The Forbidden Tongue.(International Edition; TURKEY)(use of native Kurdish language)

Byline: Owen Matthews

Turkey's leader is in a tough spot after a Kurdish politician dares to speak his native language.

For years, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has positioned himself as a champion of the ethnic Kurds who make up one fifth of Turkey's population. He's spoken Kurdish at election rallies and on television, eased restrictions on the use of the language in public and, with more than a little encouragement from the European Union, pushed through laws that allow education and broadcasting in Kurdish. But last week Erdogan found himself on the spot when an ethnic Kurdish parliamentarian, Ahmet Turk, addressed Parliament in his native language. "Kurds have long been oppressed because they did not know any other language," he said as he switched from Turkish to Kurdish. "I promised myself that I would speak in my mother tongue at an official meeting one day."

State TV immediately stopped broadcasting the speech. Turkey's hard-line nationalists, who accuse Turk and his Kurdish-based party, the DTP, of abetting terrorists, rose in uproar. "The seeds of separatism, which were hailed by Erdogan in Kurdish on state television, have started to grow," said Devlet Bahceli, head of the Nationalist Action Party. "The prime minister's new Kurdish initiative has immediately found its ground in the separatist groups."

Now Erdogan faces an impossible decision. Local elections are approaching, and Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) badly needs Kurdish votes if it is to win. But if Erdogan backs the scrapping of all restrictions on the Kurdish language to please Kurdish voters and Europe, he risks alienating mainstream AKP voters--many of whom strongly oppose Kurdish separatism. Equally important, the AKP is just recovering from a yearlong constitutional wrangle with Turkey's ultrasecularist judiciary, which tried to close down the party and ban its leaders from politics for overturning a prohibition against wearing Islamic headscarves in universities. Though the AKP eventually won the dispute, the party emerged chastened, and reluctant to provoke the establishment into further showdowns. Many Turks, and especially the politically powerful military, believe even limited Kurdish rights threaten Turkey's unity and the vision of modern Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who insisted that every citizen of Turkey be a Turk.

Erdogan can't afford a showdown ...