6 - 12 September 2001
Issue No.550
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 6 - 12 September 2001 Issue No.550 |
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Turkish travails
As elections near, Turkish police detain nearly 1,000 Kurdish supporters and a smear campaign against a popular new party begins. Gareth Jenkins reports from Ankara
Around 570 supporters of the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HADEP) were taken into custody in Ankara alone on Saturday as they tried to defy the local governor's rejection of an application by the party to hold a rally in the city's main square. As police cells filled, many had to be held in a nearby football stadium.
Throughout Turkey's predominantly Kurdish south-eastern provinces, the security forces intervened to break up marches as demonstrators chanted slogans in support of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) and its leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has been on death row on the prison island of Imrali since July 1999. In the impoverished Istanbul neighbourhood of Zeytinburnu, police baton-charged 3,000 Kurds who were trying to hold a rally. Many sought refuge in the local HADEP offices. Police stormed the building and 19 year-old Zeynel Durmus died after falling from a fifth floor ventilation duct as he tried to flee.
The clashes have come at a time of increasing frustration amongst Turkey's 12 million Kurds that, two years after the PKK officially renounced its 15 year-old armed struggle, the Turkish authorities have still not relaxed the draconian restrictions on the expression of Kurdish identity. In mid- August, the authorities banned a string of local radio and television stations for broadcasting songs in Kurdish. Even the Turkish language broadcasts of the BBC World Service and Germany's Deutsche Welle have been banned on the grounds that their references to Kurds as a distinct cultural and ethnic group constitute separatist propaganda.
Publicly, the Turkish authorities attempt to justify their intransigence by claiming that the PKK's abandonment of the armed struggle in September 1999 is merely a ruse. Turkish intelligence reports claim that the PKK has 5,000 armed militants in camps in Iran and northern Iraq waiting for the right moment to renew the struggle in the mountains of southeastern Turkey.
But privately, sources close to the Turkish military admit that they are far more worried about the PKK exploiting the deepening economic recession to launch a campaign of urban terrorism. Since the collapse of the Turkish lira in February 2001, over 750,000 people are estimated to have lost their jobs. According to figures released on Friday by the Turkish State Institute of Statistics, Turkey's Gross National Product shrank by an annual rate of 11.8 per cent in the second quarter of 2001, the largest contraction since World War II.
"The economic situation makes people desperate and when they become desperate they listen to extremists, whether they are PKK or Islamists," said a source close to the military. "We have to be very careful not to allow anything to happen that might destabilise the situation and trigger a social explosion. That would play right into the separatists' and fundamentalists' hands."
But other state institutions appear less concerned about provoking the country's long-suffering citizens. For many poor Turks, last month's establishment of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) seemed to offer a glimmer of hope. Born out of the wreckage of the banned Virtue Party, the AKP promised a combination of piety and probity and was founded by a younger generation of conservatives under the leadership of Tayyip Erdogan, the charismatic 46 year-old former mayor of Istanbul. When the AKP was founded, public opinion polls suggested that it would win over 30 per cent of the popular vote, enough to bring it to power on its own in the next general election.
But many Turkish secularists remained suspicious of Erdogan, claiming that he secretly planned to establish a state based on Islamic shari'a law. In late August, the Istanbul public prosecutor launched an investigation into a video recording from the early 1990s apparently showing Erdogan advocating the overthrow of secularism. If convicted, Erdogan could face not just a lengthy prison term but a lifetime ban from politics. In a separate development, the Court of Cassation Prosecutor issued a warning to the AKP that it should remove six female founding members of the party on the grounds that they wear headscarves. Taking its cue from the judiciary, Turkey's mainstream press has now launched its own smear campaign against Erdogan, accusing him of everything from irritability to advocating abandoning "Western" dress such as jackets and ties.
"I knew they would start a smear campaign sometime. I just didn't think it would be so soon," wrote columnist Fehmi Koru ruefully in the pro-Islamist daily Yeni Safak.
The smear campaign is likely to intensify in the weeks ahead. Last Sunday, as relations between the three coalition partners became mired in mutual allegations of corruption, Deputy Prime Minister Devlet Bahceli of the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (MHP) warned his party workers that elections were imminent. Yet, according to a public opinion poll conducted last week, in the next elections the three coalition partners are unlikely to receive more than 11.5 per cent of the vote between them. Despite the smear campaign, the AKP still received the backing of 23.8 per cent of those questioned, far ahead of its nearest rival, the True Path Party of former prime minister Tansu Ciller with 5.9 per cent.
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