Turkey’s Kurds are caught between an insurgency and a crackdown

A CENTURY and a half of Kurdish history stares at Altan Tan from the photographs in his office on the outskirts of Diyarbakir, the heart of Turkey’s restive south-east. His great-grandfather, a merchant who shuttled between Aleppo and Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, inspects the room from one frame. His father, tortured to death in a state prison after an army coup in 1980, looks up from another. Just two years ago Mr Tan, an engineer and member of parliament, had reason to think Turkey’s Kurds were on the verge of a brighter future. He was a key player in the peace negotiations between Turkey’s government and Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which seemed about to bring the decades-long war between the government and the PKK to a close.

That was before the summer of 2015, when a ceasefire between the PKK and the Turkish army collapsed, unleashing the worst bloodletting in two decades. At least 2,100 people, many of them civilians, have died in the clashes since July 2015. Insurgent strongholds, including swathes of Diyarbakir’s historical centre, have been pummelled by artillery fire and razed to the ground. The south-east’s economy is on its knees. From his office balcony, Mr Tan looks out over rows of vacant apartment blocks and hotels, relics of a building frenzy interrupted by the fighting. “Construction, trade with Syria and Iraq, and tourism have all stopped,” he says. Meanwhile a new front in the conflict has opened across the border in Syria. On October 20th Turkish jets bombed areas claimed by the PKK’s local affiliate, the People’s Protection Units, and claimed to have killed up to 200 fighters.

The vast majority of Turkey’s estimated 15m Kurds opposed July’s coup attempt against the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Yet having packed its prisons with thousands of followers of the Gulen movement, an Islamic sect held responsible for the coup, the government has turned the crackdown against its Kurdish opponents. Drawing on emergency powers, recently extended for another three months, it has removed 28 mayors from office and suspended over 11,000 teachers accused of PKK sympathies. It has sacked dozens of academics who called for an end to security operations in civilian areas. Earlier this month, it closed 20 mostly Kurdish media outlets. The government even shut down a children’s TV station that aired the Smurfs and other cartoons dubbed into Kurdish. Stripped of immunity earlier this year, at least 50 of 59 MPs from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), including Mr Tan, face terror-related charges.

The municipalities whose mayors were removed “had not been governed by elected officials, but by the PKK, and no democracy could have allowed that,” says Orhan Miroglu, a Kurdish deputy from the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party. Sabri Ozdemir, the evicted mayor of Batman, a city an hour’s drive from Diyarbakir, insists this is false. “They couldn’t oust us through the ballot box, so they did so through the state of emergency,” he says. “They accused us of funnelling money to the guerrillas, but our books are clean.” Mr Ozdemir says the conflict will rage as long as the government continues to ignore Kurdish demands for decentralised rule and education in their mother tongue. “If you deprive young people of political representation, they have no choice but to wage violent struggle,” he says.

Yet the PKK’s leadership also bears responsibility. In the last three months alone, the group’s car bomb and suicide attacks against army and police targets have killed some 200 people, according to the International Crisis Group, a think-tank. Last week, its militants gunned down two local AK officials. The PKK needs to part with the fantasy, says Mr Tan, that it can recreate in Turkey’s southeast the kind of statelet it has forged across the border in Syria. Turkey views that statelet as a threat. Turkey’s Kurds have nothing to gain from violence, Mr Tan says. “When they say they do not want war, that they want to remain part of Turkey, the PKK does not listen. And when they ask the state for new rights, the state does not listen.”

Four decades into the conflict, each side understands but does not acknowledge that it will never be able to claim victory on its own terms. A return to talks is inevitable, sooner or later. For now, however, using the failed coup against him as cover, Mr Erdogan is trampling on the same rights he granted the Kurds in years past. The insurgency he faces is growing more radical. Turkey’s Kurdish conflict might have to get worse before it can get better.