THE OTHER CIVIL WAR
A family tragedy unfolds at home in Turkey’s fight with Kurdish militants,
NUSAYBIN, TURKEY— Three-month-old Miray Ince was in her mother’s arms, returning from a Christmas Day visit to relatives in a neighbouring apartment. Gunshots suddenly rang out — and a stray bullet passed through the infant’s cheek, causing a fatal wound.
Ramazan Ince and his elderly wife responded by ferrying their dying granddaughter outside to an ambulance. They waved a white flag to signal they were no threat, but they, too, were shot in the street.
“They thought the (Turkish) security forces wouldn’t target the elderly,” said the dead girl’s father, Burhan Ince.
Ramazan died of his wounds the next morning. His wife was taken into intensive care but was later released.
The devastation in Syria and the international campaign against the Islamic State group have drowned out one of the Middle East’s most intractable struggles: Turkey’s war with Kurdish militants.
Millions of Kurds in Turkey are deeply affected by a conflict they are not actively participating in. They feel under siege by their own government.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has fuelled their fear by saying to Kurdish militants: “You will be annihilated in those houses, those buildings, those ditches which you have dug.”
Cizre, the predominantly Kurdish town in southeast Turkish home to the Ince family, had been under siege by government forces for 11 days when the Inces made their fateful Christmas visit.
Since July, more than 2,000 Kurdish militants and civilians, and 130 soldiers and security officers, have died.
Turkey’s government sent 10,000 soldiers to the predominantly Kurdish southeast and said that since mid-December, military operations in Cizre, Nusaybin and Silopi have killed more than 200 armed “terrorists” that had taken over several towns and districts.
For more than 30 years, Turkey fought separatist militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, leading to 40,000 deaths. Thousands more disappeared under police custody during the brutal military dictatorships of the 1980s and ’90s when civil rights for Kurds were suppressed.
Two-and-a-half years ago, a historic understanding was announced between Erdogan’s AKP and the PKK to begin talks. That ended last July, when Kurdish militants began assassinating police officers and soldiers following the massacre of 32 Kurdish and other activists in Suruc; the militants blamed the government for not protecting Kurds and for inciting anti-Kurd feeling during an election campaign.
With the Kurdish death toll mounting, Kurdish political parties recently called for autonomy in southeast Turkey, a move likely to deepen a political crisis between the government and the leading Kurdish-rooted party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). For its part, the Turkish government has refused to reenter talks with the PKK, which is recognized by Ottawa, the U.S. and Europe as a terrorist organization.
“The solutions to this problem are politicians,” said Leyla Imret, a Kurdish official who, as a child, fled to Germany when her father was killed by security forces. She lived there for 17 years before returning to Turkey in 2013. A year later and all of 27 years of age, Imret became co-mayor of Cizre — Turkey’s youngest ever.
“Negotiations should be opened according to the demands of the people,” she said. “A solution should be launched with dialogue, not with the tanks and artillery.”
Imret is also a casualty of the return to war. In September, she was fired by the central government, who accused her of encouraging “terrorist propaganda.”
“We hear artillery fire, bombs, gunfire,” she says of life in Cizre in a phone con- versation. “People can’t bury their dead. The food is slowly running out.
“The curfew has to be lifted immediately. There is no right to punish innocent people this way.”
In a region replete with unrest, the international community’s attention has skipped past the Kurdish conflict, despite the increasing civilian deaths. Turkey has become an important partner for the European Union since reaching a deal in November that will see it prevent refugees from entering Greece in exchange for billions of dollars.
On top of this, the war in neighbouring Syria has added a new source of fuel to the conflict. Kurds in northern Syria have successfully started to carve out autonomous regions and Turkey fears their success has now reignited hopes for independence among Kurds in Turkey.
For Burhan Ince, the politics of the conflicts do not capture the pain of his now-shattered life.
“What we live pushes the limits of the human mind. We cannot bury our dead,” Burhan said through a spokesperson for the Kurdish HDP party.
“I want all Europe and Turkey hear our voice . . . Although we informed them beforehand, the state forces have shot my father, my mother and the baby Miray while they were going to the ambulance. This is ferocity and we want all the world to see this ferocity.”