Surge in Kurdish Nationalism Poses Tough Test for New Turkish Regime : Rebellion: Minority flexes muscle in Parliament, where it has 22 new members, and on the battlefield.

After 70 years of suppression in modern Turkey, political and revolutionary ferment is sweeping the nation’s 12 million Kurds. A perilous, sometimes violent celebration of Kurdish identity rocks their homeland here in southeastern Turkey and poses a new challenge to stability in the volatile Middle East.

Formulating policies to confront Kurdish nationalism will be an early and major test of a new Turkish government being assembled by Suleyman Demirel, winner of last Sunday’s national elections.

“Four years ago, the Turkish government worried about how to control terrorism in the southeast. Now, a new government must consider how to re-win the southeast,” said Ismet Imset, a correspondent for the Turkish Daily News who specializes in the southeast.

It was only yesterday that Kurdish nationalists told visitors of their dreams in careful mutters through the fierce mustaches that are the ethnic insignias of their men.

Now they are in full cry.

Kurdish Turkey cheers: Twenty-two radical Kurds, many of them former political prisoners, will sit in the new Parliament. In a six-party race, the radicals drew more than three-quarters of the vote in parts of Diyarbakir, the world’s largest Kurdish city. “We shall be the voice of Kurdish liberation,” said Leila Zana, 31, elected by a landslide.

And Kurdish Turkey bleeds: Throughout the southeast, the radical Kurdish candidates were openly supported by a Marxist guerrilla movement, officially the Kurdistan Workers Party, universally known by its initials as the PKK. There are new deaths almost every day now, 50 to 100 a month--soldiers, guerrillas, peasants.

After seven years of a struggle that has claimed about 3,300 lives, the PKK is growing rapidly in size, scope and skill.

A Kurdish insurgency based in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley of Lebanon may now have up to 3,000 fighters, independent Turkish sources say. The PKK has mounted sporadic attacks in Turkish cities, but it is in the countryside where the insurgency--in many ways a Turkish echo of Peru’s Shining Path guerrilla movement--strikes hardest.

“The government rules by day, but the nights belong to us,” boasted one PKK activist in Diyarbakir.

Founded by college dropout Abdullah Ocalan, now about 48 and known as “Apo” to his followers, the PKK calls for an independent Kurdistan. Besides Syria, the PKK is thought to have had at least some official support from Iran.

Turkish sources say the PKK is increasingly well armed, thanks in part to the spoils of war in northern Iraq, where the Iraqi army lost division-loads of weapons during an Iraqi Kurdish uprising at the end of the Persian Gulf War.

The sources say the PKK’s newest weapons, most of them of Chinese manufacture but perhaps also including U.S.-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles, appear to have been sold or at least brokered by Afghan rebels and smuggled through Iran.

Ocalan offered to send his guerrillas into battle alongside the Iraqi army if it clashed with Turkey during the Gulf crisis, but there is no evidence that Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein has been arming or supplying the PKK, according to a wide range of officials.

Faced with an insurgency that has grown almost overnight from nuisance to threat, Turkey’s armed forces are fighting back. Air force jets recently strafed and dropped napalm on a handful of villages in northern Iraq that may have been used as PKK transit areas, and Turkish infantry has also made shallow probes into areas of northern Iraq controlled by Iraqi Kurds.

Heavy military traffic in border areas may presage an attempt to seal off PKK infiltration routes into Turkey. The government has also created a paid militia of about 30,000 to guard southeastern villages.

“The forces of the state will win, but we do not want to infringe on democracy. If we did not take democracy into account, we could finish this off in six months. . . ,” Dogan Gures, army chief of staff, told a Turkish newspaper. “I compare these people to sharks. They live in water. The water feeds them. . . . We will cut off the water.”

Already, elite army and police counterinsurgency teams prowl the countryside. As in Peru, it is a tragic game of peasant-in-the-middle. The PKK eats farmers’ supplies and recruits their sons, sometimes forcibly. Government forces kill farmers’ livestock and sometimes blow up their houses for collaborating with the guerrillas.

Death squads have sprung up--heavily armed civilians with walkie-talkies who raid by night. One such group took Kurdish nationalist politician Vedat Aydin from his home in August. His body was found 36 hours later. Seven demonstrating Kurds were shot to death at his funeral in Diyarbakir.

Gures and other Turkish officials say fear is the main reason behind the PKK’s growing influence, but there is another view.

“I feel sympathy for them because they have taken on leadership of the people,” said a 32-year-old unemployed worker in the storefront office of a political party, the room dominated by a primitive painting of a peasant girl with a gun. “We’ll make the Turks accept our Kurdish identity.”

About 20 million Kurds, a non-Turkic, Indo-European people, live in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and the Soviet Union. They have been an oft-suppressed and as often rebellious minority.

Since shortly after the establishment of the Turkish nation-state by Kemal Ataturk in 1923, Turkey has officially denied the existence of the Kurds as a minority.

For decades it was forbidden to speak Kurdish in public, to listen to Kurdish music or to publish in Kurdish. Traditionally, Kurds who played by Turkish rules climbed as high in all areas of Turkish society as their talents allowed.

“There is no difference between Kurds and Turks. They all have their rights. They can be generals, deputies, even ministers,” said an official in the government’s emergency-rule headquarters here.

But since the 1920s, a vociferous minority of Kurdish poets, singers and politicians have been jailed. Human rights workers say there are still 400 to 600 Kurdish political prisoners in the Diyarbakir jail.

Parliament partly lifted the Kurdish-language restrictions in January at the behest of President Turgut Ozal. It was a revolutionary act, but some Kurdish hard-liners denounced it as a cynical attempt by Ozal to win support of Turkish Kurds for Turkey’s pro-American stand in the Gulf War.

The lifting of the language ban--plus the willingness of the guerrillas to put their lives on the line in a national cause and the international attention attracted by the flight of half a million Kurds from Iraq last spring--has changed the rules in the Turkish southeast.

Ozal, his power stripped by an election loss, says he is even willing to talk to Kurdish leaders about why there cannot be a new federated Turkish-Kurdish state.

Amid strong rumors of an impending military crackdown, Ozal pleaded for his soft line last week, saying: “Everybody must be able to talk about his ethnic identity. This problem will not be solved by the stick and gun. . . . “

Demirel, on his past record, seems much less receptive to any sort of a Kurdish national cause.

Calls for total independence ring out regularly now from the awakening southeast, but even many Kurds dismiss them as rhetorical. Rather, they believe that a realistic future might hold an autonomous or federated Kurdish region in union with Turkey.

If history is any measure, more blood may have to be spilled first. Kurds in Iraq have been negotiating with Hussein for months and seem no closer to the autonomy that he promised them long ago.

Still, even if Demirel authorizes a crackdown in the southeast, there seems no chance that the freshly sprung genie of Kurdish nationalism can be returned to its decade-old bottle.

Special correspondent Hugh Pope contributed to this report.