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COPYRIGHT 2001 JAI Press, Inc.
In November 1998, Turkey's Kurdish question returned to the top of the international agenda with the seizure in Italy of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the rebellious Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan--PKK). Demonstrations in support of Ocalan's release wreaked havoc throughout Europe and served as a reminder of the war between the PKK and the Turkish state that has claimed over 30,000 lives since 1984. A month before his seizure, Ocalan had been expelled from Damascus, his base for the last nineteen years, after Turkey had threatened Syria with war unless it ceased to provide a safe haven for the PKK. Having failed to find asylum in Russia, Belgium, or the Netherlands, Ocalan--apparently acting on an invitation from Italian leftists--believed he could find refuge in Italy. After heavy Turkish and American pressure, Ocalan was nevertheless forced to leave Italy and seek asylum elsewhere, but was eventually apprehended by Turkish security forces on February 16, 1999, in Nairobi, Kenya.
The Kurdish question is arguably the most serious internal problem in the Turkish republic's seventy-seven-year history and certainly the main obstacle to its aspirations to full integration with European institutions. Most Westerners define the problem simply as a matter of oppression and denial of rights by a majority group (the Turks) of an ethnic minority (the Kurds). The civil war in southeastern Turkey that raged between 1984 and 1999 is accordingly viewed as a national liberation movement and enjoys widespread sympathy both in the West and in the Third World. The Turkish political elite, for its part, promotes an entirely different view of the problem, which is often misunderstood and ridiculed in the West. In official Turkish discourse, there is no Kurdish problem, but rather a socioeconomic problem in the southeastern region and a problem of terrorism that is dependent on external support from foreign states aiming at weakening Turkey. In reality, neither the official Turkish view nor the dominant We stern perception holds up to close scrutiny. A deeper study of the problem reveals its extreme complexity, with a number of facets and dimensions that tend to obscure the essentials of the conflict.
One observation that should be made at the outset is that the Kurdish issue in Turkey differs in many respects from such recent ethnic conflicts as those in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Liberia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Rwanda. Despite almost two decades of armed conflict and thousands of casualties, open tensions in society between Turks and Kurds remain, under the circumstances, minimal. Foreigners are startled by the discovery that a significant portion of Turkey's political and business elite is of Kurdish origin, including three of the country's nine presidents--something unthinkable for Kosovars or Chechens--and that Kurds' representation in the country's parliament is larger than their proportion of the population. [1] At the same time, it is difficult to refute the assertion that there is an ethnic dimension of the conflict, in the sense that a portion of the country's population holds on to an identity distinct from that of the majority and feels discriminated against on the basis of that identity, result ing in at least a limited ethnic mobilization. In addition to the irrefutable ethnic aspect, the Kurdish problem contains oft-neglected social, economic, political, ideological, and international dimensions that have carried different weight at different times.
Several points need to be understood with regard to the origins and future prospects of the Kurdish problem in Turkey. A thorough grasp of the problem requires, first, an understanding of the national conception underlying the Turkish state and society. Secondly, it must take into account the social (and not only ethnic) distinctiveness of the Kurds and their relationship with the republic's leadership. Thirdly, the Kurdish problem in Turkey must be understood as distinct from the problem of PKK terrorism. Finally, the Kurdish question must be understood within the analysis of the general process of democratization in Turkey.
The National Conception of the Turkish Republic
The Turkish republic is the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, which dissolved during the First World War after more than a century of decay. However, the republic is a dramatically different construct from its predecessor. The Ottoman Empire was an authoritarian monarchy with a religious foundation derived from the sultan's claim that he was also the caliph, the spiritual head of all Muslims of the world. The empire recognized minorities and accorded them extensive self-rule, but it defined minorities in religious terms. Hence, no Muslim people was ever accorded minority rights, while Jews and Christian Armenians, Serbs, Greeks, and others were. Before the twentieth century, this approach posed few problems, especially given that the Muslim peoples in the empire developed national identities considerably later than the empire's Christian subjects in the Balkans, and did so at least partly as a result of the latter's emerging national awareness. Collective identities were based primarily on religion--Isl am at the broadest level and various religious orders and sects at the local level--and regional or clanbased units.
The Turkish republic, by contrast, was modeled upon the nation-states of Western Europe, particularly France. It was guided by six "arrows" or principles enunciated by its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: republicanism, nationalism, secularism, populism, etatism, and reformism. Among these, the first three principles form the foundations of the republic. Although Turkey was no democracy in Ataturk's lifetime, the principles of republicanism and populism suggest the goal of popular rule, that is, a democratic political system. [2] In the speeches and writings of Ataturk, republicanism unmistakably meant a break with the monarchy of the past. [3] The second pillar, secularism, entailed a break with the Islamic character of the state. Although religion was to be kept out of political life, however, this is not to imply that Kemalist Turkey was in any way atheistic. Indeed, as Dogu Ergil has noted, Ataturk's highest goal in the religious field was the translation of the Quran into Turkish. In fact, the aim of the new regime was twofold: to dissociate the state from religious principles, and to "teach religion in Turkish to a people who had been practicing Islam without understanding it for centuries." [4] The regime's policies, most blatantly the abolition of the caliphate, nevertheless enraged the more religious parts of the population. This included the Kurds, who have been described as being at that time "a feudal people... of extreme religious beliefs." [5] Indeed, the Kurdish population was ruled by local hereditary chieftains whose power often stemmed from the backing of the Naqshbandi or Qadiri religious orders.
The founding principle most relevant to the Kurdish question, however, is nationalism. The new state was based on Turkish nationalism, but the territory comprising the republic was a highly multiethnic area even before the large migrations that took place in the late nineteenth...
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