ISTANBUL — Last Thursday was the start of the Kurdish New Year and, if all goes according to plan, the advent of a new era in Turkey’s relationship with its own Kurdish population. In Diyarbakir, the largest city in southeastern Turkey, a few hundred thousand people converged to listen to a proclamation, read — first in Turkish, then in Kurdish — on behalf of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned founder of the Kurdistan Workers Party, also known as P.K.K.
It was time, the message said, “for the guns to be silent and for ideas and statecraft to speak.” In short, Ocalan was calling for the end of an armed insurrection that has lasted almost three decades, killed some 40,000 people, cost Turkey hundreds of billions of dollars and stood in the way of the country’s ambition to be a regional powerhouse.
The occasion should have pleased Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He recently celebrated his 10th year in power, and this could well be the defining moment of his reign. Yet he was uncharacteristically sullen. While on a trip to the Netherlands, he called the rally in Diyarbakir — which he had helped orchestrate — a “positive development” but scolded the crowds for their lack of patriotism. Why, he asked, were they not waving Turkish flags?
The explanation for Erdogan’s flash of ill-humor, I think, is his realization that the peace process could still founder and his legacy go up in smoke. Having secured Ocalan’s cooperation, the government is now less worried about persuading the P.K.K. to lay down arms than convincing mainstream Turkish public opinion that it will need to make concessions in return.
The government has portrayed the recent thaw as though the Kurds, now violence-weary, have suddenly come to their senses. Yet history is on their side. Thanks to oil wealth, the Kurds of northern Iraq have become an important trading partner, and the Kurds in Syria are exploiting the weakness of the regime in Damascus to solidify control over the northern region that borders Turkey. Turkish Kurds may no longer be asking for an independent Kurdistan, but they will be reluctant to leave the negotiating table empty-handed.
For starters, Turkish law, which still equates Kurdish identity politics with abetting terrorism, will need to be amended. The joyful throngs in Diyarbakir last week were technically committing an offense by waving the Kurdish flag and banners of Ocalan.
Among the Kurds’ most common demand is the right to use Kurdish as an official language in government offices and schools. Another is some form of political devolution. There’s also the release of the 8,000 or so pro-Kurdish political activists held in pretrial detention under Turkey’s sweeping antiterrorism laws. Finally, and most problematic, the P.K.K. is demanding the rehabilitation of its militants — including, if not actual freedom, then a lenient form of h
These are compromises most Turks will find difficult to accept, particularly if they suspect that Erdogan has made a deal with Ocalan in order to win the Kurds’ support for his own political ambitions. His party’s bylaws forbid him from running for prime minister again, but the presidency becomes vacant in 2014, and Erdogan hopes before then to push through a constitutional reform that would give the job much greater powers. Just putting that proposition to a public referendum requires the support of at least one opposition party — and now the Peace and Democracy Party, a Kurdish nationalist party, looks like the most likely to oblige.
Given these stakes, small wonder Erdogan chided the Kurds of Diyarbakir last week. Or that he publicly burst out in anger in late February after a newspaper leaked minutes from meetings that Ocalan held in prison with some MPs according to which he urged P.K.K. militants to get with the program — including by supporting Erdogan’s candidacy for president.
This is not the first time Erdogan has tried to resolve the Kurdish issue, but he knows it may well be his last. His main obstacle used to be resistance from the Kurdish side. Now, it’s convincing his own constituents, whom he helped rear on a diet of “no surrender to terrorism,” that compromise means peace, not defeat.
Source: IHT Global Opinion (latitude.blogs.nytimes.com)