The Turkish Ship Is Sinking The U.S. Government Is Guiding It To The Rocks Statement by the American Kurdish Information Network before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe hearing on "Turkey - U.S. Relations: Potential and Peril" Tuesday, September 19, 1995 Washington, DC ---- The Turkish Ship Is Sinking The U.S. Government Is Guiding It To The Rocks We live in an age that has witnessed some remarkable changes. Films such as "The Day After", which chilled us with the thought that we may be the last generation, can now be forgotten. Apocalyptic books such as Endgame may for now, we hope, gather some dust. But the new times, though promising, have brought new challenges in their wake. The emerging scenes, the clearer they become, now seem like vistas from "The Killing Fields". The beast in us has a way of prevailing over our nascent humanity to inflict untold misery and sufferings upon the human family. Reported and under- reported tragedies in places like Rwanda, Bosnia, Kurdistan, and East Timor clearly show how fragile is the bond of our civility. In some cases greed, in others racism prevents us from making this world a better place for all. One realm which has remained impervious to the vast changes that have taken us by surprise is that of Turkish/American relations. Ankara has insisted that the special relationship it enjoyed throughout the Cold War remain intact, arguing that nothing has changed to its north, and that even greater menaces now lie to its east (Iran) and southeast (the Kurds). The United States government seems to have accepted this Turkish logic, or as some cynics would put it, the Foggy Bottom has not yet awakened to the fact that the Soviet threat is gone. In our view, this unchanged policy endangers Turkey's stability and imperils American interests. The problem is the Kurdish question, -- every night it is the number one issue on Turkish television news, -- which has demanded a civil solution but has thus far only received a military response. Such an approach is nothing new in Turkey. What is new this time, however, is that Turkey faces an organized resistance from a popular mass movement that has passed the threshold of unbecoming by means of force. A cursory look at the origins of this problem will reveal some rather disturbing facts. First divided between the Ottomans and the Persians in 1514, the Kurds lived quietly on their mountains, oblivious to the world until 1923. To be sure, they were the subjects of the far-flung Ottoman and Persian Empires and suffered their share of the indignities that are the lot of captive peoples. But, most important for the subject of this paper, their land, Kurdistan, and their language, Kurdish, were respected and tolerated in a relatively free environment which preserved them to our own time. The Turkish Republic, which rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, was conceived on a promise of full rights for the Kurds. Mustafa Kemal, the Turkish general who courted the Kurds to join with the Turks to liberate the remnants of the empire, said nothing at the time of the unitary state that he later advocated and to this day his successors have defended. He knew of the promises of self-determination made to the Kurds at the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, and yet he succeeded in convincing them that an Islamic comity of two peoples, that of the Turks and those of the Kurds, had a better prospect than the Kurds' allegiance to the "infidels" of the West. The Turkish and Kurdish war of liberating what is today called Turkey lasted some four years. At the peace talks in Lausanne in 1923, Mustafa Kemal sought legitimacy for his gains. In a symbolic act which his successors are emulating with the same adroitness, he sent a Kurdish envoy, Ismet Inonu, to the negotiating table. Mr. Inonu pleaded with his British interlocutor that the Kurds wanted no special rights and were happy to be part of the Turkish Republic. To assure the British that this indeed was the case, Ankara even stooped to the time-honored ploy of having reputable Kurdish representatives send telegraphic messages to the British at the peace conference stating that the Kurds were in favor of a "union" with the Turks. The Lausanne Treaty of June 24, 1923 officially sanctioned the division of the Kurdish lands among five states. Turkey proved to be the largest beneficiary holding onto 43% of the land. Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Soviet Union got 31%, 18%, 6%, and 2% respectively.1 It is difficult to establish the current Kurdish population figures in these states, since the governments that have the Kurds in their custody choose to ignore the question or offer figures that run contrary to demographic trends. Unofficial figures vary from a low of 25 million to higher estimates of some 40 million Kurds. Of these, some 15 to 20 million live in Turkey. The life of the Kurds after Lausanne made the theocracy of the Ottomans seem enviable by comparison. Soon after the agreement, Ataturk (meaning "Father of the Turks", the name now given to Mustafa Kemal) abandoned all of his pre-war promises to the Kurds and conceived of Turkey as being a unitary state comprised of one, and only one, people: the Turks. His rallying cry "Turkey belongs to the Turks!" became the creed which to this day forms the basis for Turkish national consciousness.2 Even today, the Turkish Constitution reads: "The Turkish state, its territory and people, is one and indivisible. The language is Turkish. These facts cannot be changed, nor can changes be proposed."3 What the "facts" of the Turkish Constitution overlooked were the rights of the Kurds, the Armenians, the Greeks, and other natives of Anatolia who now were told to call themselves Turks because Ataturk had so decreed. The Greeks, as late as the 1950s, were systematically uprooted, sometimes by force and sometimes by provocative acts which compelled them to flee and leave everything that they had behind.4 The Armenians were silenced by the massacre of 1915, prompting Hitler two decades later to argue that what the Turks had done with impunity, the Germans could emulate against the Jews. The Kurds were a different matter. To begin with, there were more of them, and they were Muslims like the Turks. Something more than brute force was required to undo them. Meticulous plans were made for this act of social engineering. The solution was sought in forced assimilation. In a generation or two, the Turkish social engineers wanted to erase all the references to the Kurds. Beginning in 1924, the Kurdish language was banned. Then came the laws which enabled the authorities to give Turkish names to everything that had a Kurdish name. All at once, Kurdish cities, town, villages, and hamlets acquired new Turkish names. For example, the maps that were printed when the Ottomans ruled the area have references to the Kurds and their land, Kurdistan; modern Turkish maps, leaving aside the impartiality of science, refer to the entire region as Turkey. As can be expected, the Kurds did not take lightly to the death warrant that was issued in their name. They rose to undo the legislation that was condemning them to the dustbin of history. Long before United Nations Resolution 31035 sanctioned the use of force in liberation struggles, the Kurds fought on several occasions (most notably in 1925, 1930, and 1937/38) to gain control over their destiny. Up until the 1980s, however, all their uprisings were crushed. Known Kurdish leaders were hanged. Their relatives and followers were deported. As if the memory of the defeats were not enough, the Kurdish landscape, especially visible sites such as high mountain slopes, were selected for onerous expressions such as "How happy I am to be a Turk!", which were spelled out with stones in large fonts. If there ever was a psychotherapist for nations, he or she would treat the Turkish case as one that suffers from a severe inferiority complex. In no other part of the world has one witnessed such blatant self-adulation or environmental degradation over the lands of subject peoples. If the purpose of these Turkish maxims all over the Kurdish landscape were to instill love and respect for the Turks, the opposite has happened.The Kurds have resisted and the Turks have enforced the racist laws that were instituted by Ataturk and his cronies. Today, the struggle has taken the form of a massive resistance led by the armed forces of the ARGK, the People's Liberation Army of Kurdistan, the military wing of the PKK. This struggle has become an all-out war on the part of the Kurds to prevail over death, while the Turkish military does all it can to keep the fascist legacy of Ataturk intact. There are a number of published reports which document the cost of this Kurdish struggle for freedom and liberty. One of the most compelling is a small book entitled File of Torture: Deaths in Detention Places or Prisons, published by the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey in 1994. It lists the violent deaths of 420 political prisoners in custody since 1980. And, as the fighting intensifies, other reports keep surfacing. Derya Sazak, in the July 25th edition of the Turkish daily Milliyet, quotes the governor of State of Emergency Region, stating that 2,665 Kurdish villages have been destroyed in the conflict. That is an official Turkish government statistic. The uprooted villagers, their numbers now in the millions, have moved to the cities where they live in shantytowns, without jobs; they are vexing with anger and restlessness against the system. The Kurdish liberation struggle has no friends at Foggy Bottom. Washington is not even a disinterested party in this conflict. The U.S. administration has literally given a blank check to Turkey. Jennifer Washburn, a research associate at the World Policy Institute in New York, in a recent commentary in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had this to say about Turkish/U.S. relations: "Since the Turkish crackdown on the Kurdistan Workers Party began in 1984, the United States has contributed to the conflict by arming Turkey to the hilt, exporting more than $6.3 billion worth of weapons to an undemocratic, military-led government engaged in a ruthless campaign of terror against its Kurdish population. From 1987-91, Turkey bought 76% of its weapons from the United States. From 1990-93, when the counterinsurgency war intensified and human rights abuses worsened, that number increased to 80%."6 There is a saying in Turkish that might shed some light on the nature of Turkey/U.S. relations. It goes something like this: "Give a man a hammer and he will think all problems are nails." Turkey has been supplied with plenty of hammers by the United States government, and it is the Kurds who are being ruthlessly pounded like nails. This obviously has engendered anti- American feelings among some Kurds. They assert, and the available data supports them, that the Turkish government could not continue its dirty war against the Kurds without massive amounts of aid and assistance from Washington. The continuation of present policy does not serve the interests of this country for a number of reasons. Sooner rather than later, it will backfire. Notwithstanding Turkish claims, it is not just one group of Kurds but rather the Kurdish people as a whole who are targeted by American-made weapons. If the United States government wishes to avoid a debacle in Ankara, it needs to seriously rethink the ties that have blinded it to Turkey's war aims. Lest it not be clear, a few Turkish generals who have appointed themselves to the National Security Council in Ankara are pushing the country to the brink of an abyss. It will not serve the United States government well to associate with such brutes. The following are our recommendations for putting Turkey/U.S. relations on a more healthy course: 1. The U.S. government should demand that Turkey make fundamental changes to its Constitution and grant democratic and political rights to the Kurds. Turkey says it wants the fighting to stop, but it refuses to deal with Kurdish demands for a civil solution to the conflict. This is like trying to solve an equation without dealing with one of the given variables. In mathematics, this is impossible; in politics, it is no different. The Turkish government would do itself a favor by distancing itself from the fascist ideology of Ataturk and accepting the values of democracy and humanity, and the laws of science, and thereby recognize the existence of the Kurds by reforming the republic's anachronistic Constitution. The United States government would be a beneficiary of such a step as peace and stability would then revisit Turkey. 2. The U.S. government should advocate that Turkey address its Kurdish problem by means of democratic policy and reconciliation, rather than taking the more dangerous route of courting Islamic fundamentalism. Turkey is keeping the Islamic card up its sleeve, so to speak, so as to blackmail support from the West. In the words of a recent Foreign Relations Committee delegation which just returned from Turkey: "Despite claims that it regards fundamentalism as a threat to its secular heritage, the government of Turkey appears to be encouraging and even sponsoring Islamic activities in an attempt to bind the country together and defuse separatist sentiment."7 But the Islamic movement in Turkey has a different compass than the government officials would like it to follow, and Turkey's present policy "could backfire and inadvertently provide a foothold for Islamic extremists."8 In 1994, voters in two of Turkey's largest cities, Istanbul and Ankara, elected Islamic mayors from the fundamentalist Refah Party who oppose the separation of religion from the state. Turkey is edging dangerously close to Iranian-style Islamic fundamentalism. It is not in the interests of the United States government to see an Islamic theocracy come to power in Ankara. Rather than trying to subvert the rising Kurdish movement by fomenting religious strife (remember the massacre in Sivas in 1993 and the bloody scenes in Istanbul in March of this year), Turkey should take a more sound and reasoned approach to the issue. Only this can guarantee a place for Turkey among the nations of the West, thus preserving a vital ally of American foreign policy in the troubled region of the Middle East. 3. The U.S. government should encourage negotiations between the Turkish government and Kurdish representatives. One step in this direction would be to recognize the right of the Kurdish Parliament in Exile. The Kurds of Turkey are a fact of life. When their duly elected representatives to the Turkish Parliament were jailed in December 1994, Kurds in Europe responded by forming a Parliament in Exile in April of this year. This body has stated that a political solution to the Kurdish question is the preferred option for a durable settlement. It would be in the interest of the United States government to recognize the Kurdish Parliament in Exile to serve as a starting point for negotiations with the Turkish government. Such a gesture would give much needed encouragement to those Kurds who have tried again and again to seek a peaceful and democratic solution to this question, but who have met with nothing but violence and repression at the hands of the Turkish state. The Kurds of Turkey, as the philosophers would put it, have freed themselves in their thoughts. No amount of force will cause them to abandon their natural right to a life with dignity. But even the PKK, the most militant of all Kurdish parties, has time and again expressed its willingness to forgo its stated goal of creating an independent Kurdistan and to entrust the complexities of the situation to the negotiating table, hinting that a federal model could be the basis for a solution. Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of PKK, on March 17, 1993 and again on May 25, 1995, has gone on record for wanting to do his share to bring an end to the this enduring conflict. But a deafening silence has prevailed in Ankara. Historians have noted that it is the mark of statesmanship when the policy makers have foreseen problems and charted courses that have cleared the ship of state from rocky paths. The present Turkish government is refusing to deal with the problem at hand, because the Turkish military is not letting them do so. The top brass simply has too many hammers to allow the tedious but essential work of the politicians to take over. With each passing day, more and more body bags are flown back to western Turkey as more and more Turkish soldiers are sent to the eastern provinces to fight in a war which has lasted for far too long. It is an irony of history that the head of the present U.S. administration, President Bill Clinton, refused to serve in the armed forces because he opposed a war which he felt was unjust; now, two decades later, he is fueling a conflict which nearly everyone would agree is inhumane. President Clinton on numerous occasions has expressed his "understanding" for Turkey's armed forays against the Kurds. How can a man who felt the Vietnam War was immoral now "understand" the need to wipe out thousands of Kurdish villages and condemn millions of Kurdish civilians to live their lives as refugees? Twenty years ago, the adventure in Vietnam was wrong; student Bill Clinton was right to protest. Today, the war in Kurdistan is just as wrong; President Bill Clinton, however, is pursuing a policy which is wholly misguided from the standpoint of human rights. We trust that Bill Clinton will right this wrong soon, for the sake of humanity. American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN) 2309 Calvert Street NW #3 Washington, DC 20008-2603 Tel: (202) 483-6444 - Fax: (202) 483-6476 - Email: mail06672@pop.net ---- ENDNOTES: 1 "Kurds and Kurdistan: Facts and Figures", The International Journal of Kurdish Studies, Volume 8, Numbers 1&2 1995, p.160. 2 The second best selling Turkish daily, H]rr/yet, now uses this expression, "Turkiye Turklerindir", as its motto. 3 Turkiye Cumhuriyet Anayasasi 1995, Article 3. 4 Charles William Maynes, "Bye-Bye Bosnia", The Washington Post, Sunday, August 6, 1995, p.C1. 5 This 1973 resolution, which was passed by a vote of 83 in favor, 13 opposed, and 19 abstentions, read as follows: "The struggle of a people under colonial or foreign rule or under a racist regime to gain their rights to self-determination and independence is legitimate and in full agreement with the Principles of the Rights of Peoples." 6 Jennifer Washburh, "Turkey Uses U.S. Arms To Attack Kurds", St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Thursday, September 7, 1995, p.7B. 7 Foreign Relations Committee Staff Report on Turkey, September 15, 1995. 8 ibid.