Turkey: Hopes Fading for a Turkish Truce with Militant Kurds

Recent attacks carried out by Kurdish militants that left 10 Turkish soldiers dead are dashing hopes for ending a 25-year conflict in which over 45,000 people have perished.

Nine soldiers died just after dawn on April 29, when a roadside bomb blew up their armored personnel carrier on a dirt road near the town of Lice, in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast. Six hours later, another soldier died when assailants opened fire on a unit returning from operations in the province of Hakkari, 500 kilometers to the southeast.

Speaking before the second attack, Turkish Chief of Staff Gen. Ilker Basbug told a news conference in Ankara that the explosion was caused by a home-made bomb "either remote-controlled or detonated by cable."

A former separatist group that has been fighting the Turkish state for 25 years, the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, claimed responsibility for both attacks. They were the group's most deadly operations since 17 soldiers died in an assault on a military border post last October.

On April 30, two more soldiers were injured in a remote-controlled blast in Tunceli, northeast of Lice, and Turkish jets retaliated by bombing PKK camps in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The sudden upsurge of violence throws a pall over a period of optimism that Turkey and the PKK might finally be prepared to stop shooting and begin talking. A country that denied the existence of Kurds until 1993, Turkey launched a Kurdish-language channel on state television this January, a move US President Barack Obama described as "an important signal" in a speech he gave in the Turkish parliament on April 6. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

In recent months it seemed as if the two sides were cautiously warming to the idea of rapprochement. During a two-day visit to Baghdad at the end of March, Turkish President Abdullah Gul referred to the northern Iraqi Kurdish entity by its official name, the Kurdistan Regional Government. It was the first time a senior Turkish official had used the word Kurdistan. Long suspected by Ankara of turning a blind eye to PKK activities on his territory, the ethnic Kurdish Iraqi President Jalal Talabani responded by saying "the PKK either puts its weapons down or leaves the country."

President Gul also gave support to yet-to-be-finalized Iraqi Kurdish plans to hold a pan-Kurdish conference in Iraq later this year aimed at persuading the PKK to announce a permanent ceasefire.

Faced with a Turkish army bolstered since 2008 with real-time US intelligence and growing pressure from the Iraqi Kurds to sit down and talk, the PKK announced early in April that it was calling a ceasefire until June 1.

Like many Turkish commentators, Mehmet Ali Birand speculated in Hurriyet on April 30 that the late April attacks were the work of a faction inside the PKK opposed to the peace process. But many agree Ankara shares a large part of the blame for the renewed chill in the air.

Leading political commentator Cengiz Candar says the Turkish detente was built on shaky foundations from the start. "Everybody agrees the fighting has to stop, but nobody dares to take the necessary steps," he said. "It's like wanting to go to heaven, but not wanting to die."

Contradictory Turkish attitudes on the Kurdish issue are nowhere more evident than in the army. In an April 14 speech striking for its moderate tone, Basbug, the Turkish chief of staff, became the first senior officer publicly to accept the existence of a Kurdish identity in Turkey. At his April 29, news conference, however, he refused to share a room with members of a democratically-elected Kurdish nationalist party, even as he insisted that the military "respects democracy and the rule of law."

Gen. Basbug isn't the only Turkish official who has problems with the Democratic Society Party, or DTP, which won 21 seats in parliament in general elections in 2007. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan refuses to shake hands with its members, criticizing them for their failure to denounce the PKK as a terrorist organization. Like four Kurdish parties before it, the DTP is currently facing closure.

Turkey's on-going unwillingness to draw the line between militants and sympathizers is nowhere clearer than in a December 2008 decision by the country's High Court of Appeals. Until then, adults and minors who threw stones or shouted slogans at pro-PKK street demonstrations faced at most 10 months in prison for participation in an illegal protest and "terrorist propaganda." The court's ruling, though, said violators could be prosecuted for membership of a terrorist organization, thus exposing them to much longer sentences.

On April 27, a court in the southern Turkish city of Adana sentenced 22 teenagers aged between 13 and 18 to up to eight and a half years in jail for participating in a demonstration to mark the anniversary of the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. Human Rights groups estimate another 500 minors are currently in custody, many of them held with adult inmates.

The irony, notes Emma Sinclair-Webb, Turkey researcher for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, is that while active PKK members can apply for a reduced prison sentence in return for intelligence on the group, no such option is open to minors jailed on the basis of the December 2008 Appeals Court decision.

"I expect to see a wave of cases going before the European Court of Human Rights in five years or so," Sinclair-Webb adds.

The Turkish establishment's suspicion of anything smacking of Kurdish nationalism increased during the run-up to March 29 local elections, which resulted in a string of overwhelming DTP victories in predominantly Kurdish areas.

Further underscoring the growing sense of suspicion, government oversight of the Kurdish television channel appears to be tightening. When the Kurdish television channel TRT-Shesh was launched on January 1, Prime Minister Erdogan went on air to wish it well, in Kurdish. But in mid-March, the government appointed three police intelligence operatives to the board overseeing the channel, according to a report in the daily Taraf on April 23. Increased meddling in the running of the program proved too much for Rojin, the Kurdish pop star who hosted TRT-Shesh's most popular show, Rojinname. "I came, I saw, I left," she told the daily Radikal on April 13, announcing her resignation.

"The pressure increased steadily. ... Guests I proposed were not accepted. My words were cut. ... I was treated as a potential criminal," Rojin said. "Nobody can keep me somewhere where I am not free."

A day later, as if to prove her point, police began arresting DTP members suspected of receiving orders from the PKK. There are 200 now in custody.

Police sources insist the arrests have nothing to do with the fact that the DTP almost doubled the number of municipalities under its control following the March local elections. Others are less sure. "We had hoped AK Party would interpret the result as a sign for the need for improved dialogue," Selahattin Demirtas, a leading DTP deputy said on April 29, a day after the party had sent another request to the prime minister for an interview. "Instead, the state seems to have decided to punish us."

"Whether you like them or not, the [DTP] represent a majority of democratic votes in Kurdish areas," says Cengiz Candar, the political analyst. "You have to talk to them." Failure to do so, he adds, not only signals the bankruptcy of hopes of a Kurdish "opening": it means "showing Kurds the road to the mountains."