Turkey: Government Launches PR Offensive on Kurdish Question

Turkey's political leaders are taking to the road to explain their plans to end a 25-year Kurdish war to the people. The PR offensive is opening amid rising political tensions and dwindling hopes of a multi-party accord on the initiative.

"We are ready to be stripped of all the offices and titles we possess," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told an audience in the conservative eastern town of Malatya on November 14. "Our only desire is that not another drop of [soldiers'] blood be spilt."

A day earlier, in an often tumultuous parliamentary session, Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, or AKP, provided for the first time concrete details about the contents of what Interior Minister Besir Atalay, the government's point man on the issue, repeatedly stressed was a "program of national unity."

"Our slogan is more freedom for everybody", Atalay told deputies, listing measures including a start to private broadcasting in Kurdish, an end to bans on political campaigning in Kurdish, and the restitution of Kurdish names to villages given Turkish names since the 1950s. Over the longer term, Atalay added, Turkey needed a new "democratic and civilian" constitution to replace one drafted by a military junta in 1982. "Our people deserve better," he said.

He added that AKP leaders would be visiting every one of Turkey's 81 provinces in the coming weeks to explain the government's plans in greater detail.

Mainstream opposition parties have expressed dismay at the initiative. Devlet Bahceli, leader of the Nationalist Action Party, called the session "one of the most unfortunate days in Turkey's 89-year parliamentary history." Deniz Baykal, head of the secular Republican People's Party, accused the government of "collaborating" with the former separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, which took up arms against Ankara in 1984.

His comments were indicative of the extremely thin line the government has to tread between Turkish and Kurdish opinion.

Neither Atalay nor other AKP speakers made any mention of a possible pardon for an estimated 4,000 armed PKK militants hiding out in the mountains of Turkey and northern Iraq, a key demand of Kurdish nationalists. In a statement released on November 14, PKK representatives called the government's measures "claptrap," adding that the "Kurdish question cannot be resolved without recognizing the will of the Kurdish people and initiating dialogue with its interlocutors."

The head of a Kurdish nationalist party that shares a support base with the PKK, Ahmet Turk, struck a more dovish tone. "We will not obstruct this initiative", he told the daily Milliyet on November 16, noting that Besir Atalay had described it as "an open-ended process."

"Of course, as debates continue and tensions begin to fall, demands which today are rejected will of course come onto the agenda," Turk said.

But this is exactly what roils Turkish public opinion. For years, Turks have been encouraged by mass media to see the Kurdish issue as a simple matter of terrorism. Many analysts think the government could have done more to prepare public opinion for an initiative, which, while much less sweeping than expected, represents a radical departure from traditional state policy.

"For months, we have been debating an initiative whose contents were unknown", says Adil Gur, a leading pollster. "That has deepened the divisions of society along party lines."

It also appears to have reduced support for the government. According to a survey of AKP supporters carried out in mid-November by the pollsters Metropoll, support for the government has slumped to 32%, from 39% in August.

The chief foreign policy advisor to the Prime Minister, Ibrahim Kalin, notes rightly that polls continue to show a majority of Turks supportive of efforts to bring fighting to an end. "I have never seen any issue discussed in such a lively and civilized way in Turkey," he says. "People are now freely discussing not only the Kurdish issue, but also ... other fundamental issues. ... I believe that is a huge contribution to Turkish democracy."

With the debates in parliament coinciding with allegations that senior members of the traditionally secular judiciary have illegally been wire-tapped, political analyst Mesut Yegen thinks tensions over the initiative are a microcosm of much deeper anxieties over the direction Turkey is taking. "The government renamed what it first called a Kurdish initiative a democratic one to reduce potential tensions," he says. "It may inadvertently have made its job more difficult by implying that this was a debate about Turkey's regime."

That is certainly the impression opposition parties are trying to give. The government caused a stir by calling for a preliminary parliamentary debate on the initiative on the anniversary of the death of Turkey's founding father, Kemal Ataturk, on November 10. Secular deputies ended up disrupting the debate by brandishing posters of Ataturk and shouting slogans. Two days later, they stormed out of parliament en masse in protest over Erdogan's angry claims that they were "making politics by exploiting the blood of soldiers."

Erdogan seems to have given up hope of trying to reach a compromise with the political opposition. Mesut Yegen thinks he should try harder to find common ground at least with the secularists. The Prime Minister's efforts to solve the war are undoubtedly helped by the fact that Turkey's bureaucracy is in general agreement that its traditional Kurdish policy is bankrupt, he says. Without support from other parties, however, "the whole weight of the initiative risks being carried forward by Erdogan's charisma alone."