Street violence returns to Kurdish Turkey

After months of quiet, rioting has recommenced in the streets of Kurdish Turkey. The ban imposed on the Kurdish DTP party has only served to strengthen support for the PKK and its imprisoned leader Öcalan.

Hot tea to fight the bitter cold and lemons to ward off the tear gas are sold on the stairs leading up to the former head office of the Kurdish DTP party, which was outlawed and banned from parliament only recently. A boy with a boogie hanging from his nose, barely taller than his cart full of fruit and steaming pots of tea, had the latest on the riots smouldering in the outer reaches of this mostly Kurdish town. “If you are looking for some action head to Baglar today. Sure to be some fighting there,” he said.

Street violence is back in South-East Turkey, and the hoodlums hanging around the streets of Diyarbakir don’t mind a bit. The months since Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised the Kurds equal rights had proven a tad dull. Curbside clamour died down shortly after Erdogan first spoke of ending the 25-year war with the Kurds and recognising local language and culture: the so-called ‘Kurdish opening.’

The lull in violence that followed was the direct result of a decree issued by the DTP (Democratic Kurdish Society Party). The party did not want to crush the hope Erdogan had engendered in Kurdish hearts through violence. Last September, tens of thousands flooded the streets, holding flowers and “celebrating brotherhood” with the Turks. Not a single stone was thrown. Not one angry word spoken. The tea-seller shook his head as he recalled those months. He hadn’t been that bored in years.

Some 15 million Kurds abruptly lost their newly proclaimed faith in blossoming democracy last Friday, when the Turkish Constitutional Court declared their representation in parliament a “danger to the integrity and unity of the state” and banned its two leading men from politics for five years. The party name was promptly taken down from the DTP head office. The word “Democratik” being the first to go.

The citizens of Diyarbakir have now lost all appetite for insincerity. As the 19 DTP members of parliament returned from Ankara to inform their base about their dismissal, they were greeted by a mob chanting only three letters: PKK. The alleged ties between the DTP and this militant separatist movement were the very reason the constitutional court concluded the party was a “danger to the unity of the state” in the first place. Its leaders' claim that they had nothing to do with armed conflict, nor did they want to, fell on deaf ears.

“Long live APO,” boys clad in ski-masks sung while throwing incendiaries and stones at the police and the head-office of the governing AK party on the opposite side of the street. The image of the man they were referring to, Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK, was barely visible on posters held up amidst clouds of tear gas. Housewives and teenagers alike held portraits of him high above their heads for the TV-cameras to see, as if he were a referred prophet. With the DTP gone, the only thing left to call for is the PKK and its leader.

“He is our leader. Turkey will not know peace before the government is willing to negotiate with Öcalan directly,” said Seydi Firat, a former PKK combatant who was a member of the DTP’s board for two years. In 1999 he returned from a PKK camp, on the orders of Öcalan who had been arrested in the same year. What was meant to be a peaceful gesture ended badly for Firat. He and several other combatants were detained and subsequently jailed for terrorism. He served seven years in a Turkish prison.

Since then, under Erdogan’s AK government, Turkey has changed. When eight PKK-combatants returned from North Iraq last October to put down their arms voluntarily they were registered, but not arrested. “But I think the court’s ruling has made it very unlikely more will come down from the mountains. On the contrary: I understand a lot of people are jumping to take up arms again,” Firat said.

Firat claimed he did not doubt the youth of South-East Turkey would prove willing to take to the camps, leading a hard life governed by Marxist-Leninist doctrine. But at a time like this, few people in Diyarbakir dare question the PKK’s struggle openly.

A new name was already being hoisted up on the head office’s façade: that of the Party for Peace and Democracy (BDP). This party was founded in May when it became clear the public prosecutor was looking to ban the DTP, as happened with eight other Kurdish parties before. “New name, same problem,” said Seyh Maz, one of the co-founders of the DTP. “Each time a Kurdish party is outlawed, each time an obstacle is placed upon the road to democracy, the PKK gains support. If the constitutional court thought it would be able to save the unity of the state by banning the DTP it will find itself sorely mistaken.”