At the same time, there are good reasons to think of Turkey’s Kurds as a factor of immediate relevance for Southeast Europe. Kurdish communities are now present and visible all over the region. Speakers of Kurdish and Turkish in its eastern variations are to be heard ever more frequently, not only in the streets of Lavrion, but also in Omonia Square in the Greek capital and in the schools of the nearby neighborhood of Gazi, as much as in the major cities in the region, especially in Romania and Moldova. The asymmetric war between the PKK and the armed forces, particularly under the government of Tansu Ciller in the mid-1990s, uprooted more than a million mostly Kurdish villagers. Most of them fled to the hurriedly built-up, drab suburbs of western Turkish cities, some made it to countries like France and Germany, while a smaller, yet still substantial part terminated their journey in the region. This unprecedented transnational displacement of Turkey’s Kurds has made Southeast Europe a part of what the Johns Hopkins academic Bilgin Ayata calls ‘virtual’ or ‘Euro-Kurdistan,’ an imagined space, yet a real network that connects, for instance, Athens and Diyarbakir.

Legal reform and repolarization

Analyzed from this angle, recent developments in the Kurdish-populated areas are of crucial immediacy. Reform packages aiming at the liberalization of the legal and political system, inspired by Turkey’s drive for EU membership, have removed some of the most obvious obstacles to the expression of Kurdish identity.

Broadcasting in Kurdish, if limited and state-controlled, is now widely accessible. Teaching of Kurdish, though still banned from the official curricula of primary and secondary schools, has become possible in private institutions. This opening in the otherwise overly rigid minority policy of the state promised a reconciliation of Kurdish grievances with the concerns of those who remain fearful of a disintegration of the unitary Turkish nation-state. For a brief period, the discourse of the ruling Justice and Development Party seemed to have broken with the tradition of non-recognition.

Yet, recent developments suggest a fallback into the default option of securitizing the Kurdish issue through draconian measures such as the new anti-terrorism law that obliterates many of the liberalizing reforms undertaken in the preceding years. In the last 12 months, clashes between the military and PKK units have been on the rise, further aggravated by counterterrorist plots and lawsuits against Kurdish mayors, seen by many Kurds as attacks on the relative peace by the ‘deep state.’ Dozens of soldiers have been killed in clashes in the last few months, with the total death toll rising to well over a hundred. Violence on such a scale inescapably leads to a polarization of the political environment with moderate voices, especially among the Kurdish-interest opposition, being the first victims. With every dead soldier, anti-Kurdish sentiment is fueled, while every civilian death or PKK casualty further alienates the country’s politically engaged Kurds from the ruling party and from the idea of peaceful coexistence.

The Iraqi quagmire

Indicators for a return to the politics of polarization and an interruption of the EU reform process are increasing. Frustrated by the rhetoric of exclusion emanating from many EU publics and cornered by an influential coalition of nationalist, secularist and anti-EU forces, the Justice and Development Party under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to have decided to stall the reform process for the time being, trying to gain time until the upcoming election of the president and general elections in 2007. The actual upsurge in violence in the southeast, however, might easily spiral out of control. The disastrous failure of the US-led intervention in Iraq has created a new set of regional power dynamics, which now benefits the PKK with its bases in northern Iraq. Despite the rhetorical commitment to fight the PKK as a terrorist organization, the US is in no position to put at risk its amicable relations with the Iraqi Kurdish leadership, the only remaining ally in the quagmire of the Iraqi occupation. In the absence of political alternatives, PKK attacks, supported logistically from the territory of northern Iraq, are likely to proliferate, and so are acts of reprisal by the military. The foreseeable results of this worst-case scenario on the regional scale are far from encouraging: interruption of the reform process, suspension of membership negotiations, a complete standstill and possible backlash in the already strained resolution of central Greek and Turkish concerns such as Cyprus or the Aegean, not to mention the status of the Patriarchate or Halki. To complete this grim image, add a new wave of refugees from the Kurdish-populated areas to the west, both within Turkey and to Southeast Europe.

Challenges and opportunities

Worst-case scenarios are not unavoidable. They are instructive as they might galvanize decision makers into taking action to avert them. To what extent the Justice and Development government will be able to harmonize its primary agenda to win a second term in power with a continuation of the reform course and an appeasement of the Kurdish areas remains to be seen. A number of external and internal factors outside the government’s control ― the course of events in northern Iraq, internal differences in the PKK, the position toward Turkey in EU capitals, but also the strategy of the Turkish military under its new Chief of Staff Yasar Buyukanit, known to be a hawk ― will ultimately shape the environment within which any future scenario can unfold. The EU can make a difference: By constantly raising the bar and demonstrating ignorance and disengagement with Turkey, it can further polarize public opinion and weaken the legitimacy of the country’s already beleaguered pro-EU forces. Recent tendencies in the European Parliament to add new issues to Turkey’s to-do list before accession ― such as recognition of the Armenian genocide ― could prove to be the ultimate tipping point, after which the EU will have lost its ability to mobilize soft power resources to shape Turkey’s Kurdish policy, or any policy for that matter.

Alternatively, the EU can also play a positive role, especially if it renews its commitment to Turkey’s EU accession process, even if this commitment is framed in general terms. Such a move could re-establish a sense of perspective and trust for the EU project among the Turkish public. A responsible, principled and proactive initiative of some EU heads of state could draw on the experiences of conflict resolution in the Western Balkans and Northern Ireland and contribute to the mitigation of the current escalation. Furthermore, it is not inconceivable that the unexpected call for a ceasefire by the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan might create a window of opportunity that allows for a depolarization of the scene and a return to political reasoning that could be seized by the EU and the Turkish government, even if only through indirect negotiations. A decision for engagement might well be nurtured from the recognition that Turkey’s southeast has, for better or worse, already become part of Europe’s southeast. In the new strategic environment, which the ‘war on terror’ has unleashed, the Middle East indeed appears to have become part of the politics of Southeast Europe.

By Dr Kerem Oktem
Dr Kerem Oktem is a research associate at the European Studies Center, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.

Website: www.merip.org/mero/mero060306.html