With the end of the Cold War, the Kurdish problem – in particular, the campaign of violence by the PKK – became Turkey’s most important and immediate security issue, gathering pace during the early 1990s.26Until 1998,
the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was an unacknowledged guest of the Syrian
government and benefited from Syrian logistic support as well as the use of training camps in the Syrian-occupied Bekaa Valley in the Lebanon. The Kurdish cause also won more international publicity after Saddam Hussein’s brutal repression of the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq, just after the Gulf war of 1991. On 5 April 1991, following theflight of around 500,000 mainly Kurdish refugees to the Iraqi–Turkish border and even larger numbers to that with Iran, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 688. Under the Resolution, an international force, initially numbering around 20,000 troops from 11 countries, established a‘safe haven’ in northern Iraq, to which all the refugees had been able to return by the end of May.27
‘Operation Provide Comfort’, as it was initially known, solved the immediate problem of the refugees but exacerbated Turkey’s internal Kurdish problem, since it attracted international attention to the Kurdish cause and provided a base (or at least a power vacuum) in northern Iraq from which PKK insur- gents could attack targets in Turkey. Exploiting this position, and benefiting from continued support by Syria, the PKK was able to intensify its campaign. By 1993, it almost seemed on the verge of leading a mass popular uprising on the lines of the Palestinian intifada – running its own ‘liberated zones’, extorting taxes, suppressing activities by the other political parties and ruthlessly punishing alleged ‘collaborators’.28 In March 1993, and perhaps
encouraged by rather vague and indirect contacts with President Özal via the Iraqi Kurdish leader Jelal Talabani,29 Öcalan declared a unilateral ceasefire.
However, this failed to provoke any effective political response by the Turkish government.30As a result, the war against the PKK was resumed at full scale.
After 1993, the PKK’s chances of achieving long-run military success gra- dually receded. By 1994–5, the Turkish army and gendarmerie were starting to regain the upper hand in south-eastern Anatolia, where the fighting was concentrated, and by 1998 they had re-established control over most of the region. Turkey also became engaged in the struggle for power in northern Iraq, firstly by an incursion into Iraqi territory against the PKK in 1992, and then a far larger attack in 1995. These were followed by further operations in 1996 and afterwards, in which the Turkish forces collaborated with the peshmerga militia attached to the Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by Massoud Barzani.31
Meanwhile, successive Turkish governments took an uncertain but gen- erally hawkish line against non-violent activities by Kurdish political groups in Turkey. After their establishment of a coalition government in November 1991, Süleyman Demirel and Erdal I.nönü made a well-publicized visit to the south east, in which Demirel proclaimed that‘Turkey must recognize the Kurdish reality’.32 The October 1991 elections also brought to parliament a
group of 22 Kurdish MPs, elected on the SHP ticket, who then joined the People’s Labour Party (HEP), Turkey’s first distinctly pro-Kurdish party.33
This was closed down by order of the Constitutional Court in June 1993, but its members officially left the party shortly before this took effect and were able to set up a successor party, known as the Democracy Party (DEP). In March 1994, Tansu Çiller’s government engineered the arrest of 13 of DEP’s
MPs by lifting their parliamentary immunities. The party was closed down and they were charged with treason. Six of them managed toflee abroad, but the remainder were imprisoned and one was murdered. A third pro-Kurdish party was then set up, as the People’s Democracy Party (HADEP) under Murat Bozlak. This was allowed to compete in the 1995 and 1999 general elections, as well as the local elections of 1999. It emerged as the leading party in a number of south-eastern provinces on both occasions, and in 1999 succeeded in winning the mayoralties in Diyarbakιr and a number of other south-eastern towns and cities. However, it won less than 5 per cent of the national vote on both occasions and thus failed to capture any seats in par- liament. Officially, HADEP disavowed terrorism, but many of its grassroots supporters were also supporters of the PKK, and the party found it hard to distance itself from it.34
A turning point in the PKK’s career came during the winter of 1998–9. After a fierce Turkish diplomatic offensive against Syria, backed up with the threat of military action, Hafiz al-Assad’s government expelled Öcalan on 7 October 1998, and he left for Moscow (see pp233–4). On 12 November, he made a dramatic appearance in Rome airport, where he was arrested for carrying a false passport, and then tried to gain political asylum in Italy. The Italian authorities expelled their unwelcome guest on 16 January 1999, when he set off on another odyssey to Belarus, Russia and Greece. Öcalan eventually arrived at the Greek ambassador’s residence in Nairobi, Kenya, on 2 February, carrying a Greek Cypriot diplomatic passport. On 16 February, he was cap- tured by a Turkish security team while on his way to Nairobi airport and brought back to Turkey, where he was placed on trial before a State Security Court on 30 May.35 On 29 June, the court sentenced him to death under
Article 125 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes it an offence to attempt to remove any part of Turkish territory from the control of the state, and he was found guilty of causing the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Under the constitution, if Öcalan were to be executed, parliament would have had to pass a positive vote to that effect. However, it failed to do so. Eventually, under strong pressure from the Council of Europe and the European Union, it abolished capital punishment altogether in 2002, and Öcalan’s sentence was changed to life imprisonment. Meanwhile, the PKK declared a unilateral ceasefire in August 1999.36
Unfortunately, hopes of an end to the armed struggle against the PKK proved short-lived. Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the establishment of a virtually independent Kurdish administration in northern Iraq under American protection, the PKK won a new lease of life, inducing it to end its ceasefire the following September. From bases in northern Iraq, the PKK’s new campaign cost nearly 150 lives, including those of 37 civilians between 2003 and 2005.37After a short lull, the PKK launched
a new series of assaults in the autumn of 2007, culminating in an attack on 21 October in which 12 Turkish soldiers were killed and another eight abducted.38 These attacks naturally provoked a sharp dispute between the
Turkish government and the US authorities in Iraq, who proved to be unable, or unwilling, to take effective action against the PKK bases in Iraqi territory. It was only in November 2007, and under threat that Turkey might launch another unilateral cross-border military operation, that President George W. Bush agreed that the US would give the Turks ‘real time’ intelligence on the Iraqi-based PKK– in effect, giving the Turkish forces a green light for limited operations in northern Iraq (see p169).39 Allegedly, the resulting attacks
severely damaged the PKK’s military strength, although it did not eliminate it. As the conflict dragged on, it became gradually accepted in Turkey that it could not be ended by purely military means but had to be addressed at the political level also. In the 2007 elections, the Democratic Society Party (DTP), which had succeeded DEHAP in 2005 as the main pro-Kurdish party in Turkey and had unofficial links with the PKK, succeeded in evading the 10 per cent election barrage by running its candidates as nominal independents. This secured the election of 19 deputies who re-joined the DTP after taking their seats, with two others joining the party later. In this way, Kurdish nationalism gained a recognized voice in parliament. By the end of 2005, Tayyip Erdog˘an was changing the official discourse, by accepting the existence of multiple ethnic identities within a common Turkish citizenship. In effect, the national identity was being redefined as civic rather than ethnic: Turkish Kurds often referred to themselves as Türkiyeli (‘from Turkey’) rather than Türk. As Erdog˘an told a Kurdish audience in the remote south-eastern town of S¸emdinli in November 2005:‘We will respect secondary identities – that is, a Turk will say“I am a Turk”, a Kurd will say “I am a Kurd”, a Laz will say “I am a Laz” – everyone will be obliged to respect this. But we all have a primary identity, as a citizen of the Turkish republic.’40The government was
not prepared to accept Kurdish demands for political autonomy within Turkey, but ready to promote Kurdish cultural rights, on which it was under strong pressure from the European Union. As part of a package of constitutional amendments passed in August 2002, the Ecevit government had allowed radio and television broadcasting in Kurdish by the state broadcasting corporation (TRT) as well as Kurdish language education in private institutions: in July 2003, private radio and TV stations were also allowed to broadcast in Turkish. By 2010, there was a full-time Kurdish language channel on state television (‘TRT 6’) and a private Kurdish TV channel broadcasting from Gaziantep.41
Some universities were setting up Kurdish language departments, although there were no Kurdish classes in state schools.
In the autumn of 2009, the AKP government appeared to be going further than this, when it launched what was called the‘Kurdish opening’. As originally planned, this would have included reform, if not abolition of the much criticized ‘village guards’ system, in which pro-government Kurds were armed and trained by the army to act as a sort of official militia, the establishment of elective Kurdish courses in state schools, and increased investment in devel- opment schemes in the south east.42Using the new links that the government
was establishing with the Kurdish administration in Iraq, it was hoped to
bring the majority of PKK fighters ‘down from the mountains’, by being resettled in Turkey. The 300-odd militants who were counted as leaders of the organization would not receive an amnesty but might be resettled in countries other than Turkey.43
The‘Kurdish opening’ was certainly welcome, but most of it was left unim- plemented, mainly because the government had underestimated the problems it faced. As a first step, 34 PKK members and their relatives (including four children) presented themselves at the Turkish–Iraqi border crossing post of Habur on 19 October 2009. After questioning by the Turkish judicial authorities, they travelled on to Diyarbakιr, where they received a rapturous reception clearly orchestrated by the DTP. The government quickly realized that the PKK was turning the ‘opening’ into a propaganda coup for itself so on 24 October Tayyip Erdog˘an announced ‘a break’ in the process.44 Worse was
to come on 11 December, when the Constitutional Court ordered the dis- solution of the DTP on the grounds of ‘its links with a terrorist organization and being the focal point of activities contrary to the indivisible integrity of the state’. While the Prime Minister stated that he opposed the closure of political parties, he had done nothing to prevent it in this case. In response, the DTP simply regrouped as the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP).45
Although the BDP leadership was trying to promote a more moderate line, the ‘Kurdish initiative’ appeared to have dropped off the government’s agenda: instead, it launched a‘democratic opening’ of constitutional reforms, most of which did not address the Kurdish question directly (see pp191–2).
Moves towards a peace process in Turkey’s Kurdish problem were not resumed until the autumn of 2010. By this stage, Turkey was getting extensive cooperation against the PKK from the Syrian government, as well as that of Iran, which was facing attacks by the ‘Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan’ (PJAK), an Iranian-Kurdish organization closely allied to the PKK. As a result, a number of PKK members were killed in operations in Iran and Syria, and around 200 were extradited to Turkey. There were also intense discussions with US intelligence officials and Massoud Barzani, the head of the Iraqi- Kurdish administration.46 In the run-up to the constitutional referendum of
12 September (p192), the PKK declared another ceasefire, extending it in stages up to the end of February 2011.47 Although the government denied
that a deal had been struck with Abdullah Öcalan, state officials and intelli- gence officers were apparently in touch with him on his island prison of I.mralι, and there were reports that, after the elections to be held in June 2011, parts of the ‘Kurdish opening’ might be revived.48 Politically, there
was no certainty that a settlement could be reached or that the PKK would finally lay down its arms, but at leat the government had accepted the need for a wide-ranging approach. If successful, this could have a significant effect on Turkey’s external position, as well as its domestic politics, since the Kurdish problem had been a serious liability in its relations with the western powers (especially the European Union) as well as with its Middle Eastern neighbours.