has removed a thorn from the side of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government showed signs of division over the handling of the strike, at a time when Turkey is being criticised by the European Union for lack of progress in improving human rights in general, and those of minorities in particular.

The strikers were demanding the freedom to use their mother tongue in education and in judicial courts. They also wanted to end Ocalan’s solitary confinement.

Ocalan, 64, was sentenced in 1999 to life imprisonment for terrorism and is being held in isolation on Imrali Island, near Istanbul. He remains, however, the undisputed leader of the PKK, an autonomist movement he created in 1978, which has periodically resorted to armed rebellion since 1984. Clashes with the security forces have caused 40,000 deaths on both sides among civilians and combatants.

Although the PKK’s main objective is cultural autonomy for the Kurdish people, the state has always considered the movement as separatist, based on the interpretation of Turkey’s constitution, which forbids any threat to territorial integrity and imposes one language only, the Turkish. Ethnic Turks in their majority support this viewpoint, regardless of political affiliation, and are opposed to a Kurdish identity.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) promised certain cultural freedoms to the Kurds when it came to power in 2002. Under pressure by the nationalists and the military, and considering public opinion, it limited, however, the changes to light gestures, like the establishment of a state-run broadcasting station in Kurdish and a proposal to let universities offer courses of Kurdish as a foreign language.

Divergence of opinion among the public intensified during the strike, but politicians and journalists stayed generally out of the debate. Erdogan’s total opposition to it and his occasional scornful comments about the strikers, and the likelihood of deaths resulting from the strike, caused editorialists and opinion leaders to keep a low profile.

“The Turkish public is increasingly polarised on the Kurdish issue, but worse is around the corner,” Nazan Ustundag, a sociology associate professor at Bosphorus University, Istanbul, told IPS last week.

“The polarisation between the Kurds and pro-Kurdish democrats on one hand, and the state on the other hand will grow bigger, and the violence will increase if we witness the death of these people,” she added.

PKK’s decision to end the strike may have averted this bleak prospect, but not entirely. In his message on Sunday, Ocalan said that it was not for inmates to go on strike, but for those followers who were free. This may signal the beginning of another hunger strike, which will be more difficult for the authorities to control, as strikers could be anywhere.

This is unlikely to happen soon, though. The 68-day strike seems to have brought partial victory to the 682 inmates and their MPs. A parliamentary committee has submitted a proposal to legalise the use of the Kurdish language in trials. If it soon becomes a binding legal instrument, a ceasefire between the PKK and security forces may be reached, and hopes for a political solution of the Kurdish issue revived.

With 15 to 17 million people, the Kurds represent 20 percent of the country’s population. As their presence is concentrated in the southeast, they are also a significant electoral asset to any party that can win their loyalty.

Erdogan’s thoughtfulness for the Kurds’ grievances in the early days of his premiership was founded on realpolitik. His promises and gestures seem to have paid off, until recently. Political experts and think tanks have estimated that between five and six percentage points in AKP’s electoral victories of 2007 and 2011 were due to Kurdish votes.

There are still many votes to be had in the southeast, AKP strategists believe. The rival in the region, BDP, which is believed to be the political arm of PKK, has 36 MPs elected locally and controls 97 municipalities. This is a sizeable target. But the even larger electoral Kurdish platform is moderate and not permanently attached to a party. Both AKP and PKK would like to win such hearts and minds.

“All of the work conducted towards Kurdish language rights in Turkey, all of the steps taken towards resolving the Kurdish problem, alongside security politics, as well as the discourse on the death penalty are all an extension of these efforts towards winning over the Kurds,” explained Mumtazer Turkone, an editorial writer with Sunday’s Zaman, a newspaper close to the AKP.

“And the PKK is similarly trying to convince the Kurds through the ‘revolutionary people’s war’, by escalating violence and trying to gain moral legitimacy through hunger strikes. The PKK seems unable, however, to realise that it cannot use both vehicles hand in hand”, Turkone told IPS.

Less than six hours after the end of the hunger strike, at least five Turkish soldiers were killed by PKK rebels in clashes with the security forces in the south eastern province of Hakkari. A political solution to the Kurdish problem may not be so close, after all.

In a display of muscle-flexing, Turkish tanks this week carried out military exercises on the Syrian border, just a few kilometres away from towns that Syrian Kurds had seized from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

The seizure of the Kurdish towns sent alarm bells ringing in the Turkish capital. “It took a lot of people by surprise in Ankara. It is one of the toughest and serious issues in the last period of Turkish history,” said Metehan Demir, a military expert and columnist for the Turkish daily Hürriyet.

“The capture of Kurdish towns in Syria is perceived by Kurdish groups in Turkey as the signal for (a) future autonomous Kurdish region on Turkey’s border, which is seen as the start of (a) wider Kurdish state, including Iran, Iraq and Turkey,” Demir added.

Turkey has a restive Kurdish minority, accounting for around 20 percent of its population of 73.6 million. Since 1984, Ankara has been fighting the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which is fighting for greater Kurdish rights. Many of its fighters are drawn from Syria’s Kurdish minority. Adding to Ankara’s angst, the PKK flag was raised in one of the seized Syrian towns.

“We will not allow the formation of a terrorist structure near our border,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu told a Turkish television channel on Jul. 29. “We reserve every right . . . No matter if it is Al-Qaeda or the PKK. We would consider it a matter of national security and take every measure.”

The tough words are seen as a government attempt to assuage anger, bordering on panic in sections of the country’s often-nationalist media.

“This is because Ankara had not prepared the Turkish public for this event. I cannot believe Ankara was surprised,” said international relations expert Soli Ozel of Istanbul’s Kadir Has University. “Syrian Kurds are going to look after their own self-determination. They will seek to achieve at least autonomy. We had this coming for a long, long time.”

Since the seizure of the Syrian towns, Turkish armed forces with armour have been sent to Turkey’s border with the Syrian Kurdish region.

“Turkey will see and understand whether this territory is a matter of right of the Kurds, or a base of the PKK,” warned Hürriyet’s Demir. “Depending on this situation, Turkey might actually carry out an operation.”

Any military action by Turkey, Ozel believes, would be counterproductive. “I think that would be close to a suicidal move as I can imagine,” he said. “Because I am not quite sure that the Turkish military is ready to take on yet another enemy . . . Turkey would be fighting a war on two, or even three fronts, if the Iraqi Kurds were involved.”

For now, Ankara appears to be looking to diplomacy rather than force. The semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan regional government shares a border with Turkey and the Syrian Kurdish region. In the past few years, Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party has developed close ties with the region and with Iraqi Kurdish President Masoud Barzani.

“There is now a very close dialogue between Ankara and Barzani,” said Sinan Ulgen, head of the Istanbul-based EDAM research institute. “However, in Syria we see two rival Kurdish entities; one dominated by the Kurdish National Council, but the other one is an offshoot of the PKK. There, Barzani does not really have leverage.”

Questions over Barzani’s influence over developments in Syria are increasingly being raised in Ankara. Before Syrian Kurds’ gains in northern Syria, Turkish media broadcast pictures of hundreds of Syrian Kurdish fighters being escorted by Barzani’s forces back into Syria.

Adding to Ankara’s concern is that Barzani brokered a deal between rival Syrian Kurdish factions, including the National Democratic Party, which is linked to the PKK. It remains a point of controversy whether Ankara was aware of this deal, although a regional diplomatic source claims Turkish officials knew about the pact.

On Jul. 26, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan warned the Iraqi Kurdish leadership that “we are no longer responsible” for what might happen.

But tensions were markedly reduced after the Turkish foreign minister met with Barzani on Aug. 1 in the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Erbil. A joint statement was issued promising to work together on Syria. Ankara’s anger could be tempered by the increasing trade relationship with the Iraqi Kurds. Iraq is now Turkey’s second largest trading partner, of which the lion’s share of commerce is taken by Iraqi Kurds.

Analyst Ulgen said that if Ankara takes steps to resolve its own Kurdish conflict, it will have no reason to worry about Kurds setting up a state across the Turkish border. But he warns that events in Syria threaten to drive up the price for Ankara of any domestic deal.

“It will make it more difficult for Turkey to negotiate with its own Kurds, to the extent (that) each type of development across the border has tended (to make) the Turkish Kurds to raise their expectations as to what they can accomplish,” Ulgen said.

*Editor’s note: Dorian Jones is a freelance reporter based in Istanbul.

This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Sinem Sahin, whose classmates were arrested for political activism, speaks at a solidarity protest. Credit: Lindsay Oda/IPS

By Lindsay Oda
ISTANBUL, Jul 17 2012 (IPS)

Ahmet Saymadi slumps into a cafe, gives a limp handshake to some friends, and then stops at a computer to do some work. When he finally pauses for a tea break, he pushes a CD across the table, which contains the names of all 768 student activists currently imprisoned in Turkey’s jails.

Saymadi has been working steadily for the past year to complete this comprehensive report, during which time the number of politically active youth behind bars has risen steadily.

Rights activists charge that the country’s stringent anti-terror laws are responsible for hounding students protesting human rights violations against the country’s Kurdish minority.

After hundreds of protestors gathered outside Çağlayan courthouse chanting, “Freedom for detained students”, Yildiz Technical University students Baran Nayır and Ali Deniz Kılıç were finally released late last month after spending nearly two and a half years in prison.

Although they are not themselves Kurdish, the two students were prosecuted for protesting the government’s closure of the Kurdish National Party in 2009 for its alleged association with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Nayır and Kılıç were just two of hundreds of students detained for acts of political protest dubbed as “terrorism” by the state.

Academia, human rights activists, and members of the secularist opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) are growing increasingly disconcerted by the number of young people caught up in the government’s aggressive clampdown on perceived opponents.

Between 2005 and 2007, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) amended a series of laws, causing a 2.8-fold increase in the number of people detained on terrorism charges by 2011, according to the Ministry of Justice. This number has continually increased in 2012.

“They (the students) are mostly detained on the basis of our draconian anti-terror law,” Mehmet Karli, professor of international law at the Galatasaray University, told IPS.

“The Turkish state has a history of draconian criminal laws. Under the rule of the AKP this hasn’t changed. Since 2005 it has (been) exacerbated.”

Legal complications

Student arrests began to climb with the creation in 2006 of ‘assize’ courts. These state security courts came under intense pressure from the Europe Union for alleged human rights abuses but instead of being held accountable, they were granted punitive powers by the government to apprehend political dissidents.

“They specialise in trying organised crime, but their main aim is to try political ‘crimes’,” Karli said.

Anti-terror laws have also been used to imprison journalists, artists, activists, and even non-AKP members of parliament for association with or membership in the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK); ties with other Kurdish groups; and for alleged participation in the coup-plotting group, Ergenekon.

A lawyer and activist working on behalf of arrested students, Olguner Olgun, estimates about 90 percent of the imprisoned students are Kurdish, and that most were arrested for demanding Kurdish rights.

“There are serious problems with respect to the rights of Kurds in Turkey. Some (students) expressed discontent, but the fact that there is a PKK doesn’t mean that all Kurds are members of the PKK and engaged in violent activity,” said Karli, who has read over 200 indictments of students detained for terrorism, but has yet to find any connection with violent activity.

Absent any substantial evidence of violent actions, most prosecutors cite an anonymous witness described as a “patriot”, who offers relevant information to the state associating defendants with terrorist organisations.

Anything from Facebook messages to text messages are used as evidence, according to Olguner. Anonymous witnesses can’t be cross-examined, making their evidence difficult to challenge in court.

The majority of arrested students are languishing in pre-trial detention, where they are forced to wait months before they are presented with a statement from police or allowed contact with lawyers. Olguner said that the average waiting time before a first trial is six months.

“They extend the surveillance time so police can better prepare an argument with prosecutors for the first trial,” Olguner contended.

In most countries, a person is innocent until proven guilty. In Turkey, specifically with cases of terrorism, authorities assert a person is guilty and detain him or her until the defendant is proven innocent.

Nayır and Kılıç had a record of about two court hearings per year.  The average minimum of hearings before a verdict is six. Given those statistics, a student may be detained for three years before receiving a verdict.

Arrested students also face disciplinary action by university administration before a final verdict is handed down. Rules overseen by Turkey’s Board of Higher Education, YOK, criminalise “ideological activity”. Students receive warnings and suspensions, and sometimes even risk expulsion, if caught engaging in almost any kind of political activity the government considers undesirable.

Solidarity protests

Across the country, solidarity groups are taking action against student imprisonments. Their campaign strategy is to widely publicise the students’ cases.

Letters students write from jail are posted online, and translated into English in hopes that other countries, especially EU member states, will put pressure on the Turkish government.

“Our biggest difficulty is getting true knowledge of these cases published in Turkish media. The media works for the AKP, and don’t reveal the truth to the public,” Saymadi told IPS.

But the prevalence of independent media has enabled word to spread, with news of detainees appearing on solidarity blogs, Facebook groups, and left-wing news websites.

Solidarity actions continue to take place on university campuses, even though most university administrations disapprove of political protest. Students at graduation ceremonies open their robes in unison to reveal T-shirts bearing the mantra “freedom for detained students” printed in bold letters.

So far, 62 students detained on terrorist charges have been released.

(END)