by Derk Kinnane-Roelofsma
About the Author

Part I

Turkey’s strategic location, The CIA World Fact Book says, is at the straits linking the Black Sea and the Aegean. Such has been the case for more than two hundred years, since Imperial Russia began sending its navy through the straits into the Mediterranean. The Bosphorus and Dardanelles remain strategically sensitive, if only because of the passage they provide for oil tankers. On this western end of its territory, Turkey also faces a hostile Greece and Greek Cyprus. However, the eastern borderlands of Turkey are of strategic interest, too. On both sides of the frontier, forces are in motion that raise questions about the political future of Turkey and carry weighty implications for a good part of the Middle East. At the root of these questions, and the responses to them of neighboring Iran, Iraq and Syria, are two perennial neuralgic points within the Turkish body politic. One is Islam, the other is the Kurds.

A fractious people

The Kurds are an ancient, fractious people who claim descent from the Medes and who speak an Iranian, not a Turkic or Semitic, language. Their homeland is divided between Turkey and its neighbors. The Kurds in Syria are not a problem for the government of Hafiz al-Asad. Those in Iran are only a small and intermittent problem for the ayatollahs. The Kurds of Iraq, at least for the present, are beyond the close control of Baghdad and have been preoccupied with their internal rivalries.

Military and political problems

In Turkey, however, the government is burdened militarily with an expensive effort to suppress a Kurdish insurgency that has lasted 14 years. Politically it has to cope with a policy, born with the Turkish Republic itself, that the national population has a single identity, that of Turks. This policy is contradicted by a considerable part of the population which refuses to surrender their sense of a Kurdish identity. The other policy, also fundamental to the original concept of the republic, is the pursuit of secularism with a concomitant denial of a political role for Islam. After three-quarters of a century, a great many Turks wish precisely for Islam to have a political role.

Getting oil to market

Mingled with these domestic questions are important external issues. One is the oil fields being developed in the Caspian Basin and how to bring that oil to market. Proposals are being considered for various new pipelines. One, if it is ever built, would pass through or close to Turkish Kurdistan, carrying oil from Azerbaijan and other Caspian oil producing countries of the FSU to a terminal at the Turkish city of Ceyhan near the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

Bone of contention

Ceyhan is evocative. Readers will remember it is as a town struck, with its bigger neighbor, Adana, by a severe earthquake in June 1998. Both places have a large population of Kurds, migrants from villages in close by Kurdistan proper. Both cities are on the Iskenderun Korfezi, the Bay of Alexandretta. Iskenderun was the principal town of an Ottoman sanjak (district) of the same name . After a local plebiscite, the French, who held Syria under a League of Nations mandate, transferred the sanjak to Turkey in 1939. It now forms the Turkish province of Hatay. Syria has never accepted this and Iskenderun is a bone of contention between Damascus and Ankara. It is one of the reasons that Syria, until October 1998, supported the PKK (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan, Kurdistan Workers Party), the Maoist- guerrillas fighting the Ankara government.

30,000 killed

The war between the PKK and the Turkish security forces has resulted in something close to 30,000 deaths since it began in 1984. It costs the government an estimated $7 billion dollars a year. Those considering the Ceyhan pipeline project must be asking themselves whether their investment would be safe from the PKK. According to some highly regarded military analysts, there is no great danger. The Turkish security forces, says Edward Luttwak of the Center for Stratetgic and International Studies in Washington, would have no difficulty in keeping control of any locality.

Syria bows to Turkey

Turkey, while failing as yet to destroy the PKK, dealt it a heavy blow by obliging the Syrian dictator, al-Asad, under threat of war, to end his support for it. PKK militants were obliged to quit the facilities he had provided for them in Syria and the Bekaa valley in Syrian-controlled Lebanon. The founder and leader of the PKK, Abdullalh Ocalan, after first unsuccessfully seeking refuge in Moscow, flew to Rome on November 12, 1998 using a false Turkish passport. Although the Italian authorities detained him, they refused, to the fury of the Turks, to turn him over to Turkey. Rome took the position that this could not be done as the Italian constitution forbade extraditing anyone to a country which has the death penalty as does Turkey. Germany mumbled it would not press the extradition request it had outstanding for Ocalan, wanted for PKK crimes committed in Germany. Europe tut-tutted about Turkey’s miserable record of human rights abuses, but largely ignored the perfectly true Turkish assertion that Ocalan was a killer whose activities have brought about the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Washington alone gave loud and clear support to the Turkish demand he be extradited.

Plan to transform poverty

The Kurdish guerrillas who follow Ocalan inhabit a very poor and often very harsh land. Turkish generals speak about the need for more roads, more schools, more medical facilities and the government agrees that the southeast of the country is overdue for economic development. Hence the Southeastern Anatolia Project known as GAP. This vast development plan is to transform South Eastern Turkey into a prosperous market garden and power plant, supplying not only Turkey but its West Asian neighbors with agricultural products and electricity.

Tigris and Euphrates

Extending over 75,000 square kilometres, an area the size of Belgium , the Netherlands and Luxembourg combined, GAP will contain 22 new dams and 19 hydroelectric power stations on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. GAP will also develop transport, health facilities, education, telecommunications, mining, industry, and tourism. The government intends spending $1.8 billion a year on it through 2010. Sandra Akmansoy, in a report made at the University of Texas at Austin in 1996, foresaw local income levels rising fivefold. The population, currently about 3.5 million, will rise, it is said, tonine million.

Forced evaucations

In a total Turkish population of about 65 million, there are perhaps between ten and 12 million Kurds, 70 to 75 percent of whom now live mostly congregated in the slums of Ankara and other cities to the west of the capital. Hundreds of thousands more have gone to cities in Kurdistan or migrated, often illegally, to Europe. Of those who left their villages some 560,000, according to an estimate accepted by the State Department, were forcibly evacuated by government forces. The purpose of emptying villages was to deny the PKK resources, including food and men who might join it voluntarily, or be obliged to do so.

Return to the villages?

According to Turkish government sources, 80 percent of the villagers turned urban dwellers are unemployed. The government would like them to return to their villages, with GAP soon to make life much better. And how is GAP progressing? "Wonderfully," says an American specialist who knows Turkey well. Others, particularly among Kurdish nationalists, are not so optimistic. They talk of insufficient foreign investment and of Turkish entrepreneurs who doubt it will be profit-making.

Fears over water

GAP is not just about South Eastern Turkey and the Kurds there. It also involves what has been said will be the most important source of conflict in the Middle East in the coming century: who controls whose water. Syria and Iraq are hostile to GAP because it will enable Turkey to regulate the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers on which their agriculture depends. Turkey has suggested arrangements for settling the problem, including transferring water from the Tigris to the Euphrates. This would insure that all of Iraq and Syria’s planned irrigation projects would be provided for. Both Saddam Hussein and Hafiz al-Asad have rejected all Turkey’s proposals.

Lose one, find one

Until very recently, the PKK has had Syria and so the bases from which it infiltrated units into Turkey, but it has found another Arab friend, Saddam Hussein. In May 1998, the Iraqi army presented PKK representatives in Iraq with heavy machine guns, sniper’s rifles and the ammunition to go with them. Next, Baghdad announced the opening of PKK offices there and in two cities on the edge of Iraqi Kurdistan, Kirkuk, a major center of the oil industry, and Mosul, the most important city in the north of Iraq.

Military presence

Like Asad, Saddam fears Ankara’s plans for the Tigris and Euphrates. He also values the PKK as the enemy of the Iraqi Kurdistan Democratic Party, which collaborates with the Turkish army against the PKK. The Turkish army has introduced tens of thousands of troops into Northern Iraq to strike at PKK bases there, something hardly to Saddam’s liking, demonstrating as it does his inability to prevent a neighboring power from exerting military control over Iraqi national territory. .

Iranian involvement

Completing the ring of states bordering South Eastern Turkey is Iran. Iranian support for Islamist terrorists in Turkey, both Turks and Kurds, is not in doubt, but there are those, such as Edward Luttwak, who say there is no evidence to support claims that PKK units cross into Turkey from Iran and no confirmation of allegations that Tehran supports the PKK. Others disagree. Michael G. Gunter of Tennessee Technological University, a leading American specialist on Kurdish nationalism, believes there is indeed an Iranian involvement with the PKK. Writing in the March 1998 issue of the Middle East Quarterly, he cited a detailed report by the Turkish parliament’s Border Security Research Committee, The report alleged there were PKK training camps and logistic-support bases in Iran and that PKK militants, infiltrating from Iran, were laying mines in Turkey.

Rival models

Iran provides another example of how the Kurdish issue has been exploited to serve issues beyond the Turkish frontiers. Iran and Turkey are , of course, competitors offering neighboring Islamic societies in the Caspian Basin and Central Asia rival models for development. It is not surprising then that there has been Iranian inspired, and sometimes Iranian controlled, activity inside Turkey. This activity has been directed not only against Iranians living in Turkey who were opponents of the ayatollahs but also against Turks opposed to Islamism.

Part II

Turkey has two enduring and potentially destabilizing problems. One is the widespread popular devotion to Islam and its customs in a state committed to maintaining a secular order. The other is the persistence of the Kurds in maintaining their identity in an officially mono-ethnic state. The two problems are sometimes intertwined as illustrated by the recent history of certain Islamist groups.

Sympathy for Islamism

In September 1980, the Turkish army took power and imposed a ‘retour a l’ordre’ that ended the violence between Leftist and Rightist groups that had come close to breaking down all civil order in Turkey. These groups were broken up, but not Islamist ones. Even before the military coup, sympathy for fundamentalist Islam was on the rise, not just among villagers but among those occupying places of influence in the Turkish state. Right-wing intellectuals were convinced that Islamists wished to maintain the territorial integrity of the Turkish Republic and would counter the Marxism embraced so widely by the intelligentsia, especially among the Kurds. So the army endorsed what was called the Turkish- Islamist Synthesis.

Turkish Hezbollah

While many educated Kurds were secular Leftists, others became Islamists and even supporters of Islamist terrorism. Ely Karmon of the University of Haifa, writing in the January 1998 issue of the Middle East Review of International Affairs, describes the rise of a Turkish Hezbollah, modeled on the Iranian original, but made up mostly of Turkish Kurds. It carried out attacks and assassinations on secularists and Leftists, including the PKK.

Kidnapping and torture

Another target was the remnants of the Christian population in Turkish Kurdistan whose presence long antedated the arrival of the Muslims. William Dalrymple, in his account of the communities, From the Holy Mountain, reports a Syrian Orthodox monk telling him how Hezbollah helped the government in many ways, but hated Christians, kidnapping their girls and forcing them to marry Muslims, how it seized a monk, tortured him and held him to ransom.

Easing restrictions

By 1991, government circles were no longer so enamored of the Turkish- Islamist Synthesis. At the Interior Ministry, Islamist civil servants began to be transferred from the center of power in Ankara to the South East. But there they either ignored or supported the Hezbollah attacks on the PKK. At the same time President Turgut Ozal eased the restrictions on Kurdish cultural and political activities. The Kemalist ban on publication in Kurdish was lifted and overtly Kurdish political factions were allowed to form in parliament.

Misguided and exploited

Change also came to Hezbollah which became persuaded the PKK was not really its enemy. In March 1993, it signed a co-operation agreement with the PKK, explaining that before it had been misguided and exploited by ‘colonialists.’ Also in 1993, the government finally admitted that murderous Islamist groups really existed. It did so following public outrage over the killing of a well-known investigative journalist, Ugur Mumcu. He was blown up by a car bomb similar to the ones used to kill an American computer specialist in 1991 and an Israeli diplomat in 1992

Supervised by Iranian intelligence

In 1994 Turkish Islamists, acting on orders from Tehran, murdered a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (a separate body from the KDP in Iraq). In March 1996, Irfan Cagarici, a leader of a small group known as Islamic Action, admitted he and his organization had assassinated secular intellectuals and politicians with, he said, the direct support and under the supervision of Iranian intelligence. At the same time many Kurdish nationalist politicians, journalists and business men were eliminated in murders that remained unsolved crimes.

Opening to the Muslim East

So far there was no apparent Iranian support for the secular Maoist PKK, despite its reconciliation with Turkish Hezbollah. Indeed, in 1994 the Iranians turned over 14 PKK members to the Turkish authorities. Ankara returned the favor by forbidding activity by the anti-Tehran Mujahidin e Khalq and rejecting President Clinton’s call to cut trade and investment in Iran. When the Islamist Necmettin Erbakan became Prime Minister in 1996, he proclaimed a greater Turkish opening to the Muslim East. His first visit abroad was to Tehran where he struck a $23 billion deal to buy natural gas from Iran.

Co-operation with Israel

The military, however, were not about to allow Erbakan and his Refah (Welfare) Party to intefere with their sense of where the national interest lay, which was more to the West and Nato and the European Union than to the East and the ayatollahs. The military reached agreements with Israel on military co-operation with a predictable response from the Arabs and Iran. The supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ail Akbar Khamenei, declared Turkey had bid farewell to its Islamic traditions. Within two years, according to certain intelligence sources, Iran was itself holding talks on military co- operation with Greece, Turkey’s bitter enemy.

Strategic, not tactical

While Turkish officials tried to calm things down by asserting the agreements were only about training programs, the Israeli Defense Minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, took a more robust line. Speaking in Ankara in December 1996, he said plainly that the agreements were more strategic than tactical in nature. The following February, the military forced Erbakan out of office and in the same month Turkey and Iran withdrew their respective ambassadors. In March the Border Security Research Committee issued its report alleging Iranian activities aiding the PKK.

Air cover

The shift in relations between Turkey and Iran could be seen in the changes in their policies towards Iraqi Kurdistan, as Michael M. Gunter pointed out in the March 1989 issue of the Middle East Quarterly. In 1991 the Allies, having driven Iraq out of Kuwait, set up a safety zone to protect the Iraqi Kurds from Saddam Hussein. Air cover was provided by Operation Provide Comfort. For some Turks, Gunter reported, Provide Comfort ‘was the opening salvo of a new Treaty of Sevres that would eventually lead to the creation of Kurdish state in northern Iraq and to the demise of the Republic of Turkey.’

No independence

The Treaty of Sevres, signed with the defeated Ottoman Empire in 1920, allowed for the creation of an independent Kurdish state. After Mustafa Kemal ralllied the Turkish forces, drove the Greek army out of Turkey and consolidated the Turkish state, the Treaty of Sevres was replaced in 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne, which made no mention of Kurdish independence.

‘Oops, sorry’

When an Operation Provide Comfort mission accidentally delivered provisions to the PKK in Northern Iraq, the Turkish public, became suspicious of U.S. intentions. Starting in 1992 the Turks got together with the Syrians and Iranians for talks. The subject was how to prevent the autonomous Iraqi Kurdish government that had come into being from becoming an independent Kurdish state. The talks stopped in 1995, by which time Turkey and Iran had begun to make clients out of the rival political parties in Iraqi Kurdistan. The fragile co-operation between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) shattered in the aftermath of elections in 1992 in which the two parties came out neck and neck for control of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

Turkish-KDP alliance

The KDP stronghold is in an area adjacent to the Turkish border. Through it runs the arterial road carrying goods betweeen Iraq and Turkey. The KDP has greatly benefited from the levies it imposes on traffic on the road, which includes oil sent to market abroad by Saddam in defiance of United Nations sanctions. To keep the profitable traffic rolling and to maintain good relations with the Turks, Masud Barzani. the KDP leader, has cracked down on PKK activities inside Iraq. In return, the Turks have helped the KDP, most dramatically late in 1997 when a large Turkish force aided the KDP to neutralize a PUK assault. One PUK official present on the battlefield later reported, "There were 36 Turkish tanks. We counted them. We were simply overwhelmed."

Iranian-PUK relationship

The PUK, too, developed a working relationship with the power across the frontier from the area it dominates. Iran sent 5,000 troops of the Badr Forces, made up of Iraqi Shia Arabs hostile to Saddam, to help the PUK against the KDP in November 1995. In July 1996, up to 3,000 Iranian troops are believed to have penetrated deep into Iraqi Kurdistan in pursuit of anti-Tehran Iranian Kurds. More Iranian help was provided in 1996 after the Iraqi army swept into the ‘safe haven’ the Allies had established in Northern Iraq. Saddam’s forces seized Arbil, the seat of the Kurdish government, from Jalal Talabani, head of the PUK, and handed the city over to the KDP. At the same time Iraqi security forces wiped out the C.I.A.-supported Iraqi opposition that had gathered in Arbil. It was a hard blow to United States hopes for replacing Saddam.

The Turkish army, anxious to put an end to 14 years of insurgency by Maoist PKK separatists in Turkish Kurdistan, has been present for some years now across the border in Northern Iraq where the PKK has bases. There the Turks deal routinely with Kurdish authorities who have effectively governed Iraqi Kurdistan since 1991. The Turks have shown they are quite able to rub along with Kurdish nationalists exercising autonomy in Iraq.

Coping with Kurds inside Turkey is something else. The Kurdish problem, like that of Islam in a secular state, is as old as the republic itself.

Temporal and spiritual

The Ottoman Empire had two supreme offices combined in one person, the sultan-caliph. The sultanate exercised temporal government and the caliphate spiritual leadership, in succession from the Prophet Muhammad. Having abolished the sultanate and established a republic, Mustafa Kemal, in 1924, ended the caliphate, the pinnacle of Turkish identity with Islam. Forced secularisation for all, and forced cultural assimilation for Kurds, had begun. In 1925 Kemal had to put down a major revolt by Kurds, raised in the name of Islam. Since then the republic has been alert to defend secularism and Turkish nationalism from dissident elements in its own population.

Sense of identity

The policy of secularism has not detached the mass of Turkey’s people from Islam, nor has Turkish nationalism superseded the Kurds’ sense of their own identity. After the army took power in 1980, it intensified the repression of Kurdish nationalist activists. Prisoners, brought to trial in the major Kurdish center of Diyarbekir, were sometimes barely able to walk or stand in the courtroom. On March 21, 1982, Mazlum Dopan lit three matches in his cell to mark the Kurdish New Year feast of Newroz. He then hanged himself rather than make a televised confession. In May of the same year, four Kurdish prisoners immolated themselves.

Maoist terrorists

In 1984, the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, began to attack Turkish security forces. The PKK showed-and shows -- no mercy to school teachers, civil servants and elected officials whom it considers collaborators with the enemy. In 1995, the Fifth Congress of the PKK declared, ‘By effectively arguing in favor of socialism and by spreading socialist ideas to the people of the region, [the PKK] is the vanguard of the global socialist movement.’ The PKK was a founding member of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, a loosely structured Maoist version of Lenin’s Comintern that includes Peru’s Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso).

Murders in Germany

Outside Turkey, the PKK has organized among Kurdish immigrant communities in Europe, notably in Germany where it is banned as a terrorist organization and held responsible for murders of Turks. It is adept at mixing appeals to noble sentiments about freedom and human rights with extortion and participation in the lucrative drug trade.

Village guards

In eastern Turkey, the Kurdish homeland, the army countered the PKK in part by forming village guards, sometimes using harsh measures to oblige the villagers to serve. According to the respected watchdog body, Human Rights Watch, there are about 50,000 of these Koruculuk. They are poorly trained and disciplined and some have become involved in smuggling, kidnapping and other abuses. The Turkish Interior Ministry puts at 296 the number of murders committed by village guards between 1985 and 1996. They are a common target for the PKK.

Parliamentary bloc

As for recognition of the Kurdish identity, President Turgut Ozal lifted the ban on publishing in Kurdish in 1990 and in elections the following year an explicitly Kurdish bloc of parliamentarians, including PKK sympathizers, was formed for the first time. This did not last. In July 1992 the Constitutional Court found the bloc, known as HEP, guilty of spreading ‘separatist propaganda.’ The HEP deputies resigned their seats and set up DEP (the Party of Democracy) which elected a PPK supporter, Halip Dicle, as chairman. In 1994, Dicle and six other Kurdish deputies, their parliamentary immunity having been lifted, were tried for ‘crimes against the state.’ They received sentences ranging from three to 15 years.

‘Unsolved crimes’

Prison was not always the worst fate. Between 1991 and 1997, some 1,500 Kurdish nationalists died in what until January 1998 were classified as ‘unsolved crimes.’ Then a government report revealed that the killings were the work of state-sponsored death squads.The report, published by Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz, described Tansu Ciller’s period as Prime Minister from 1993 to 1996 as the time of the worst abuses. In fact the killings had begun when Yilmaz was serving his first term as Prime Minister. Ciller’s Interior Minister had been Mehmet Agar. He was obliged to resign that post because of his friendship with one of the men in a car crash in November 1996. The crash exposed connections between the state, organized crime and political assassinations. The scandal that followed gave rise to the government report, to which Agar responded by asking rhetorically, ‘Are we supposed to fight terrorism by using bug spray?’

Turnaround

In the Turkish countryside, the PKK insurrection is, it appears, losing ground. In 1993, it was not considered safe to travel by road during the day, let alone at night, between the important cities of Elazig and Erzurum. But in that year, the army began to turn the situation around. Employing some 200,000 troops and swallowing a huge slice of the national budget, the army has been very successful. The strength of the PKK now, says the Washington-based military analyst Edward Luttwak, is in the low thousands. In 1993, estimates had been as high as between 12,000 and 15,000.

Still able to strike

In October 1998, under strong pressure from Ankara, which threatened war on Syria, Hafiz al-Asad withdrew his support for the PKK which until then he had protected. PKK units were hunted by the Turkish army and the Kurdistan Democratic Party’s peshmerga as they made their way from Syria across Iraq. Still the PKK retains a capacity to mount small-scale but lethal attacks in Turkish Kurdistan where the terrain is well suited to low-intensity warfare. As for the humiliated Asad, he was comforted a month after his capitulation to the Turks by a visit from the Russian Defense Minister, Marshal Igor Sergeyev. Russia, he was told, was ready to renew its military assistance, training Syrian officers in Russia, increasing the number of Russian advisers in Syria, modernizing the airforce, supplying new, advanced-design tanks and S-300 missile systems, the same kind which the Greek Cypriots were to receive to the intense displeasure of Turkey.

Thousands demonstrate

Sergeyev’s visit took place during the furore in November 1998 over the detention of the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in Rome. What was striking about the latter was the size and intensity of demonstrations in his favor by Kurds in cities both in Turkey and in Europe. Some 4,000 Kurds in Bonn took to the streets and a similar number in Rome. Dozens of Kurds went on hunger strikes in Bucharest and in Moscow. A Kurdish suicide bomber killed herself and injured six other people in Turkey, two Kurdish protesters set themselves on fire in Moscow and another set himself ablaze in Rome. In Turkey, HADEP (People’s Democracy Party), now the largest legal Kurdish party, charged that police had detained over 3,000 of its members around the country. In the countryside, clashes continued. The military announced 20 guerrillas killed for a loss of three soldiers during one weekend that November.

Political emphasis

‘The Turkish military has put a clamp on things,’ says Michael Gunter, an American expert on the Kurds, ‘but while they have won a battle, it may be that they have not won the war. The PKK is very much with us and if it now puts more emphasis on political activity than fighting, that is a typical aspect of the kind of war it is leading.’

Villages burned

The Turkish forces in Kurdistan, according to Edward Luttwak, have benefited neither from clever tactics nor good training. They appear indifferent to winning hearts and minds. Women and children are made to stand in the rain while the identity of bus passengers is checked. Cover against the weather could be easily provided. Troops sent to make an arrest in a village arrive in force during the day, not quietly in small numbers at night. Failing to arrest anyone, they burn down the village. Over 2,500 villages have been destroyed by the security forces.

Loyalty retained

Despite such conduct, Luttwak believes, the Turkish state retains the allegiance of at least 50 percent of the Kurdish population. In his view, the situation requires what he calls a ‘Basque solution.’ This would require the Ankara government to allow the Kurds to maintain their language and culture. It would also require the creation of local government bodies in Kurdistan with real powers. And instead of sullen hostility and worse, the government needs to show a brotherly interest in the welfare of its fellow citizens. The implementation of such policies would win the cooperation of the Kurdish people to deal with the PKK as a criminal problem. ‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘all this is proper to the democratic advancement of Turkey.’

Mass support

Mention of democratic advancement touches on the other perennial problem, Islam. An intellectual fashion for a Turkish-Islamic synthesis, which considered Islamists to be defenders of the national integrity, allowed Islam to be seen as not always incompatible with the well-being of the republic. Islamist sentiment was permitted expression with the result that the Islamist Refah party emeged and developed and its leader, Necmettin Erbakan, became Prime Minister. He did not last. Elected in 1996, Erbakan was obliged by the army to quit in 1997. Refah was banned, but its members regrouped under the banner of the present Virtue party.

Renewed tension

Tension has risen once again between the secularists and the Islamists. The Islamist Mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyib Erdogan, was removed from office in November 1998, whereupon the city council voted in another Islamist to replace him. Police also detained the Islamist Mayor of Ankara.

A spectre haunting Turkey

The row over the refusal to hand over Ocalan coincided with the fall of Mesut Yilmaz’s minority coalition over charges of corruption in the $600 million sale of a bank. With elections to be held in the Spring of 1999, a spectre may be said to be haunting Turkey’s political life, that of mass political support for Islamist policies. The Virtue party will go into those elections having been, like Refah before it, is the biggest party in parliament.

Joining the club

With its parliamentary system and secularism, the republic is as Mustafa Kemal built it, facing West. During the contest with the Soviet Union, the West was glad to have Turkey in its NATO club. Nowadays, the West is in no hurry to admit Turkey to the newer, bigger club, the European Union. This, according to voices in Turkey, is because the club does not wish to admit Muslims as members. But religious affiliation counts very little one way or another with the leaders of what is a largely post-Christian Europe. Political sentiments are moved much more by questions of human rights and their violation.

Progress and setbacks

In this regard, Turkey does not look good. In its world report for 1998, Human Rights Watch says of Turkey: ’Although a lively, if small, civil society was active and there was both progress and setbacks with regard to prosecuting police, lowering detention periods for security detainees, and releasing jailed editors, persistent human rights abuses continued. They included restrictions on free expression, torture, death in detention, and police abuse and maltreatment. Prisons continued to be a problem, with poor administration and excessive use of force during unrest. Militant left and right-wing groups continued to commit abuses, such as bombings and assassinations.’

Economic growth

In economic terms, according to Norman Stone, the eminent historian who is familiar with the country, Turkey will on present trends overtake a number of middle-sized members of ‘Euroland’ in a few years. Whether those in the club will at that point welcome such a new member is moot. A settlement of the Islamic and Kurdish questions in keeping with the norms of liberal Western societies would greatly assist if Turkey still wishes to press its application to become fully recognized as a ‘European’ country.

Keeping watch

The European Union has shown that in any case it is in no hurry to admit new members, even such well-recommended candidates as Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. If Turkey is eventually admitted, it will not be for some years to come. In the meanwhile, Turkey will have to continue dealing with the Kurds and Islam. It will be interesting to see how it does so: will it at last break or transcend what Ataturk built? Together with Israel, it will also have to keep an eye on the neighbors, particularly the emerging hostile alignment of Athens-Damascus-Baghdad-Tehran. The United States, of course, and Russia, will be watching, too.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

© Copyright Derk Kinnane-Roelofsma 1998

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