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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 March 2000 Issue No. 472 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 March 2000 Issue No. 472
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Books Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Banning the Kurds
By Gareth Jenkins
Hopes that the January decision by the Turkish government to postpone executing imprisoned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan would finally end the bitter, 16-year-old low-level war in south-eastern Turkey received another setback on 2 March when six PKK militants and three Turkish soldiers were killed in a gun battle near the town of Sirnak.
The clash came only two days after the Turkish authorities had bowed to international pressure and released on bail three mayors from the pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party (HADEP), who had been arrested the previous week on accusations of aiding and abetting the PKK. However, the public prosecutor insisted that the three, who represent the predominantly Kurdish cities of Diyarbakir, Siirt and Bingols, will still face charges.
The arrests followed a series of meetings last month between visiting delegations from EU member states and local mayors in the south-east of the country, where HADEP won 37 mayoralties in the April 1999 elections. The Turkish authorities, it seemed, had become concerned that HADEP was serving as the PKK's political wing and using the meetings to lobby the EU to increase pressure on Ankara to allow the country's 15 million Kurds greater cultural and political rights.
The detentions triggered a storm of protest from the EU. "The arrest of elected representatives is unacceptable," said European Parliament President Nicole Fontaine.
"This kind of incident negatively affects Turkey's image," Danish Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen bluntly told his hosts on 3 March, during a two-day visit to Ankara.
Signs are increasing that Ankara is backing down from its late 1999 pledges to relax restrictions on the expression of a Kurdish identity. The authorities shut down the television channel CNN Turk on 18 February, an affiliate of the US television giant, for 24 hours after an interviewer asked whether Ocalan might become another Nelson Mandela (even though he received a negative reply).
Turkish courts sentenced 18 leading HADEP officials on 24 February, including current chairman Ahmet Turan Demir and previous chairman Murat Bozlak, to three years and nine months in prison on charges of organising hunger strikes in support of Ocalan following his capture in Kenya in February 1999.
"If the PKK wants to enter politics in accordance with the rules and regulations of Turkey, and it wants to put an end to violence and ensure that it never returns, everyone should be pleased and welcome it," insisted Ahmet Turan Demir, after receiving his jail sentence. Such an assertion is in itself likely to trigger further prosecution under Turkey's draconian restrictions on any statement which might be interpreted as encouraging separatism.
Turkish daily Milliyet reported on 6 March that the interior minister had issued a circular to provincial governors to prevent customers at Internet cafes from accessing any Web sites deemed to be encouraging separatism.
The clamp-down is likely to increase the pressure on the PKK leadership from hard-line elements within the organisation, who are reluctant to comply with Ocalan's statements from prison in late 1999, when he called for PKK militants to leave Turkish territory and continue the campaign by political rather than military means.
Although hard-liners have agreed to a unilateral cease-fire, they tend to see it as a suspension, not renunciation, of the armed struggle. Last Thursday's clash in Sirnak has again demonstrated that renegade groups remain active inside Turkey. Even those militants who have withdrawn from Turkey are continuing military training in camps in the mountains along the country's borders with Iraq and Iran. There is little doubt that, although its military capabilities have been severely weakened by setbacks on the battlefield during the late 1990s and the devastating blow to morale of Ocalan's capture, the organisation retains sufficient resources to launch a low-level rural insurgency or an urban terrorism campaign.
"One of the reasons that the government has postponed carrying out Ocalan's sentence is the fear that it could make him a martyr and trigger another upsurge in violence," said one long-time observer of the PKK. "But if the organisation sees that the government is determined to prevent even peaceful political activism, such as by locking up all these people from HADEP, then there is real danger that they may decide they have no alternative but to return to violence. And who really wants that?"
