Kurdish Internally Displaced People (IDP) in Turkey
Security forces in Turkey forcibly displaced Kurdish rural communities during the 1980s and 1990s in order to combat the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) insurgency, which drew its membership and logistical support from the local peasant population. Turkish security forces did not distinguish the armed militants they were pursuing from the civilian population they were supposed to be protecting. By the mid-1990s, more than 3,000 villages had been virtually wiped from the map, and, according to official figures, 378,335 Kurdish villagers had been displaced and left homeless.
Leyla Zana
Most famously, in 1994 Leyla Zana - who, three years prior, had been the first Kurdish woman elected to the Turkish parliament - was sentenced to 15 years for “separatist speech”. At her inauguration as an MP, she reportedly identified herself as a Kurd. Amnesty International reported “She took the oath of loyalty in Turkish, as required by law, then added in Kurdish, ‘I shall struggle so that the Kurdish and Turkish peoples may live together in a democratic framework.’ Parliament erupted with shouts of ‘Separatist’, ‘Terrorist’, and ‘Arrest her”.
PKK Insurgency
In Turkey the PKK (Kurdish Worker’s Party) have embarked on a violent retaliation
against the Turkish military and Republic at large. The organization was founded in 1973 by
Abdullah Ocalan. He ruled the party until his capture in 1999 by Turkish special forces in Kenya, after taking refuge in the Greek embassy in Kenya. Ocalan remains imprisoned on
an island (lmrali) near Istanbul.
The PKK is formerly Marxist separatist group that until recently sought to create an independent Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey and parts of neighbouring countries inhabited by Kurds. (Its known as the PKK after its Kurdish name, Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan.) During a rebellion that began in the mid-i 980s and claimed some 35,000 lives, the group used guerrilla warfare and terrorism, including kidnappings of foreign tourists in Turkey, suicide bombings, and attacks on Turkish diplomatic offices in Europe. The PKK has also repeatedly attacked civilians who refuse to assist it.
Over a period of 20 years, bombing campaigns in Ankara and Istanbul claimed many lives along with the disappearance of a large number of schoolteachers in East Turkey, claimed by the PKK to be government spies. The Turkish military, on the other hand, weren’t so covert and engaged in a widespread “cleansing” campaign in which thousands of Kurdish mountain villages in the East of the country were systematically burned out and razed to the ground, leaving huge numbers of people homeless with nothing more than the clothes in which they stood. Reports of customary executions in front of burning homes were a so common.
The capture of PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999; his subsequent call for a
unilateral ceasefire, and Turkey’s aspirations of joining the European Union, have all had the effect of quelling hostilities on both sides. Sporadic forays still occur, but the undercurrent of tension is far more subtle now than in recent years. A foreign visitor to the region is most likely to be more concerned with events to the south, in battle-ravaged Iraq, than with the thought of his or her own safety in what was, until very recently, a no-go area for tourists.
The people, Kurds and Turks alike, are friendly and hospitable towards tourists, if
not each other, and enjoy nothing more than inviting a passer-by in for a glass of tea. Of course, carpet sellers are the keenest to do this, for obvious reasons, and you know you’re being lined up for a bit of patter, when a dark room is transformed into a floodlit shop floor, and your gracious host starts instructing his staff to unfurl carpets, rugs and kilims at your feet. Steely resolve is called for if you are to resist becoming the prci1d owner f a new carpet, but regardless of the outcome, plentiful tea is a certainty and a friend for life a distinct possibility.
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