For Kurdish Movement in Turkey, Peace Brings No End to Government Pressure

Winding up his service in the Turkish army, Serdar Tanis, a 22-year-old Kurdish conscript, made what appears to have been a fatal error. He decided to set up a branch of the country’s main Kurdish political party in his native Silopi in southeastern Turkey.

From his faraway barracks near the Bulgarian border, the idea seemed perfectly legitimate. During Tanis’ tour of duty, an armed Kurdish separatist movement had all but collapsed, and shooting had stopped in the mostly Kurdish southeastern provinces. An era of peaceful politicking for Kurdish rights, he thought, was at hand.

Tanis couldn’t have been more wrong. Word of his plans reached Silopi before he did, prompting the local military police commander to telephone the young man’s family. The commander, Tanis complained in a Jan. 8 letter to Turkey’s prime minister and other leaders, threatened to kill him if he set foot in the town.

That, his family suspects, is exactly what happened.

On Jan. 25, days after he defiantly opened an office of the People’s Democracy Party, the largest legal pro-Kurdish group in Turkey, Tanis was summoned to military police headquarters. Another party member, Ebubekir Deniz, 27, went with him, and three witnesses saw them enter the building. The pair have not been seen since.

“We have lost all hope of finding our boys alive,” Tanis’ brother, Yakup, said in a telephone interview from Silopi.

“It is quite clear now who is responsible,” he said. “The Turkish state failed to protect them.”

For Kurds and Turks alike, the incident raises fears of a revival of the extrajudicial killings and mysterious disappearances that were everyday occurrences in the southeast at the peak of the 15-year armed insurgency. Many in the region say the fragile peace that followed the 1999 capture of guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan may be unraveling.

Ocalan, convicted of treason by a Turkish court, dropped his demands for independence and ordered his fighters to withdraw to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. Clashes between Turkish security forces and the guerrillas all but ceased.

But pressure on the 120,000-strong People’s Democracy Party has not.

Turkish prosecutors are trying to get the nation’s highest court to ban the 7-year-old organization on grounds that the party is nothing more than a political arm of the rebels. Party officials are routinely detained, their offices are raided, and scores face trial on charges of promoting Kurdish separatism.

Military police officials in Silopi acknowledge that the two missing party activists “visited” the headquarters but claim that they left after half an hour. Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit says state agencies had nothing to do with their disappearance. Huseyin Baskaya, the provincial governor, claims that they were really government agents sent to spy on the party and had probably been kidnapped by Kurdish guerrillas.

Western diplomats in Ankara, the capital, dismiss the government claims as an effort to cover up new stains on Turkey’s human rights record.

They note that Ecevit’s government has balked at enacting a range of democratic reforms that the European Union is demanding as a condition for starting talks on Turkish membership. The EU wants Turkey to lift bans on education and broadcasting in the Kurdish language, but leaders of the armed forces argue that such concessions will lead to the creation of an independent Kurdish state.

Ahmet Turk, chairman of the People’s Democracy Party, said in a recent interview that peaceful politics is a threat to the heroin and arms trades that thrived in the southeast during the guerrilla war and in which some prominent Kurdish politicians, Turkish security officials and the rebels have been implicated.

Like others in Ankara, he sees a link between the party activists’ disappearances and the Jan. 24 slaying of Gaffar Okan, the liberal-minded Turkish police chief of Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish-dominated city.

Okan, who along with five other policemen was killed by unidentified gunmen, had been popular among Kurds because he learned their language, eased up on abusive police practices and cracked down on organized crime.

Tens of thousands of Kurds attended his funeral.

“It’s as if an invisible hand is seeking to stir up the region and the whole of Turkey again,” Turk said. “Peace is bad business for the war lobby.”