Kurdish rebels take chance on peace talks

“I shall persist with the peace initiative even if costs me my political career. I’d drink hemlock poison to end the hostilities,” said the prime minister.

“If this fails, I’m a dead man,” said the guerrilla leader from his isolated island jail.

The stakes are high as Turkey begins negotiations with its Kurdish minority to end a 30-year conflict that has claimed 40,000 lives.

Thursday was Nowruz, the Kurdish (and Persian) new year (celebrated in Toronto with gusto by the Canadian Iranian community). In Diyarbakir, in the Kurdish heartland of Turkey, tens of thousands turned up to mark the occasion but also because word had come that their leader, Abdullah Ocalan, serving a life sentence for terrorism, was going to send a historic message.

He did. There was to be a ceasefire. “We are moving from armed resistance to political struggle. Let the guns be silent and political ideas dominate.” Kurdish guerrillas, operating from mountain hideouts, about 4,000 of them, are to cross the border to their bases in northern Iraq.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan welcomed the call that he himself had engineered, at great political risk, through secret talks, first in Oslo, then in Turkey.

This moment had been dreamed of for decades, since the origins of the conflict at the end of the First World War.

When the allied powers divvied up the Ottoman Empire, they went back on their promise of a separate state for the Kurds. The new rump state of Turkey did not want an independent Kurdish state either, so the indigenous mountain people of Southwest Asia found themselves spread over Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran.

They rebelled but were put down at various times by all four states.

In Turkey, they have suffered systemic ethnic, cultural and linguistic discrimination, due mainly to narrow Turkish nationalism that demanded total assimilation of minorities.

In 1978, Ocalan founded the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, by its Kurdish initials). In 1984, the Marxist group launched an armed campaign for a separate homeland. The insurgency was beaten back by the Turkish armed forces. Tens of thousands of Kurds fled to Europe. Ocalan found refuge in Syria, courtesy of Hafez Assad, who backed him as part of his tactics of cultivating the enemies of neighbouring states. It was only in 1999 when Turkey threatened war that he expelled Ocalan, who was nabbed by Turkish agents in Kenya.

Turkey sentenced him to life for treason but it could not break his hold on his Kurdish people.

Erdogan — elected in 2002 and twice more since, with greater majorities — made small yet unprecedented concessions to the Kurds. He lifted the ban on Kurdish symbols and language — state TV now has a Kurdishlanguage channel and Kurdish is taught in schools. Kurdish defendants can use their own language in courts. Health care and infrastructure were improved. He opened back channel talks with Ocalan. But there were setbacks. A tape of the secret talks in Oslo was leaked to the media. There were new clashes in the mountains and TV coverage of soldiers’ coffins coming home. Terrorists planted bombs. Public opinion turned sour.

It was widely assumed that the peace process was being sabotaged by either a) militant PKK factions, unhappy that the dream of a separate homeland was being traded for greater autonomy, or b) right-wing Turkish nationalists who wanted the Kurds — “Mountain Turks” — to remain subservient.

Thousands of Kurds remain in jail, including for peaceful activity. It’s not clear whether this is at the behest of the government or old-style secular nationalist prosecutors, who remain a law unto themselves.

Regardless, those in jail for peaceful activity must be released. There are already calls for amnesty for Ocalan. Retreating guerrillas would want guarantees of safe withdrawal. In return, terrorism must cease.

Turkey needs to make peace with its Kurdish citizens — up to 15 million in a population of 75 million. Erdogan has the democratic legitimacy to do so. It is said he’s doing it to strengthen the case for Turkey’s entry into the European Union. I am not sure he or a majority of Turks care any longer, given Europe’s racism and economic malaise.

This is more a reflection of Turkey’s own internal maturity as the leading Muslim democracy and a rising economic power. Setting the internal house in order also serves Turkey’s regional interests — and also those of the transnational Kurds.

It neutralizes Bashar Assad’s mischief-making in courting the PKK, just as his late father did. It also enhances Turkey’s already existing co-operation with the semi-autonomous — and oil- and gas-rich — Kurdish regional government in Iraq (one rare benefit of the 2003 American invasion and occupation).

If done right, within the sovereignty of the states involved, this new axis of political and economic convenience may do more for the Kurds than anything else in the last 90 years. hsiddiqui@thestar.ca