Turkish Awakening

by Alev Scott

  The application of this extreme patriotism to a modern-day diplomatic problem may not be right, but some of the calls for recognition of a genocide are just as mulish. Significantly, many of the most strident calls come from the Armenian diaspora rather than from Armenians themselves, mainly because diasporas are often more fiercely patriotic than indigenous populations, and the Armenian diaspora in particular is disproportionately large. Expressions of solidarity come from the most unexpected of sources; in 2011 the American reality TV star Kim Kardashian, whose father is Armenian, petitioned President Obama to formally recognise a genocide (he did not oblige). The French-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour is another celebrity advocate for recognition. France already recognises a genocide but in February 2012 President Sarkozy went a step further by proposing a bill to punish the denial of genocide by up to a year in jail and a fine of €45,000. The bill did not pass but talk of it occasionally resurfaces under President Hollande.

  There are close to half a million Armenians in France and Sarkozy’s proposal, timed shortly before the general elections in 2012, was widely viewed as a vote-winning ploy. The bill was needlessly politically aggressive to Turkey and threatened free speech no matter what one’s personal views on the issue. Its announcement had an immediate and dramatic effect on the relationship between France and Turkey: Ankara froze diplomatic relations with Paris and Prime Minister Erdoğan described the bill as racist and Islamophobic. He also accused France of hypocrisy, on the grounds that French troops committed a genocide when they massacred fifteen per cent of the Algerian population in the 1940s. Elaborating on this point, the municipality of Ankara decided to change the name of Paris Street, home of the French Embassy, to Algeria Street, and to erect a monument to the Algerian genocide near the embassy. Turkey has critics on home ground, too, and is similarly hard on them – if not more so. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish author, spoke out against Turkish denial of a genocide in 2005, was charged with ‘publicly insulting Turkey’s national character’ by a prosecutor in Istanbul and has been persona non grata in Turkey ever since. Cases like this put Turkey and France in a similar camp when it comes to free speech – both governments are insisting that ‘what we say is true, is true, and no one is allowed to say it isn’t’. It is a sad situation which just falls short of being risible because of the implications for free speech in general.

  Official recognition of an Armenian genocide, while a controversial and emotional issue for many people, is on the whole more beloved by academics, politicians and the wider Armenian diaspora than by Armenians living in Turkey, at least the younger generations. Young Armenians are often more eager to integrate and identify themselves as Turks than their parents, and I have known several young Armenians who are respectful and conscious of their Armenian heritage without wanting to be defined by it. A young woman I once worked with only told me she was Armenian when I queried her name, Tanya, a few weeks after we had started working together. She also told me that her parents were eager for her to marry a good Armenian Catholic boy, although she was not particularly keen to. A half-Armenian boy from a totally different walk of life used to tell me how stupid he thought the genocide-denial wrangling was, but he strongly believed the border crossing between Armenia and Turkey should be opened, and trade resumed. His concerns were for the present and the future, not the past. In my experience, young Armenians are understandably more concerned with their own progress in life than with recognition for a past tragedy that consumes their parents or grandparents. They remind me of young Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus today, who want to identify themselves as Cypriots rather than Turkish Cypriots, and feel much more friendly towards Greek Cypriots than my mother’s generation could ever feel. This is not necessarily a good sign; they might well be doing so because belonging to a minority is often an uncomfortable experience. Armenians have suffered decades of discrimination; perhaps young Armenians like those I talked to are just anxious to avoid that by distancing themselves from their minority identity. Even if that is true, I do think that anger over past events fades over time, unless there is an active and pertinent cause of some kind to keep that anger alive.

  The Kurds of the south-east of Turkey have such a cause. The last thirty years of Turkish–Kurdish strife are being challenged today in the form of the Kurdish peace process (which is in tentative progress as I write), and it is to be hoped that this, along with other unresolved minority-related problems, will be successfully addressed in a less ferociously nationalistic age. In 1984, the emergence of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) posed the most serious threat that the Turkish nation-building project had ever faced. Since the founding of the republic, Kurds had been forced to assimilate, rebranded as ‘Mountain Turks’ and dismissed as backward peasants, but they had not formed an organised resistance. Ironically, it was as a result of the Turkish government’s harsh treatment of Kurds as a problematic minority that Kurds formed such a strong concept of their own national identity. Before the PKK, there had been no organised Kurdish resistance to the Turkish government, and consequently no active fighting. There was the same nebulous prejudice towards them that existed towards many minorities, mainly because Kurds come from deprived areas in the south-east, but nothing comparable to the situation now. The Kurdish problem exploded in the 1980s, and a solution is long overdue.

  ‘Kurdistan’ is a politically problematic term in Turkey, but it is also a geographically problematic term because a country for Kurds does not currently exist. In the Ottoman period, Kurds lived in a province or eyalet called Kurdistan, which is now an area in south-east Turkey which encompasses the cities of Mardin and Diyarbakır. While many Kurds still live there, it is now only called ‘Kurdistan’ by Kurds or Kurdish sympathisers. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Western Allies carved out borders for an independent Kurdish state in the Treaty of Sèvres, but this treaty was subsequently ignored by Atatürk’s government. Instead, as a kind of compensation, Kurds were told to seize traditionally Armenian towns in Turkey like Van and were largely left to their own devices. Kurds did not have autonomy or land, but they were temporarily appeased. In 1970, ‘Iraqi Kurdistan’ in the north of Iraq was granted autonomy by the central government, and there is an unofficial province called Kurdistan in Iran, as well as many Kurds living in Syria. The ultimate aim of Kurdish nationalists today is to create a state encompassing all these communities, and the biggest obstacle to this has traditionally been Turkey, which up until now denied even the existence of a Kurdish minority.

  The question of why the ruling party is initiating the Kurdish peace process has been much debated by their opponents. On a straightforward level, it is a great thing to be undertaking; no one wants to lose soldiers to guerrilla warfare, and the situation has already gone on far too long, costing tens of thousands of lives (of soldiers and civilians on both sides) and an estimated 766 billion lira to the Turkish government. The negotiations are good PR for the AKP, of course, but who cares, as long as they work? Some Turks accuse the AKP of nouveau Ottomanism because they portray themselves like sultans rebuilding an empire and magnanimously dealing with their subjects – in March 2013 Prime Minister Erdoğan controversially referred to the eyalet (province) system used by the Ottomans to manage their empire, specifically mentioning the eyalet of Kurdistan and causing considerable upset among Turkish nationalists. Other critics suspect the AKP of opening negotiations with Kurds because they want to be able to bargain with them to gain access to the petrol-rich areas in Northern Iraq (Kurdistan); the AKP find it easier to negotiate with Kurds than previous governments because they are not defined by a nationalist, anti-Kurdish agenda. This is probably true, but it is irrelevant in the greater context. Peace is desperately needed now.

  Kurds make up about twenty per cent of the Turkish population, a fifteen-million-strong minority. To give some idea of scale, there are an estimated fifty thousand Armenians living in Turkey. Many more millions of Kurds live in surrounding areas in Syria, Iraq and Iran, giving them a huge cr
itical mass and the impetus for change. In Turkey there is an organised rights movement, which includes NGOs, artists and the BDP (Peace and Democracy Party), a relatively mainstream political party, as well as illegal organisations, the most famous of which is the PKK. Some groups are not directly associated with the Kurdish rights movement but involve the cause in their broadly leftist agenda, like the semi-illegal music group, Grup Yorum, which has been linked to illegal, far-leftist organisations such as the notorious anarchist group the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party. Grup Yorum’s members regularly spend spells in prison, and their music is confiscated by police from the recording studio before it is due to be publicly released. I went to one of their concerts, and there were thousands of people there, young, old, Kurdish and otherwise, listening to three hours of music and poetry with a distinct freedom-fighting flavour. Other concerts have been shut down by police because the group explicitly talk about the Kurds’ right to freedom, as well as other dangerous topics, but with the growth of social media and YouTube, their music is hugely popular and enjoyed in secret across the country. I shared a taxi to the concert in Istanbul with a Turkish friend who shushed me when I started to give the taxi driver more detailed directions to the concert venue. ‘Just tell him to drop us by the mall,’ whispered my friend in English. ‘He might be a government informer.’ I do not know whether this was over-cautious or not, but it shows how nervous Turks can be attending something as apparently innocuous as a music concert, when anything that might be construed as ‘terrorism’ is involved.

  Countless articles, books and reports have been written about the Kurdish issue. I cannot begin to do justice here to an incredibly complicated situation, but as far as I can see, it is a terrible mess of contradictory demands, decades of hurt, and desperation on the Kurdish side. On the Turkish side, there is a whole gamut of reaction which ranges from fascist calls for the obliteration of the Kurdish race to acceptance that the Kurds should be allowed to speak Kurdish and call themselves Kurds. Practically all Turks fall short of wanting to give away Turkish soil to the Kurds. They are worried about making concessions because that could lead to all sorts of uncomfortable situations, like making reparations – perhaps in the form of land – not only to Kurds but to Armenians, as I’ve mentioned, or to Greeks. One can see their point. Considering all the minority elements that make up Turkish society, it is a potential slippery slope. However, concessions can be made – like granting the Kurds the right to speak their own language – without descending down this slope, and the PKK seem cautiously ready to accept these concessions.

  There seems to be a problem with the word ‘Turk’: does it refer to an ethnicity or citizenship? If ‘Turk’ means someone living in Turkey, there should be no problem. However, many Kurds – even those who do not necessarily want an area of Kurdistan in current Turkish territory – object to the exclusive use of the word ‘Turk’ to define someone living in Turkey, not wanting to be lumped with the rest of the population when they have a perfectly good word for themselves. The institutionalised insistence on self-definition as a Turk creates problems from childhood onwards for everyone who might think otherwise, mainly because of the obligatory oaths of allegiance and the phrase which children utter in every Turkish school: Ne mutlu Türküm diyene, ‘How happy is the one who can say “I’m a Turk”.’ This phrase is inscribed everywhere – public buildings, army bases and town squares, particularly in Kurdish areas where it is considered efficacious by authorities as a reminder of identity. The Turkish side of the Iraqi border (mainly populated by Kurds) is probably the most aggressively nationalistic area of Turkey; I have seen footage of school drills involving hundreds of children dressed in red and white doing military-style formations with Turkish flags in something approaching scenes from China. Most of all, expressions of Turkish sovereignty, typically quotations from Atatürk, are displayed everywhere in an obvious attempt to quash local Kurdish morale and ram home the idea of Turkish supremacy.

  This is finally being challenged, often in an atmosphere of secrecy. In March 2013, the base of a statue of Atatürk in the predominantly Kurdish town of Batman was vandalised – or edited, depending on how you look at it – in the middle of the night. The Ne mutlu phrase was replaced with another famous quotation from Atatürk: ‘Peace at home, peace in the world.’

  Nationalists, of course, went crazy. The local authorities cringed and squirmed in their efforts to distance themselves from the crime. I think it was a wonderful thing to have happened, and as tactful a piece of graffiti as one could wish for. The new phrase is in keeping with the times and rejects the limitations of the ‘How happy . . .’ maxim while replacing it with something else Atatürk said, thus retaining respect for a national hero. The whole episode reminds me of Christians quoting different parts of the Bible to each other as a kind of moral point-scoring; sometimes material from the same source can be on the cusp of being contradictory while retaining integrity and competing in relevance. The original phrase on the statue could have been replaced with something violently separatist or anti-Atatürk, but it was in fact a very constructive change, reminding people of the current priority of the need for peace. The Kurdish gauntlet was not so much thrown as placed in a dignified and gentlemanly manner by someone who, understandably, had no wish to be thrown to the nationalist lions.

  There have been suggestions from Kurds and Kurdish sympathisers that Turkey should be renamed ‘the Republic of Turks and Kurds’. I think, firstly, that this will never happen, and secondly, it is impracticable – where would it stop? What about indigenous Armenian, Greek, Roma or Turkmen communities? ‘The Republic of Turks and Various Minorities’ is a nice thought but certainly not on the cards. Very few people in Turkey are ethnically one hundred per cent Turkish, or Turkic (which is why, of course, the Turkish brand of nationalism is so extraordinary), but it is difficult to see how that could be reflected by rebranding Turkey. What is more important is to allow Kurds to call themselves so, without fear of prejudice, to speak Kurdish and to celebrate their culture freely, without construing these things as an attack on the Turkish state.

  The Kurdish peace process initiated in March 2013 is the first attempt at dialogue with the PKK for around thirty years, and has been engineered by the AKP and the jailed head of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan. ‘Apo’, as he is affectionately called by Kurds, has been held in solitary confinement on an island prison in the Sea of Marmara since 1999 but still wields great influence from his prison cell. At the Kurdish festival of Nowruz in March 2013, hundreds of thousands of Kurds gathered in Diyarbakır, the centre of the Kurdish region, to welcome his much anticipated call for peace. At the time of writing, there is a precarious ceasefire and PKK fighters are beginning to leave Turkish territory in small numbers, in return for unspecified concessions on behalf of the Turkish government. These concessions have not been made public, and many Kurds are deeply suspicious of what they will get in return for the laying down of arms. Is the constitution going to be changed? A lot of Turkish prejudice towards Kurds is ingrained, and cannot be changed by heart-warming speeches.

  In June 2013, anti-government protests spread from Taksim, Istanbul, all over the country. In Western towns like Izmir, Ankara and Eskişehir, protesters were educated, mainly leftist people who had middle-class concerns like the preservation of Gezi Park or annoyingly restrictive anti-alcohol laws. However, the protests which sprang up in the Kurdish areas in the south-east were another matter entirely: they were aimed at the disproportionate number of gendarmeries and police stations in villages which have no water, schools or hospitals – an expression of Kurdish frustration with Turkish authorities. On 28 June 2013, nineteen-year-old Medeni Yıldırım was shot dead in Lice, south-east Turkey, when police opened fire on people protesting against the opening of a new gendarmerie. His death added to the toll of what were loosely called the ‘Gezi protests’, but it had a different significance from those killed in Western cities. The government immediately claimed that the unrest
in the south-east was the result of an ongoing drugs war. They did not want anything to derail the peace process, which had started only a couple of months before, but it certainly seemed shaken – the Kurdish BDP did not hold back from criticising the government’s vindictive backlash and its lack of recognition of the severity of the Lice incidents. Interestingly, not all Kurds felt the same; at the height of the protests, in the Kurdish town of Erbil, Northern Iraq, a group waving Turkish flags and pictures of Erdoğan staged a pro-AKP demonstration in front of the Turkish consulate, an unexpected counter-protest. They were worried about the Gezi protests derailing the peace process, and they were right to worry. However, the process now seems to be limping on.

  I remember speaking to a Kurdish butcher in Istanbul who was scornful of all the fuss people were making about the tear gas and water cannon used by police around Taksim Square. ‘This is nothing,’ he said. ‘In Diyarbakır [his hometown] we get this sort of thing all the time. I was brought up on gas.’

  I visited Diyarbakır a year before the protests and was struck by the tension in the air. There was an atmosphere of surveillance which made people both afraid and angry, and I felt a very similar atmosphere in Taksim following the evacuation of the square by police on 11 June 2013 – helicopters passing sporadically overhead, intimidating uniformed policemen hanging around on street corners and occasionally conferring with not-so-secret policemen wearing leather jackets and noisy walkie-talkies. It was unpleasant living in the atmosphere in Taksim. For people in Diyarbakır, this is normal life.

  The reason for the surveillance and massive police presence in Diyarbakır is the PKK. Many Kurds have moved from remote Kurdish villages to Diyarbakır in the last twenty years, and some have family members hiding out in the mountains with the rebels – these migrants feel torn between their loyalties to freedom-fighting family members and their desire to live a trouble-free life in the city. The police presence in Kurdish cities is in many ways intrusive, but neither the current Turkish government nor any future government is ever going to leave the area free of gendarmerie while the PKK remain in Turkey.