Turkey is Winning the Battle, but Can It Win the War?

Slenderly built, his face wrinkled from years of sun and a diet of locally-grown tobacco, Irfan Gur doesn't look like the sort of person who would give the Turkish state a headache.

The photos on his wall tell a different story. There's his father, long dead, the top of his portrait covered in lace as is the tradition here. But lace also covers the features of a much younger man, Gur's son, a Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant who died fighting the Turkish army in 1994.

Gur points to another photograph, this one open. "My youngest son", he says. "He went to join the group in July. I haven't heard from him since."

About 75 PKK militants have died since militants attacked a Turkish platoon on October 21, killing 12 soldiers and taking eight hostages, who were subsequently released November 4. Since 1984, about 5,000 Turkish soldiers and about 20,000 PKK militants have been killed.

Turkish armed forces have been massing in recent weeks along Turkish-Iraqi frontier, preparing for a possible cross-border raid against PKK training and logistics camps in northern Iraq. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. The imminent threat of an incursion seemed to recede following a November 5 meeting at the White House in Washington between US President George W. Bush and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. During the meeting, Bush promised to undertake additional US measures aimed at containing PKK militants. Even so, the Turkish government emphasized on November 6 that Ankara retains the right to launch cross-border operations against PKK targets in Iraq.

Turkey's number two general admitted recently that while the country's military campaign has so far been successful in combating the PKK, Turkey has been "unsuccessful" in dissuading a new generation of Kurds from joining the insurgent group.

In 2006, Turkish military intelligence reported that 40 percent of the estimated 3,000 militants in northern Iraq had joined up since the PKK declared a five-year ceasefire in 1999. In Diyarbakir, locals talk of at least 150 teenagers who have enlisted this year. In Yuksekova, a town of 100,000, six have joined in the last month.

Many Kurds find the PKK's continued magnetism baffling.

Formed at a time of massive state oppression, the group fought until 1999 for an independent Kurdistan. Since then, it has dropped separatism. Few - sympathizers or otherwise - appear to understand the organization's current call for "democratic confederalism."

Part of the answer to the PKK's attraction can be found outside Irfan Gur's front door. A decade ago, his neighborhood consisted mostly of open fields. Now it's a slum - the streets full of grubby children, some without shoes, leaping over open sewers and piles of rubbish.

Places like this exist throughout the southeast, filled with villagers forced from their homes by Turkish security forces during the 1990s. Only a decade ago Diyarbakir had a population of roughly 350,000. Now the city has nearly 1.5 million inhabitants, with upwards of 90 percent of families in some districts living below the poverty line.

"What future do these children have?" one local journalist asks. "Crime, the PKK, radical Islam." Locals say it was poverty and a sense of neglect, rather than organized PKK activity, that drove a riot in Diyarbakir last summer in which 11 people, mainly children, were shot dead by security forces.

Poverty, though, is not an exclusively southeastern problem. What makes it explosive here is the frustration that has grown since 1999. There have been improvements since then. The southeast is now free of military law, Kurdish names are legal, Kurdish broadcasting is permitted for one hour a day, and, for the first time in a decade, Kurdish nationalists are represented in parliament. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

But Kurds remain unconvinced that the state's attitude toward the Kurdish minority has fundamentally changed over the past eight years. They point to the flood of criminal investigations opened against Kurdish politicians since elections this July. In sharp contrast, when four policemen shot a 12-year old boy 10 times in the back from close range in 2005, a court described the incident as an act of "self-defense" and freed the accused.

Nothing, though, irks Kurds more than what they perceive as the partiality of the Turkish media. "He makes it sound like a bloody football match", says Yuksekova student Semdin Dumankaya, referring to a news reporter enthusiastically describing how 30 PKK fighters were killed by the military in one recent clash.

When 17 villagers were injured when their minibus hit a mine on a road outside Yuksekova on October 21, the media followed Turkey's military in blaming the incident on the PKK. Almost nobody in Yuksekova believes the official account, however. "We keep being told we should stand up to the PKK", says one Yuksekova shopkeeper. "I haven't heard many people questioning the army recently."

There are two sides to the Kurdish story, but only one of them gets told in Turkey, says Esat Canan, a Yuksekova lawyer and former MP. "The Kurdish problem is the Kurds' problem. But as somebody living here, nobody asks me