July 27, 1997

Kurds Fashion Two Identities in a Fearful Turkey

By STEPHEN KINZER

VAN, Turkey -- More than 1,000 miles separate a defiant peasant named Baran, who lives in a refugee's hovel outside Van, in eastern Turkey, from a polished and successful Istanbul jeweler named Cemal.

The gap in perception and experience between the two is even wider. All they have in common is that they are Kurdish citizens of Turkey.

"I am a Kurd, but what difference does that make?" asked Cemal as he sat behind a glass case full of gold bracelets and earrings. "I'm Turkish. I love Turkey. Never once have I had a problem because I happen to have Kurdish blood. Everyone is equal in this country."

To Baran, who fled his ancestral village rather than be pressed into the pro-government village guards, things look very different.

"My identity as a Kurd is the most precious thing I have," he said as his son listened solemnly. "If I give up that identity, I can do anything in this country, even become president.

"But no matter what they do to me, I will never abandon a hundred generations of tradition in my family. I was born a Kurd, and nothing can ever make me a Turk."

These two men, both of whom asked to be identified only by their first names, represent the twin paradigms of Kurdish life in Turkey: Until their world views can somehow be reconciled, the government will find it all but impossible to resolve one of the world's bitterest and most intractable ethnic conflicts.

It is a conflict that has produced more than a dozen rebellions over the last 80 years, cost untold amounts of blood and treasure and polarized public opinion here and abroad. The current revolt, led for the last 13 years by the Kurdistan Workers Party, has taken more than 20,000 lives, mostly in fighting in eastern Turkey.

At a recent meeting here in Van, about 50 miles west of the Iranian border, senior Turkish military and intelligence officers agreed that the conflict cannot be resolved militarily. But like countless others who have pondered the problem, they failed to find a formula under which Turks and Kurds, the country's two principal ethnic groups, could live together without fighting.

The Kurdish issue is so divisive that there is even debate about how many Kurds live in Turkey. A leading demographer, Cem Behar, recently estimated that as many as 10 million people speak Kurdish in a country with a total population of 63 million. Several million more Kurds live in Iran, Iraq, Syria and other nearby countries, concentrated in a region that has historically been known as Kurdistan.

The decades of revolts since the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 have made Turkish authorities deeply suspicious of nearly all Kurdish political, social and cultural movements. In their view, the line separating guerrillas from peaceful intellectuals and politicians often blurs.

As recently as 1981, a member of Parliament was sentenced to three years in prison for asserting: "There are Kurds in Turkey. I am a Kurd." Since then -- and especially after the late President Turgut Ozal broke a longstanding taboo by declaring that he was partly Kurdish -- laws have been loosened. It is no longer illegal to speak Kurdish in public or to play Kurdish music.

Turkish officials often assert that Kurds enjoy the same rights as other citizens. Thousands of Kurds are highly successful in many fields, and by some estimates more than one-fourth of the members of Parliament are of Kurdish extraction. These facts make it difficult to argue that Kurds suffer systematic discrimination.

Kurdish leaders, however, say the path to success is open only to assimilated Kurds. The government has strongly resisted Kurdish demands for cultural and political concessions. President Suleyman Demirel spoke for many Turks when he warned that such concessions would lead to "compromise after compromise with no end."

The Turkish Republic was founded after a rebellion against the terms of the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, in France, under which most of what is now Turkey was to be divided among European powers. The trauma of that experience has bequeathed to Turks a "Sevres syndrome," which Kemal Kirisci, author of a new study of the Kurdish problem, described as "the deep belief that the outside world is always trying to take the country away from you."

As a result, many Turks fear that giving autonomy to Kurds would lead to demands for independence, and that their country would split apart in the manner of Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union.

"This is not something unique to Turkey, but what is specific here is that Turkey has nurtured this fear and integrated it into the state apparatus so successfully that most people are only now beginning to question it," Kirisci said. "In many ways, the key question in Turkey is how to overcome that fear, the fear that minorities and minority rights represent a threat to the unity of the country."

Efforts to forge a political party to speak for the Kurds have failed several times. Opponents of Kurdish nationalism, fearing such a party would serve as a wedge for separatists, have used various tactics to assure that none survive for long.

The People's Democracy Party, which is now a principal civilian voice of Kurdish nationalism, was subjected to fierce criticism after someone tore down the Turkish flag at its 1996 convention and replaced it with a guerrilla banner. Criminal charges were filed against party leaders, and 31 of them were convicted in June of subversive activities and sentenced to prison terms of up to six years.

The most famous Kurdish prisoner in Turkey is Leyla Zana, who was among eight members of Parliament convicted in 1994 on charges of "separatist speech" and supporting terrorism. She is now serving a 15-year prison term, and her supporters regard her as a martyr of democracy.

But many Turks consider the sympathy for Ms. Zana ludicrously naive.

"Leyla Zana is a separatist and her party was a direct extension of the guerrilla insurrection," said former Foreign Minister Coskun Kirca. "Advocating separatism is illegal in Turkey, as it should be. We have a very strong desire to keep our country from splitting apart as she would like."

In 1991 a group of Kurds decided to set up a foundation to promote Kurdish culture, and last year it was finally given legal status as the Kurdish Cultural and Research Foundation. In May it began offering Kurdish language courses, but the courses were quickly shut down by the police. The chairman of the foundation, Yilmaz Camlibel, has been notified that criminal charges will be filed against him.

At the foundation's headquarters in Istanbul, the bathrooms are labeled Mer and Jin, the Kurdish words for men and women. But there are no students to use them, and Camlibel ruminates in his office under an allegorical painting that shows Kurds being sucked into a whirlpool.

"If you speak Kurdish, you become Kurdish," he said. "Maybe that is what they are afraid of. They don't mind allowing courses in any other language, even Japanese, but when we want to learn our language, they see it as a threat."

Some prominent Turks have become convinced that the Kurdish question can be resolved only if Turkey becomes more democratic. A group of them recently formed an organization, the Foundation for the Research of Societal Problems. According to its manifesto, it aims at promoting "democratic pluralism" as an alternative to "authoritarian centralism."

It has begun a series of conferences at which figures on both sides of the Turkish-Kurdish divide seek a common platform.

"The challenge now is to reconstruct Turkish institutions to make this a truly democratic country which embraces multiculturalism, political democracy and the rule of law," said Dogu Ergil, an essayist and university professor who is the foundation's director.

"Without those things, the war in the east will go on, people who benefit from the war will remain powerful and the Kurdish problem will never be solved."