During the 1980s the Kurdish and African National Congress leaders in exile frequently claimed a common cause and declared their solidarity. Since the 1990s these ties have become frayed, as the Kurdish struggle for political rights has intensified and the ANC-in-government has resumed economic and military links with Turkey, one of the nations charged with denying Kurdish human rights.
On November 20 last year a group of students at Istanbul University signed a petition appealing for optional Kurdish lessons at the university. The petition effectively demands the rescinding of Article 42 of the Turkish Constitution, which bans education in the Kurdish language.
Similar petitions soon followed throughout Turkey and by February 14 this year students at 24 universities had submitted 11 837 petitions, and thousands more were handed in from primary and secondary schools. The campaign ended in April 2002, and rough estimates reckon that 45 000 signatures accompanied the petitions, which were ultimately submitted to the Turkish Grand National Assembly.
The response of the Turkish authorities was swift and ruthless. By February 14, 1 359 petitioners had been taken into custody, 143 had been remanded in custody, and 46 had been suspended from university or school. According to the respected United States Chronicle of Higher Education, “mistreatment of students in police custody appears to have been widespread, especially outside the largest city, Istanbul [and] many complain of being blindfolded during questioning and of being hit by police” (July 19 2002). According to Amnesty International, Mursul Sargut, a 19-year old literature student at Istanbul University, was tortured while in police custody for his part in the campaign.
The significance of the campaign, and the reasons for the draconian response to it, only make sense in the context of the long struggle of the Kurds against the Turkish state. We therefore turn first to this history, and then to the justifications put forward by the Turkish government for denying Kurdish aspirations.
The Kurdish view
Kurdistan was first divided in 1639 by the treaty of Kasri-Sirin between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. Kurds remained dispersed between these two competing empires and beyond for the centuries to follow.
After the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, but the Kurds’ faint hopes for autonomy were dashed as the empire was transformed into the Turkish Republic in 1923 under the nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The Treaty of Lausanne of that same year confirmed the minority status of Kurds in four nations: Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.
Official policy in Turkey since 1923 has been aggressively nationalist, with all state efforts dedicated towards assimilating minorities into a common Turkish citizenry. This has meant the (often violent) suppression of any form of separatist ethnic aspirations, and successive generations of Kurds have struggled against what they experience as uncompromising and racist Turkish state policies.
These policies have included the destruction of Kurdish villages, torture and extra-judicial killings, state-sponsored dam projects on traditional Kurd land (like the recently aborted Elysu dam), and the systematic economic under-development of Kurd regions like the south-east. The European Court of Human Rights has found Turkey guilty of numerous instances of human rights violations in pursuit of these policies.
The most violent phase of the Kurdish struggle against the Turkish regime, however, was between 1984 and 1999, when approximately 37 000 people were killed, the vast majority of them Kurds in the south-east of the country. Armed Kurdish resistance to the US-backed Turkish military was organised by the Kurdish Workers’ Party (the PKK), but was ended with the arrest of its leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999, who appealed to his followers from prison to return to non-violent methods of pursuing the Kurdish cause.
Ocalan’s appeal has been heeded, and since 1999 Kurdish interests have been represented by a combination of groups, including the People’s Democratic Party in Turkey (Hadep), the Parliament of Kurdistan in Exile and the PKK.
Demographic information about Kurds now in Turkey is uncertain, as the Turkish government denies the existence of a separate Kurdish community, and does not gather any information on Kurds in the national census. However, careful estimates suggest that there are about 15-million Kurds in Turkey (about 20% of the total population of 65-million).
Until 1991 the use of the Kurdish language, which is related to Persian but quite different to Turkish, was totally prohibited in Turkey, even in private. Despite such efforts of Turkish governments to repress the Kurdish language, a 1995 survey of the south-east suggests that 65% of Kurds still speak Kurdish at home, and as many as 21% of Kurds in the region understand no Turkish.
Educational opportunities for Kurds in the south-east fall well short of the national averages in every respect. Illiteracy in the region is 44%; at least 20 000 children of the 320 000 of school-going age do not attend school; average class size is 55, but there remain many classes of 70 or 80 in poorer districts; and there remains a serious shortage of teachers.
There have been improvements since the end of the civil war in 1999, but Kurdish educationalists continue to criticise the lack of political will on the part of the central state to redress endemic inequalities.
The Turkish view
Pejorative stereotypes of Kurdish culture circulate widely in Turkey as a justification for refusing to recognise Kurdish rights. Such stereotypes are repeated even at surprisingly elevated levels. For example, Nurset Aras, professor of medicine and rector of the University of Ankara, is quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education as saying that “Kurdish is not a true language. It is not adequate for academic education” (July 19).
A more frequent reason put forward by the Turkish government for the clampdown on the petitioners is that they are unwitting tools of the PKK, which has used the campaign as a strategy to further its cause. The Turkish Daily News reports the comments of Education Minister Metin Bostancioglu, who said that the severe punishment of the student petitioners was legitimate because “these demands were not innocent individual actions, but were separatist actions planned and organised by the PKK” (June 11).
The most articulate and energetic spokesman for the Turkish government is Kemal Guruz, a professor of chemical engineering who is now president of the Higher Education Council. A hard-line nationalist dedicated to the modernising ideals of Ataturk, Guruz considers Kurdish ethnic aspirations as retrograde, and antithetical to the transformation of Turkey into a modern nation state.
For Guruz, capitulation to Kurdish demands would amount to a return to the pre-1923 condition of semi-feudal chaos. Accordingly, he has been entirely unsympathetic to all demands for Kurdish language education, and has pursued the criminal prosecution of petitioning students.
International pressures
The most formidable pressure upon Turkey predictably comes from the US that, in its campaign against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, badly needs Turkey’s cooperation as a member of Nato, and in particular needs to continue using the strategic military base at Incerlik.
To accommodate the Turkish government, the US has placed the PKK on its list of terrorist organisations. Kurdish sympathisers point out that whereas Kurds in Iraq resisting state oppression are routinely represented in the pro-US Western media as brave freedom fighters defying Saddam’s tyranny, Kurds in Turkey resisting state oppression are represented as terrorists destabilising a democratic ally of the free world.
The second source of international pressure upon Turkey comes from the European Union. A significant faction of Turkey’s ruling elite sees membership of the EU as indispensable to Turkey’s progress as a nation. At this stage, however, Turkey’s record of human rights abuses represents a significant obstacle to membership. The differential treatment of the Kurds — including the denial of language and education rights — lies at the core of this unhappy record.
A recent fact-finding mission undertaken by Robert Dunbar from the School of Law at Glasgow University and United Kingdom human rights lawyer Fiona McKay, sponsored by the London-based Kurdish Human Rights Project, draws the following conclusion. The present state of affairs in Turkey “constitutes a violation of a wide range of international commitments made by Turkey, and a violation of a very wide range of international human rights and minorities standards. The denial of the Kurdish language does not promote, but in fact compromises, the equality of all Turkish citizens.”
South Africa’s trading partnership with Turkey is of course a small matter for Turkey compared with the difficulties of negotiating the contradictory pressures exerted by the US and EU. However, as it stands our foreign policy lines up squarely with those forces within Turkey that promote policies similar to those of the apartheid regime when it attempted to impose instruction in Afrikaans in the 1970s.
David Johnson is a graduate of the University of Cape Town and Sussex University who lectures in the literature department of the Open University, England. He is the author of Shakespeare and South Africa and co-author of Jurisprudence: A South African Perspective