by Meredith Tax
Without a parliamentary majority, the AKP was supposed to try to form a coalition. But rather than let that happen, Erdogan scheduled a new “snap election” to be held on November 1, 2015, hinting that, unless people gave him the majority he wanted, things were going to get rough.
On July 20, a suicide bomber attacked a Kurdish rally in Suruc, killing thirty-three Kurds from socialist youth groups who were crossing the border to help rebuild Kobane. Turkey accused Daesh, but the HDP and the press raised questions about how Turkey’s omnipresent security apparatus could have let a suicide bomber through when everyone else at the event had been searched.23
On July 22, a local PKK group killed two Turkish security police in retaliation for the Suruc attack. That was all the excuse Erdogan needed to begin arresting HDP leaders and start bombing PKK camps in Iraq for the first time in four years. On July 23, HDP co-chairman Selahattin Demirtas called for an immediate ceasefire, saying, “No one has anything to win from a civil war in Turkey. Just look at Syria and Iraq.” Appealing to the PKK as well as the government, he insisted that killing individual soldiers and policemen was not the way to fight, saying, “They are also the children of this country, our children.”24
A few days later he told Der Speigel that killing the two policemen was “a dark, dirty chapter. It was revenge for the attack in Suruc, committed by a local PKK unit. The broader organization did not claim responsibility. It seems to me that individual elements were looking to provoke the Turkish state. . . . We urgently call on the PKK and the Turkish government to put down their weapons.”25
Instead of listening, Prime Minister Davutoglu bragged that government planes had hit 400 targets in their raids n PKK bases in Iraq. In a furious response, the PKK rejected the call for a ceasefire just as they had when Leyla Zana made a similar appeal in 2004. PKK Executive Committee member Duran Kalkan explained that the PKK was not looking for a fight and had not started this one but it was “not right to talk about the actions by PKK without mentioning the most recent Amed (Diyarbakir) and Suruç massacres, and increasingly ongoing repression and arrests. On the other hand, guerrillas haven’t pulled the trigger yet. Their current actions are limited retaliation.”26
The situation continued to escalate. On July 29, someone blew up the oil pipeline between Turkey and Kirkuk, and the PKK attacked a Turkish police station in Hakkari. By the third week in August, at least fifty Turkish police had been killed. Despite HDP calls for a ceasefire, the Turkish state followed its usual procedure of treating the PKK and HDP as if they were the same organization. As political scientist Nicole Watts has observed, Turkish electoral politics can be almost as dangerous as armed struggle, at least for Kurds.27 By August 2015, 1,464 HDP elected officials had been arrested, and 224 were in jail, including the co-mayors of Hakkari, Sur, Silvan, and Edremit. (Turkey considered the co-mayor system, one man and one woman, illegitimate, and Turkish repression often made it hard to carry out the vision behind the HDP’s democratic autonomy program. During one period in 2015, for example, 60 percent of the women leaders in Diyarbakir were in jail.)28
The Erdogan government then began to put Kurdish cities in the southeast under martial law, treating regions that had voted HDP as conquered provinces whose people needed to be taught a lesson. In Cizre, for instance, the military put the whole town under 24-hour-curfew for nine days, refusing to let HDP deputies in to observe, and stationing snipers on mosque roofs to kill any civilian who dared to go outside.29
The Kurdish civil resistance movement responded by declaring autonomy in town after town, saying that, since the Turkish state would not protect them, they would protect themselves. Members of the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), made up of young urban guerrillas who sought to defend their communities against attacks by right-wing Turkish groups, such as the fascist Gray Wolves, the Islamist Huda-Par, as well as the Turkish police,30 began digging ditches and throwing up barricades, preparing to defend the cities which they correctly estimated would soon be attacked in force. Early in September 2015, the government issued an executive order putting thirteen predominantly Kurdish provinces under martial law and authorizing their civilian governors to use military operations against terrorists. The PKK called on all citizens to form armed self-defense forces.31
The first towns attacked were Silopi and Cizre. In defiance of every human rights convention, the Turkish military continued to put snipers on the roofs of high buildings, from which they shot civilians at random; imposed 24-hour curfews, leaving people without food and water; burst into houses and shot whoever was there; prevented ambulances from picking up the wounded, so people bled to death; shot into crowded buildings; shot people who tried to help the wounded or retrieve the bodies of relatives from the streets; and prevented burials.32
All this was in the lead-up to the critical snap election of November 1. On October 10, two Daesh suicide bombers blew themselves up at a Kurdish peace march in Ankara, killing 102 people and wounding hundreds more. The HDP accused the state of being involved, and the accusations gathered force as evidence came out that the Turkish security service had been watching the bombers and monitoring their communications.33
After this attack, the HDP decided it could no longer hold rallies for fear its supporters would again be killed, while Erdogan cited the Ankara bombing as proof that voters would be safe only under a strong leader. His government also went on the offensive against the press, taking over newspapers hostile to the AKP and arresting their editors, journalists, and anyone who criticized Erdogan.
On October 20, Prime Minister Davutoglu made a speech in the Kurdish city of Van, saying that if the AKP failed to regain its parliamentary majority in the snap election, they could expect “the return of the ‘white Toros,’” the Turkish name for the Renault 12, the car used by the secret police who had murdered so many Kurds in the nineties. “This was a remarkably overt threat for a head of government to make to his own people,” wrote the journalist Christopher de Bellaigue in The New York Review of Books, “and a sign of the perversion of democratic norms that has become common in Turkey.”34
Under these circumstances, it would have been a miracle if the HDP had received the same level of support it had in May, and it did not. At the cost of bringing Turkey closer to a dictatorship and seriously damaging its economy and its political credibility abroad, the AKP won a parliamentary majority, freeing it from the need to form a coalition government. But it did not succeed in eliminating the HDP as a threat: The party received 10 percent of the vote, enough to keep it in Parliament—at least, until it is declared illegal again, which may happen at any time.
HDP co-chair Figen Yuksekdag tallied up the carnage after the election: “258 civilians, including 33 children, lost their lives during the period of 5 months since [the] June 7 election. Over 100 people were killed in [the] Ankara massacre. 500 executives and members of our party were arrested. 190 HDP buildings were attacked.” Yuksekdag’s co-chair, Selahattin Demirtas, added: “It was not a fair election under equal circumstances. We couldn’t run an election campaign during this process. We just tried to save our people from the massacres targeting us.”35
Despite its electoral victory, the government stepped up its attacks on Kurdish cities after the election. Using the misleading term “curfews,” Erdogan’s government instituted an urban scorched-earth campaign meant to depopulate targeted areas. The Turkish Human Rights Foundation reported that from August to the end of December 2015, seventeen different Kurdish towns were subjected to a total of fifty-two round-the-clock curfews in which whole neighborhoods were leveled and many civilians killed. Some of these towns were bombed from the air or shelled by tanks. Prime Minister Davutoglu told the press on December 15, “All those towns will be cleansed of terror elements. If necessary, neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house, street by street.”36
Rather than cowing the Kurdish population, the undoing of the HDP electoral victory and the attacks on civilians pushed people further to
wards civil resistance. On August 11, 2015, after three civilians were murdered by special forces, the province of Sirnak joined other Kurdish regions in declaring autonomy, stating, “No appointed governor shall rule us in this way. . . . We will govern ourselves from now on and won’t allow anyone rule over us.”37 Despite heavy bombardment and many civilian casualties, one Kurdish city after another declared autonomy. Self-defense groups spread throughout the region, many of them organized by youth and women, including older women.
One of these women, identified as Serife, told the Kurdish media, “Whenever the police enter our neighborhood we go into action. They used to torture our children right in front of our eyes. They would break down our doors and come into our homes. They would go up to our roofs to position their snipers. We decided together to take up arms against all of this. The President and Prime Minister of Turkey are saying that the PKK is here, however there is no PKK in Sûr, there [are] the people. We are defending ourselves and our children in our own neighborhood. We are the people, and it is us who are building these positions. We are not afraid of death, we have nothing to lose.”38
On December 28, one thousand Kurdish activists, including Selahattin Demirtas, attended a special self-rule conference called by the Democratic Society Congress (DTK). The conference’s final resolution stated, “We as the DTK embrace the declarations of self-rule by local people’s assemblies and the just and legitimate popular resistance in all areas. We consider it essential that the Kurdish people and all peoples of Turkey join and support this resistance as part of the struggle for democracy and freedom. This is a matter of democracy rather than a trench and barricade problem like the AKP government asserts. The aggressive policy of the AKP is intended to break the popular will for local democracy and a free life.” Participants resolved to further develop the concept of self-rule and support individual and collective self-defense against policies of war and violence.39
The situation continued to deteriorate. In January 2016, a coalition of Turkish human rights groups issued an urgent call for help to the international community, saying, “Since August 2015, long-term and consecutive curfews have been declared in the provinces of, and the towns attached to Sirnak, Mardin, Diyarbakir, Hakkari, and Mus, and are still underway in certain cities and towns. During these prohibitions, national and international media, human rights or professional organizations as well as representatives of the parliament who wanted to identify violations of rights have been denied access to these cities and towns. According to the findings in reports drawn up by the very small number of civil society organizations which could make their way into the region in the face of huge obstacles, it has been determined that the civilian population has become the target of both snipers and heavy weaponry, which has been used in an arbitrary fashion.
“According to reports prepared by rights based organizations, 1.3 million people have been impacted by the curfews; more than 150 civilians—including children and the elderly—have lost their lives. Many people have been injured, and hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced. Arbitrary detentions and arrests have occurred; and civilians are being subjected to torture and maltreatment in detention centres and in the open. Intrusion in telecommunication networks restricts the right to information and freedom of communication. By an official decision to send away teachers from the region, education has been disrupted without a deadline, and health services have also been suspended. Due diligence in protecting civilians is not being demonstrated in any sense and they are not even provided the opportunity to meet minimum daily needs such as the right to food and water. After the curfews, no immediate and explicitly effective investigations have been conducted. Trial and punishment of those security forces that violate rights are being rendered impossible. The policy of impunity expands and continues, getting more severe.”40
As southeastern Turkey descended into chaos, the entire country moved closer to dictatorship. Journalists, artists, and academics were particularly targeted. On January 11, 2016, over one thousand Turkish academics, plus various foreign luminaries including Etienne Balibar, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, and David Harvey, released a petition entitled “We will not be a party to this crime.” The petition condemned Turkish attacks on civilians in the southeast and called for a resumption of peace talks between the government and the PKK.41
Immediately labeled traitors by President Erdogan, the signatories were attacked in the press and the Turkish ones were publicly threatened by a nationalist gangster who said he would bathe in their blood. Prosecutors launched an investigation into everyone who had signed, on charges of “making propaganda for a terrorist organization” and “insulting the Turkish nation.” Thirty-three were hauled in for questioning. A number lost their jobs, while many more received menacing phone calls and death threats from right-wing student organizations. Erdogan said the academics were “committing the same crime as those who commit massacres” and invited university authorities and judicial organs to “do their duty.”42
At the end of January 2016, Abdullah Demirbas, the beloved former mayor of Sur—which was being pounded into dust by the military—wrote in The New York Times, “In 2007, Sur became the first municipality in Turkey to offer services in local languages . . . a move that infuriated the authorities in Ankara, the capital, and led to my removal as mayor. In 2009, months after being re-elected with two-thirds of the vote, I was arrested on charges of separatism. . . . As I was rounded up along with hundreds of Kurdish activists and elected politicians, my teenage son left our house to join the PKK. ‘You are wasting time with your politics and dialogue,’ he told me. I dedicated my life to trying to prove him wrong and bring him home in peace. I have been discouraged before, but never lost hope. Today, I struggle to keep that hope alive.”43
And how did the US government respond to Turkey’s lurch towards dictatorship and war on civilians? It criticized Turkish violations of free speech. Selahattin Demirtas, cochair of the HDP, expressed his frustration with this approach in The New York Times:
“Many American policy makers are horrified by Mr. Erdogan’s efforts to kill off what is left of free speech in Turkey. Even President Obama admitted that he was ‘troubled’ by the direction of the country, a NATO ally. While the American public is right to be concerned about Mr. Erdogan’s efforts to stifle free speech and imprison journalists, as a Kurd I am saddened that the criticism ends there. There has been hardly any real mention of the government’s abuses in the fight against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., the deportations of civilians, the destruction of Kurdish towns and the imprisonment of Kurdish politicians in Turkey.”44
The US failure to factor human rights into its Kurdish policy goes back to the Cold War.
In 1948—at a time when it was cultivating a relationship with Turkish military intelligence and planning Operation Gladio, which would arm and train clandestine groups in NATO member countries and elsewhere in Europe—the CIA made a study of the “Kurdish problem.” This report, declassified, under the Freedom of Information Act, begins:
“The almost three million Kurdish tribesmen of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria constitute a factor of some importance in any strategic estimate of Near East affairs by virtue of their tradition of armed resistance to the governments over them and the efforts the USSR is making to stimulate and capitalize upon their grievances. Because of the narrow tribal loyalties of the Kurds and the rudimentary nature of the Kurdish nationalist movement, a unified attempt to set up an independent state over all of the traditional mountain homeland of ‘Kurdistan’ is unlikely. Nevertheless, the Kurdish tribes can be expected to continue to break out in sporadic local uprisings . . . capable of furnishing propaganda for the USSR before world opinion and of disrupting operations of Iraq’s Mosul oilfields, which are in the Kurdish area. Moreover, the delicate balance of the present Near East state system creates the possibility that a Kurdish revolt, by drawing on security forces and by stimulating other dissident groups, might lead t
o further disruption of the political and economic stability of that region.”45
With minor changes, this paragraph could have been written in 2016. Washington continues to see the Kurds mainly in terms of their proximity to oil fields and their capacity for disrupting existing states. Nor have the various branches of the US government yet found a way to reconcile their longstanding relationship with Turkey with the need to ally with the Kurds against Daesh.
In July 2015, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter publicly acknowledged that the US had found the YPG-YPJ a reliable partner to act as a ground force against Daesh. That October, llham Ehmed of the TEV-DEM Executive Committee was optimistic that the relationship was moving in the right direction, saying US representatives had “said that they would support the Kurds and work together with them in a diplomatic relationship built on friendship. In this respect we can say that the United States has opened a new diplomatic door.”46
Of course, Mullah Mustafa Barzani thought the same thing until Kissinger threw him under the bus. While one can hope that this story will end differently, the US and EU have not insisted that the Rojava Kurds be part of Syrian peace talks despite their leading role in the war. In January 2016, after Ehmed and Salim Muslim were excluded from the talks in Geneva, the Kurdish delegation criticized the attitude of the US, which they said was obscuring the PYD’s role and treating them as a military, but not a political ally.47
This was an accurate description of the situation. For decades the US and EU have gotten away with relating to the Kurds in a purely instrumental way, seeing them as a military resource, rather than as a people with an agenda of their own. The Cameron government in the UK baldly stated as much in a March 2015 report on the Iraqi Kurds: “We are also concerned that the PYD is attempting to pre-empt discussions on a final settlement for the Syria conflict. We do not support the PYD’s unilateral announcement in November 2013 of forming a temporary administration in the Kurdish areas of Syria. This move was not conducted in consultation with the wider Syrian population or the international community. It will be for all Syrians to decide the exact nature of the political settlement in Syria as part of a transition process, including whether an autonomous region will be created for the Kurds in Syria.”48 In other words, the Syrian opposition will decide what happens to Rojava, not the Kurds.