Erdogan and company seen as ignoring causes of violence
ISTANBUL — Violence in several towns in Turkey’s mostly Kurdish southeast has resulted in civilian deaths, according to local news and human rights associations.
The Human Rights Foundation of Turkey says 20,000 residents have fled and six have been killed by security forces in Silvan, a provincial town of 86,000, after a curfew was imposed in three central neighborhoods from November 3rd to November 14. The curfew was imposed and military units including tanks and helicopters started occupying the town in response to barricades and ditches built by the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), an offshoot of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
“It’s like a real war. I couldn’t imagine there would be such destruction,” says Narin Çapan, a 27-year-old translator and resident of Silvan, speaking with The Media Line by telephone. “For the three neighborhoods [under curfew], I can say they’re totally destroyed. There’s no houses where you don’t see bullet [holes].”
Çapan says there’s no water or electricity in the districts under curfew, and food, even bread, is running out fast.
“It’s a really hard situation for citizens now,” she says. “They’re really angry, as I can see from their faces. At the same time they’re really scared.”
Çapan says on Wednesday two young children and a 75-year-old were injured by bullets fired by security forces.
“I’ve seen the cruelty of the state. When they see anything alive in the streets or in houses, they just shoot.”
The violence has been ongoing since the PKK broke a two-year ceasefire and killed two police officers following a large Islamic State-linked bombing in Suruç in late July that the PKK blamed on the Turkish government. The state has supported jihadist groups in Syria that are fighting against both President Bashar Al-Assad’s forces and against the PKK’s Syrian affiliate, the Democratic Union Party (PYD). The Turkish government has also been accused of allowing Islamic State militants to operate on its territory in the past.
Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its former leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, responded to the PKK’s killing of the two police officers with a brutal military campaign, winning back millions of nationalist voters in the election on November 1st that saw it regain the majority it lost in June.
Gareth Jenkins, a senior fellow at the Silk Road Studies Program, part of a trans-Atlantic research center, says Erdoğan could have easily reduced tensions following the Suruç bombing, but instead exploited the violence for political gains.
“Erdoğan has made his political survival dependent on inculcating a sense of siege among his supporters and maintaining very high levels of social tension,” he says. “After Suruç, Erdoğan could have issued his condolences for the families of those killed. He didn’t […] When you have that kind of thing, deliberately stoking tensions, it’s making things a lot worse.”
The leftist, pro-minorities Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which emerged from the same Kurdish movement as the PKK but is against violence, has been attacked by the Islamic State and Turkish nationalists since starting to campaign for an election in June. In that election, the HDP entered the Turkish parliament as a unified party for the first time. The stunning win resulted in the AKP losing its parliamentary majority and it responded with vicious rhetoric equating the HDP with the PKK, despite HDP officials constantly condemning the PKK’s violence.
The political parties that entered parliament in June failed to form a coalition amid claims that President Erdoğan gave orders preventing the formation of one, and so another election was held in November. The HDP lost a large chunk of its support in that election and the AKP gained considerably, after claiming only a majority government could stop the ongoing bloodshed.
HDP politicians have been trying to enter the locked down neighborhoods in Silvan, which voted 87.9 per cent for the party, in order to mediate, but have been attacked by police. HDP co-chair Figen Yüksekdağ was hit in the head with a tear-gas canister and claims security forces fired on her delegation with live bullets. HDP deputy Ziya Pir told a Turkish newspaper that an Interior Ministry official told him that security forces “will erase three Silvan neighborhoods from the map.”
Jenkins says the HDP’s politicians are the only ones respected enough by the residents of the restive towns to be able to ease the tensions.
“Of all the people you could think of going in to try to mediate or reduce tensions, [the HDP] are probably the only people who could do it, but they’re also being prevented from going in,” he says.
The Media Line reached HDP deputy Feleknas Uca, part of the party’s delegation in Silvan, during clashes with police on Friday.
“There’s the sound of explosions coming. They’re shooting at houses,” she said during a brief call over a poor connection. “We have five injured people. One person is heavily injured.”
Temporary curfews have been imposed and lifted in Cizre, Lice, Bismil, Dicle, and Arıcak since the uptick in violence started after the June election. A nine-day curfew in Cizre in September left 21 civilians dead according to the HDP, but the government labeled all the dead as terrorists. The curfew in Silvan was the sixth one in the town since the PKK declared self-rule there and 12 other areas in August. Yet another curfew was declared in Nusaybin on Friday, the second since October.
Jenkins says neither the government nor the PKK can win militarily, so a political solution is the only option.
“The AK Party is essentially trying to resolve the Kurdish issue by force,” he says. “We’re seeing increasingly an attempt to use violence to suppress not just the PKK or the YDG-H, but Kurds in general.”
For the Turkish government, solving the Kurdish problem simply means ending violence and eradicating the PKK, according to Doğu Ergil, a professor of political science and public administration at Fatih University specializing in the Kurdish issue.
“If this happens, the Kurdish problem will go away, they believe,” Ergil says. But he says the violence is the result of the problem, not the problem itself.
“The Kurds have reacted with violence to the injustices, the exclusion, the denial of their culture, and so forth,” he says. “The government has treated the matter by looking at the end result, not the reasons that led to the violence.”
Professor Ergil says only a political solution and cultural rights will solve the problem.
“To solve a social conflict you have to directly negotiate with the people and see what they’re complaining [about], what their demands are, what their fears and expectations are, and so forth.”
In August four mayors from the HDP’s fraternal Democratic Regions Party and HDP Silvan co-mayor Yüksel Bodakçı were arrested for attempting to “disrupt the unity and territorial integrity of the state” after they declared autonomy in response to the military’s strikes on the PKK.
But HDP parliamentarian Mahmut Toğrul says the party has no intention of breaking up Turkey.
“[The mayors] didn’t announce autonomy, but self-governance. Those are different things,” he said over the phone from Diyarbakır, the largest Kurdish city in Turkey’s southeast. “In those municipalities, people want to govern themselves. [The municipal governments] listen to the voice of the people.”
Toğrul, who visited Silvan but was stopped by the police on Thursday, says the security forces are harassing locals.
“Their right to live has been taken from them,” he says. “They’re having difficulty surviving, especially in the three neighborhoods under curfew.”
The clashes in Silvan and other towns are mostly between security and military forces and the PKK’s youth group, the YDG-H. Gareth Jenkins says the group is composed of teenaged boys without any training, and the PKK exerts limited control over them.
“The kids that they use are often from very poor families and very alienated,” Jenkins says. “It’s very difficult for the PKK to control these young kids. In fact I don’t think they can.”