Freedom’s Stalemate

Located 2 hours away from the Iranian border, Van is a provincial town of 400,000 with global problems. Turkey’s Southeast, where Van is located, is visibly less “Turkish” than other parts of Turkey. One of its most notable landmarks is an Armenian church located on secluded Akdamar Island. While the Armenians are gone as a result of the 1915 genocide, other cultures remain and try to thrive, most notably the Kurds.

Turkey’s so-called “Kurdish Issue” is a problem with implications for Turkey, the United States and Iran, Iraq, Syria, and other countries along the Southeastern border. To better understand this issue, one needs to understand the way in which the Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923. At the end of World War I, the Allied Powers divided the fallen Ottoman Empire into many protectorates that would be ruled by one of the Allied nations. Under the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, Istanbul would be ruled by international powers, Turkey’s western coast would be given to Greece, and Turkey would have been about half its current size. The treaty also made a provision for a Greater Armenia that would include lands traditionally claimed by Armenians, mainly in Turkey’s Northeast and also provided for Kurdistan in Turkey’s Southeast, as seen on this map.

Along came Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s charismatic and revered leader who formed an army from the remnants of the Ottoman one and fought to create the borders of modern Turkey. While signed by the Ottoman Government, the Treaty of Sevres was never signed by the Sultan and was later rejected by Atatürk’s republican movement and never came into effect. However, it lingers in the minds of many Turks, who are aware of their borders’ militant birth. (Photo of high school students from the town of Bingol.)













While Armenia was downsized to a small piece of land in Eastern Armenia, Kurdistan was erased from the map altogether. As a result, there are roughly 25 million Kurds living throughout a region shared by Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria as well as Armenia, Lebanon, and Azerbaijan. The Kurds living within Turkey were subjected to Atatürk’s policy of creating a nation of “Turks” out of the ashes of an empire where groups has previously seen themselves as distinct ethnic groups. To that end, Kurds were prohibited from using their own language, from celebrating their culture, and were renamed “mountain Turks.”

Under the leadership of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) many Kurds have been fighting for rights from broadcasting and teaching in Kurdish and being able to write Kurdish as their ethnicity on Turkey’s identity cards, to the release of captured PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and the creation of Kurdistan. During the 1980’s and 1990’s the Turkish Government and many political and militant Kurds fought a war during which some 30,000 people, mainly Kurds, were killed. This tragic history lingers over Southeast Turkey, as the government and Kurds maintain a delicate relationship that was recently disturbed when Turkish security forces allegedly bombed a Kurdish bookstore in the town of Şemdeli.

One can see the wariness that accompanies this precarious balance. The Jandarma, a branch of the Turkish military, guards the entrance to the university in Van, as well as every building on campus. They briefly arrested one of my American friends also doing research because they wanted to know whether she had permission to survey students in one of the campus cafes. This security struck me as both excessive and provocative until I met with a student group that works on a variety of levels from benign to active and perhaps militant. Their activities include collecting blood types from its members for targeted blood drives and offering Kurdish language classes, to providing a haven for those expelled from the University for Kurdish activities and publishing a Kurdish journal to having a secret library of Ocalan’s books (one isn’t a problem, apparently, but having many is) and hanging pictures of “the martyred” on the walls—those killed by Turkish security forces and those who were suicide bombers. “We are at war,” these students say, “we are not free.” (Photo of journal article and picture about protests at Yüzüncu Yil University in Van.)














In this situation it seems that no one is free—not the Kurds who have few rights and no territory of their own, nor the Turkish government which is obligated to defend its borders, nor the non-militant citizens who often must move from destroyed villages to the cities to escape the violence perpetrated by both sides.

With the United States’ incursion into Iraq, regional balances are shifting. Turkey is keeping a close eye on the situation in Iraq. Any movement toward civil war or greater autonomy for the Kurds in Northern Iraq could have consequences for Turkey. I have heard it said that should Iraq descend into full civil war, there is a chance that Turkey would enter Iraq if need be to maintain their own territorial integrity. While the chances of this happening are slim, it is worth noting that the U.S. does not act in a vacuum. It is no wonder then, that in this town located closer to Iran than to Ankara, the question on everyone's mind is "will the U.S. go to war with Iran?" Consequences of actions know no borders, and as Turkey and the PKK continue their sometimes hot, sometimes cold war, shifting politics in neighboring countries are bound to have an impact in Turkey.