"The real challenge to secular Turkey
Aug 31st 2006 | DIYARBAKIR
From The Economist print edition
Turks remain stoical in the face of bomb attacks by Kurdish separatists—but extreme Islamism may be a bigger threat to their republic
DESPITE all the progress Turkey has made in modernising its economy and political system, the festering Kurdish problem is unresolved. That was the grim message implied by the bomb attacks that killed three Turks and wounded scores of others in tourist areas across the country this week.
The Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, seen in Turkey as an arm of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) which has waged a separatist campaign against the Turkish state since 1984, swiftly claimed responsibility for the blasts in Marmaris, Antalya and Istanbul. Ten British visitors to Marmaris were hurt when a remotely-controlled device tore through their minibus. Hours later the Falcons declared on their website that all Turkey would become a “hell” and that tourists should stay away or risk death.
Turkey's political leaders, anxious to limit the effect of the bombs on the country's image, financial rating and tourist business, offered little public comment. Many ordinary folk were equally tight-lipped. Within hours of the blasts, shopkeepers in Antalya resumed business, replacing shattered glass and broken furniture and festooning windows with huge Turkish flags. Markets remained unrattled, with the lira holding firm, and there were few reports of holiday cancellations.
If there was an official response to the attacks, it came from the armed forces. Turkey's new army chief, General Yasar Buyukanit, said during his inaugural speech that the battle against the rebels would be intensified, without elaborating how. The general earned his hawkish reputation when serving in Diyarbakir, capital of the country's mainly Kurdish south-east, during a PKK insurgency in the 1990s.
If the general returned there today, he would scent a new enemy. He would need only to go to Dag Kapi, the city's main square. Over the past week a new Islamist group called Mustazaflar—“the downtrodden”—has erected two giant tents, decked with grotesque photographs of Lebanese children allegedly killed in Israeli air raids.
Throngs of visitors record their outrage in a diary. One entry reads: “Let us all taste the sherbet of martyrdom.” A painting to raise money for “the cause” shows a skull emblazoned with the Star of David, blood dripping from its fangs onto the Muslims' holiest shrine in Mecca.
Nowadays anti-Israeli and anti-American passions run high across Turkey. But in the Kurdish regions, where the 20th century saw a series of ethnic rebellions with religious undertones, such displays of Muslim zeal look especially menacing to the masters of Turkey's secular republic.
This very point was made by the outgoing army chief, General Hilmi Ozkok, who said political Islam had surpassed the PKK (whose ideological roots are in nationalism and Marxism) as the big peril in the south-east. Until recently rallies backing the rebels were the biggest crowd-pullers in places like Diyarbakir. Nowadays demonstrations to protest against Danish caricatures of Muhammad, or public celebrations of the Prophet's birth, are more likely to draw Kurds onto the streets.
In Diyarbakir prayer rooms have popped up in once secular social clubs. Around 60 new Islamically-minded groups have formed in recent years, offering scholarships, financial aid and “moral guidance” to the poor. Although such groups disavow violence, their members claim that as many as 500 local youths have gone to Lebanon in the past month to “help” their Muslim comrades. Enrolment at a local summer course in Koranic studies nearly doubled this year, to 20,000.
Diyarbakir's governor, Efkan Ala, is a pious Muslim intellectual, whose liberal approach is widely appreciated. He agrees that global jihadism has had a spillover effect in the conservative, Kurdish provinces of Turkey that border Iran, Iraq and Syria. Yet Mr Ala insists that radical Islam can pose a threat only if “certain forces” decide to make it one.
Mr Ala was alluding to rogue members of the security forces who secretly armed fighters of the “Kurdish Hizbullah” movement throughout the separatist war of the 1990s. Kurdish Hizbullah—which has no links to its Lebanese namesake—was once considered useful to Turkey's authorities because it fought the PKK.
When the PKK called off its insurgency after the capture of its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999, security forces raided Hizbullah cells across the country and killed the group's leader in an Istanbul shootout. The rebels ended their truce in 2004, citing the government's refusal to grant an amnesty that would cover PKK fighters and all their leaders, including Mr Ocalan. Mr Ala says the real reason the PKK resumed attacks was to reassert its waning influence in the face of reforms encouraged by the European Union. Thanks to these reforms, Kurds can now publish and broadcast in their own tongue.
So far the resurgence of PKK violence has not prompted a complete reverse of the government's efforts to give Kurds a better deal. The government is ploughing ahead with a repatriation scheme for hundreds of thousands of Kurds who were evicted from villages during the army's scorched-earth campaign of the 1990s.
In Tunceli, one of the provinces worst hit by the conflict, the governor, Mustafa Erkal, says 14 villages have been rebuilt since 2002. Songul Erol Abdil, the town's first female mayor and an activist in a large pro-Kurdish movement, the Democratic Society Party, acknowledges that Mr Erkal has played a constructive role. She says the governor helped restrain the security forces after the PKK killed two policemen in a bomb attack near Tunceli on August 13th. “In the old days they would have fired on civilians for revenge,” she says.
Kurdish eyes are now trained on a case filed by two Kurdish politicians with the European Court of Human Rights. Resul Sadak and Mehmet Yumak won a combined total of 46% of the vote in Sirnak province in the 2002 parliamentary polls. But like 51 other contestants, they were unable to win seats because their now defunct party failed to get the minimum 10% of the national vote that is needed for representation in parliament.
The Kurds say the law breaks European norms of democracy. A hearing is scheduled for September 5th. Should the court rule in their favour, some Kurds dream of the national threshold being reduced before the parliamentary elections that must take place by November 2007.
But with each PKK attack, official attitudes, and those of many Turkish voters, harden. So does the widespread Turkish nationalist feeling which has dented the government's zeal for EU-inspired reforms.
The mild Islamists who came to power in 2002, vowing to lead the country into Europe, barely mention the EU these days. Human-rights groups say a recently amended anti-terror law has rolled back many improvements to civil liberties. For example, suspects no longer have access to lawyers for the first 24 hours of their detention—a change which gives free rein to torturers, according to Tahir Elci, a human-rights advocate in Diyarbakir.
The EU's moral power to oppose such measures is waning; polls suggest that support for EU entry has dipped to half the electorate from three-quarters only a year ago. Meanwhile, squeezed between PKK violence and Turkish nationalism, a growing number of Kurds are turning to radical forms of Islam."
Economist.com