Return of Masked Police Stirs Fear Among Kurds of Turkey

The new face of Turkish authority in this restless Kurdish metropolis wears a black ski mask.

The mask is the calling card of a police squad known as the Special Team. Its members, armed with automatic rifles, prowl the city’s most volatile streets at night, hunting for any display of support for the fighters who waged a 15-year separatist war in this predominantly Kurdish province of southeastern Turkey.

When the insurgents declared a truce and retreated to northern Iraq four years ago, the masked men also faded away. Their return in recent weeks is a sign of Turkey’s fear that an autonomous Kurdish state could emerge from the war in Iraq, reviving a separatist fervor among this country’s 12 million Kurds and bringing the armed rebels back.

In a preemptive crackdown, the masked squad and other police units have made more than 1,200 arrests this year, rounding up Kurdish political activists across the region and crushing their street demonstrations, the independent Human Rights Assn. said. Last month the country’s top prosecutor asked a court to ban the main Kurdish political party.

Kurdish leaders say these measures have stalled the momentum toward promised reforms that would let their people study and hear local broadcasts in their native language. With world attention focused on Iraq, the Kurds of Turkey say they are suffering unnoticed fallout from the war there.

“Over the past four years, people here began to learn what it means to be free from the pressure of the state,” said Sezgin Tanrikuli, president of the Bar Assn. in Diyarbakir, the region’s largest city. “But now, instead of standing behind the peaceful aspirations of its people, the state is behaving again as if it is at war with them.”

The city’s elected Kurdish officials, entrepreneurs, human rights advocates, students and slum dwellers voice alarm over the darkening political climate. They are frustrated that the Bush administration, which openly supports democratic freedoms for their Iraqi Kurdish kin but is struggling to win Turkish cooperation in the war, has made no public protest.

The conviction, from the Kurdish elite to the Kurdish street, is that the Turks are trying to provoke new violence here to justify a massive army incursion against the camps in northern Iraq.

Turkish leaders say they are reacting to provocation at home, including two rare exchanges of gunfire in January between the army and remnants of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. The rebel group has threatened full-scale attacks in Turkey if the army enters northern Iraq’s Kurdish-controlled enclave.

In Diyarbakir, an ancient walled city of 800,000 people, television sets flicker into the predawn hours as viewers follow the war in Iraq, unfolding across a border just 130 miles away. They root quietly for the Iraqi Kurdish militias that have joined a southward American assault against cities held by Saddam Hussein’s army.

They would rejoice, they say, if their ethnic brethren ended up governing the northern region of a democratic Iraq. It would be the first instance of Kurdish self-rule recognized by any of the countries -- Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey -- where an estimated 23 million Kurds live, and where their forebears lived for centuries as ignored or oppressed minorities.

While hoping that such an outcome could serve as a model for Turkey, the Kurds here say they dread what might happen instead -- a renewal of the fighting that claimed more than 30,000 lives in Turkey and turned the already impoverished Kurdish region into a patchwork of war-ruined villages and refugee-crammed cities.

“The war never really ended,” said Mustafa Karahan, head of the local office of the Democratic People’s Party, which the top prosecutor wants to shut down for alleged collaboration with armed rebels. “Unless there is a peaceful solution, one that recognizes our political and cultural rights, the Kurdish people could rise up and fight again.”

Since the fighters’ retreat, which followed the 1999 capture of rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, Kurdish cities have been allowed to elect mayors and hold outdoor celebrations of Newruz, a spring equinox festival popular in Kurdish and Persian cultures. Last year, Turkey ended nearly two decades of “emergency rule” in Kurdish provinces, stripping the police of legal power to hold people indefinitely without charges.

Thousands of Kurds are still in prison for peaceful resistance during the war. But Turkey, seeking entry to the European Union, has agreed to review cases challenged by the European Court of Human Rights. Last week a Turkish court began retrying Leyla Zana, who was imprisoned nine years ago for reciting in Kurdish her oath as a new member of parliament.

But these tentative steps toward reconciliation have been overshadowed by omens of war.

On Nov. 27, the authorities isolated Ocalan from his lawyers -- an apparent effort to disrupt any communication between the PKK chief, who is serving a life sentence, and the 4,000 or so fighters who still obey him. In protest, unarmed supporters took to the dirt streets and winding alleys of Diyarbakir’s slums for weeks, burning tires.

Two armed clashes in rural areas left 12 rebels and two army soldiers dead in mid-January. Then the masked cops appeared in force here. By the time Ocalan’s isolation ended March 12, the street protests had subsided and the masks had become less numerous.

In an interview this week, Nusret Miroglu, the Turkish official sent in mid-February to govern Diyarbakir Province, said he was not aware of the Special Team. “In Turkey it is prohibited by law for policemen to cover their faces,” he said. “Nobody reported anything to me.”

But the masked policemen are still at work, according to residents who have seen them on recent nights.

“The sight of them makes me angry, because their purpose is to create fear and make the people step back,” said Abbas Yilmaz, 24, an economics student at Dicle University here whose father is imprisoned for separatist activity. “These men have tortured and killed in the past.”

Other students said the police crackdown has driven dozens of young people into the rebel underground. “We hear of continuous movement into the ranks,” said Hayri Dapci, 22.

Savas, the Turkish word for war, is on everyone’s lips here -- and not only because it is happening next door.

“Are we afraid the war could come to us? Yes. It would be easy for the PKK to slip across the border and fight again,” said Hidir Kulsuz, 47, part owner of the Famous Baghdad Coffee Shop of Diyarbakir. “Would people support them? No. We had enough of war.”

Turkish officials planned to send the army into northern Iraq to oppose any move toward an autonomous Iraqi Kurdish state. They put the plan on hold last week after the Bush administration warned against it, but reserved the right to go in if Turkey’s security was endangered.

The threat of an incursion into Iraq has sparked rallies across southeastern Turkey. Unlike antiwar protests in the rest of the country, which are against the United States and often tolerated by the police, the ones here are aimed at the Turkish army and are swiftly broken up.

Reyhan Altindag, the 29-year-old Kurdish deputy mayor of Kayapinar, a Diyarbakir suburb, said she was kicked in the leg repeatedly by a policeman during one such incident last week and faces four criminal charges for her political pronouncements.

Like other elected Kurdish leaders, Altindag rejects the ideal, once embraced by the PKK, of a separate Kurdish state but feels powerless to press the campaign for linguistic rights. If the PKK and the army want another war, she said, still limping from the police assault, “we are not strong enough to stop them.”

A law passed by parliament last year would permit education and broadcasting in Kurdish, but Turkish officials say the new threat of violence means they must move slowly to implement it. Such freedoms “can be a tool for those who still have separatist ideas,” said Huseyin Nail Atay, the region’s deputy governor.

Another casualty of the increasingly hostile climate is the hope nurtured by hundreds of thousands of Kurds like Selahattin Filizay to return to villages from which the army expelled them during the fighting.

Filizay, 40, and his family have lived in a Diyarbakir slum for a decade, dreaming of their native settlement of Fis about 30 miles away. He has been allowed to visit, but military police have barred him from moving back because he refuses to sign a statement blaming the PKK for driving him out. Until recently he hoped the police would relent.

“Now, even if they let me return, life would be impossible,” he said. “With the war in Iraq, my friends tell me the village has become more militarized. There is a curfew. The police interrogate people at all hours, about everything they see. They cannot leave and enter the place without being searched.”

“You cannot imagine how beautiful my village is,” he added. “I am sorry I cannot take you there. But it will never be the same. At least in the city, I can go home at night and sleep in peace.”