Turkey Eases Hard Line Against Kurds

After police confiscated the first seven editions of the radical Kurdish magazine Deng, it came as no surprise when uniformed raiders appeared recently at the magazine’s ramshackle offices here to cart away all 1,400 copies of No. 8 as well.

“The police chief told me, ‘We wouldn’t pressure you so much if you didn’t write in Kurdish,’ ” recalled Abdulvehab Karhan, Deng’s 28-year-old editor, who said he was first arrested and tortured for his Kurdish nationalist political views in 1981.

It had never occurred to Karhan that a war could suddenly make his forbidden language sound good to the Turkish government, but that now seems to be happening.

Out of the blue, President Turgut Ozal announced last weekend in Ankara that he will ask Parliament, which he controls, to scrap legislation that bans Kurdish.

Such laws are outdated and no longer enforceable, government spokesmen piously aver, even as American warplanes from Turkey intensify daily raids against targets in Kurdish areas of neighboring Iraq.

What is Ozal up to?

“It’s not a holy day and it’s not a family feast. Why am I being kissed by my uncle?” asked columnist Gungor Mengi in the mass circulation newspaper Sabah with the same incredulity being voiced across a nation where Kurd has been a dirty word to all governments almost since the founding of the modern Turkish republic in 1923.

Until recently, the Ozal government haughtily dismissed the notion that there were Kurds in Turkey, terming them “mountain Turks.” A few months ago, two lawyers went to jail for speaking Kurdish at an Istanbul human rights meeting.

Systematic repression of all things Kurdish, beginning with the Indo-European Kurdish language, has been the unswerving policy of a procession of Turkish rulers threatened by successive Kurdish revolts. The intent has been to speed assimilation of a stubborn Kurdish minority that now totals about 12 million in a nation of 57 million where Uro-Altaic Turkish is the official tongue and Turkish the national culture.

Uprisings by a Kurdish people, who are neither Turk nor Arab nor Persian, have vexed Turkey since the 19th Century. For the past six years, Islamic Marxist guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party have skirmished with government troops here in the poor and mountainous Turkish southeast. More than 2,000 persons have died, victims of a Quixotic guerrilla dream of an independent Kurdistan grouping the estimated 25 million Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and the Soviet Union.

Winter and the war presence of unprecedented numbers of Turkish troops in this nation’s southeastern region have dampened the insurgency, but not official vigilance. As part of war security measures after a year of escalating violence, the government has sealed Kurdish refugee camps in the southeast. The camps hold the 30,000 remaining Iraqi Kurds of more than 60,000 who fled into Turkey after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s forces killed 5,000 people with gas in the village of Halabja in 1987.

War will also probably delay the emigration of about 3,000 of the Iraqi Kurdish refugees to the United States, the largest group of whom, U.S. officials say, is scheduled to join relatives in California towns such as Lemon Grove and El Cajon in San Diego County.

With history as a guide, it is little wonder then that Diyarbakir, a dusty, down-at-heel metropolis of 1 million that is the world’s largest Kurdish city, is nonplussed by Ozal’s abrupt about-face in the middle of a war in which Turkey teeters nervously between bystander and participant.

“We don’t believe that Ozal is sincere. He has made no sacrifice for the Kurdish people. Why should we believe him now?” asked editor Karhan in a city dominated by Kurdish men and women.

Said Faysal Dagli, local correspondent for the Kurdish nationalist news weekly Ulke: “It’s a game. They’re trying to co-opt the Kurds and fix their international image.” Ulke’s last six issues have been suppressed, Dagli says, for alleged “weakening national feelings, separatism, lying news and communist propaganda.”

Knowledgeable commentators such as Sabah’s columnist Mengi suggest that Ozal, flush with Western praise for his ferocity against Iraq, may be hoping to add more luster in the eyes of the European Community, which is cool to Turkey’s application to membership.

He may also be aiming to undercut the separatists and to woo greater support among Turkish Kurds. As a result of major migration in the past two decades, about half of them live in the poorer suburbs of western Turkish cities now, and half in 20 provinces in the southeast where anti-war protests have been strongest and the growth of Islamic fundamentalism most pronounced.

Finally, the commentators suggest, the timing of his move could mean that Ozal is eager to seem avuncular in the eyes of the Kurds in northern Iraq in the event of geographical changes after the war. Turkey, which controlled Iraq, Kuwait and the Arabian Peninsula for 400 years until World War I, believes that the oil-rich provinces of Mosul and Kirkuk in northern Iraq were unfairly taken from it in 1926.

Whatever the underlying reasons prove to be, the decision is a landmark that reportedly sparked vigorous debate within Ozal’s Cabinet. Lifting language restrictions will make a crack in the dam against a much larger question about the future of a fierce people who claim to be the descendants of Noah. Every Turk understands that the Kurds will want more than the right to speak a language they have been talking anyway, Turkish laws or no.

Turkey has been the country that offered most opportunities for Kurds who wanted to join the system. There is no limit to how high a Kurd may climb in Turkey, as long as he does it as a Turk. Now, people wonder how much the rules will change--and why Ozal should tamper with them just now.

Black-walled Diyarbakir may one day celebrate Ozal’s initiative. For the moment it is cautious, waiting, in a war, for the other shoe to drop.