Kasaba R. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4, Turkey in the Modern World

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

ham

it bozarslan

which remained the ofﬁcial basis of the state’s ideology, they accepted the offer

of co-optation that the DP government made them. Finally, one should add

that the 1950s saw the much broader economic integration of the Kurdish

provinces into the rest of Turkey and the training of many Kurdish students

in the country’s main two cities, Istanbul and Ankara.

During these decades, openly outspoken Kurdish nationalism became a rare

phenomenon. Some leaders of the resistanceof the 1920sand 1930s, such as Nur

Dersim

ı,

Ihsan Nur

ı and the Cemilpas¸azada brothers,

who were dispersed in

different Middle Eastern countries, became aware of the impossibility of real-

ising their dreams during their own lifetimes. They had no other choice than

to accept their own efforts as simply moments in a long struggle that would

be continued after their deaths. They thus turned to writing, either memoirs

or history and geography books, largely inspired by the Turkish nationalist

models. The written legacy of this period of silence played a decisive role in

the codiﬁcation of Kurdish nationalism (with such accoutrements as a map; a

uniﬁed historical narration; a ﬂag; an idea of martyrdom and gloriﬁcation of

martyrs; the myth of Kawa, liberator of the Kurds; the notion of Mesopotamia

as the cradle of the Kurdishness; and so forth). The period also contributed to

the formation of a collective memory and to the integration of the years of

revolts during the Kemalist regime into the history of the Kurdish nationalism.

The period of a problematic renewal: 1961–80

The writings of this generation circulated in Turkey, but only marginally, and

primarily among the younger generation at the high schools or in the still-

active clandestine medreses (religious schools). The Kurdish students abroad,

whofounded Komala Xwendekaren Kurd li Ewropa (the Society of the Kurdish

Students in Europe) in Wiesbaden in 1956, had some contacts among the Kurds

in Turkey. Turkish nationalism itself also offered sources of self-awareness to

young Kurds. For instance, the third volume of Mustafa Kemal’s famous 1927

Speech, which contained many of his letters addressed to Kurdish dignitaries

during the War of Independence, was widely read among young Kurds during

the 1950s.

By the end of the 1950s, signs of a Kurdish revival were becoming apparent.

Some Kurdish intellectuals, among them Musa Anter, Mustafa Remzi Bucak,

Yusuf Azizo

glu, Ziya S¸erefhano

glu and FaikBucak, founded – or at least tried to

39 Cemil Pas¸a, K

urdistan kısa tarihi (Istanbul: Doz Yayınları, 1998); Cemil Pas¸a, Muhtasar

hayatım (Brussels: Br

uksel K

urt Enstit

u, 1989); Cemil Pas¸a, Doza Kurdistan (K

urdistan

Davasi)(Ankara:

Oz-Ge, 1991).

344

Kurds and the Turkish state

found – a secret organisation called K

urtleri Kurtarma Cemiyeti (the Society

for the Liberation of the Kurds).

Kurdish students in Istanbul started to

organise group picnics and do

gu geceleri (‘eastern nights’), which were events

dedicated to the discussion and appreciation of Kurdish culture. A few journals,

such S¸arkın Sesi (the Voice of the East) and

Ileri Yurt (Progressive Land), were

published and exerted some inﬂuence among the generations born after the

Republic. A Kurdish member of parliament, Mustafa Remzi Bucak, expressed

criticism of the ofﬁcial Turkish positions concerning the Kurdish issue.

1959, some Kurdish militants, both middle-aged intellectuals and students,

known as the 49s, were arrested after openly speaking out for the rights of the

Kurds.

But the real revival of the Kurdish nationalism took place only after the

1960 military coup. The 1961 constitution, which expanded civil liberties, was

certainly one of the reasons behind this revival. But there were two other

important factors, the ﬁrst one being the 1958 military coup in Iraq, which

allowed Mustafa Barzani to return from his decade-long exile in the Soviet

Union, and the Kurdish revolt that he started in 1961. The presence of some

Kurds from Turkey among the Barzani forces, the programmes transmitted

by the Kurdish insurgent radio and the news of the revolt in the Turkish press

had a tremendous effect among the Kurds in Turkey, especially the youth.

The revolt led them to re-envision their forbidden language as an existing and

cherished one, and to conceive of Barzani as the father of their own nation,

thereby challenging the moral and historical authority of Mustafa Kemal.

If this source of Kurdish renewal was largely external to Turkey, the sec-

ond factor was initially external to the Kurdish provinces: the development

of a robust left-wing movement in Turkey, which attracted Kurdish young

people and, later on, large sectors of Kurdish urban society. There are at least

three reasons for this Kurdish attraction to left-wing politics. First, the left

advocated social justice and equality, therefore becoming the main channel

for challenging the prevailing political order and demanding social and eco-

nomic development in the underdeveloped and marginalised Kurdish towns.

Second, although it did not disown Kemalism, and even to some extent tried

to rehabilitate it, the left constituted an open challenge to the state and, ulti-

mately, to state-sponsored Turkish nationalism. Finally, the ‘Marxist-Leninist’

left offered new universal perspectives for the Kurds. Under the inﬂuence of

40 Musa Anter, Hatıralarım (Istanbul: Doz Yayınları, 1990), pp. 60–1.

41 For the documents, see Remzi Bucak, Bir K

urt aydınından

Ismet

u’ye Mektup (Istanbul:

Doz Yayınları, 1991).

42 Naci Kutlay, 49’lar dosyası (Istanbul: Fırat Yayınları, 1994).

345

ham

it bozarslan

Lenin and Stalin, whose works were now being translated into Turkish, the left

in Turkey accepted the legitimacy of the ‘national question’ (which became a

synonym for the Kurdish question), and ‘the rights of the oppressed peoples

to determine their own fate’. Moreover, it also renewed a sense of Turkish–

Kurdish fraternity, i.e. the fraternity of ‘oppressed classes and oppressed peo-

ples’. Marxism-Leninism played much the same role as the discourse of Islamic

fraternity had done during the War of Independence.

During the 1960s the tribal leaders and shaykhs of the religious brotherhoods

continued to be the main forces of Kurdish political life. Both the right-wing

Adalet Partisi (Justice Party, JP), the main offspring of the DP that had ruled the

country between 1950 and 1960, and the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican

People’s Party, RPP), which took a slightly left-wing orientation, had a solid

support base in the Kurdish provinces. Some Kurdish nationalists were elected

either as local or national representatives. But the centre of gravity of political

life in the Kurdish urban areas swung increasingly towards the T

urkiye

Is¸c¸i Par-

tisi (Workers’ Party of Turkey, WPT), which ofﬁcially accepted the existence

of the Kurdish problem in 1970, or the T

urkiye Kurdistan Demokrat Partisi

(Democratic Party of Kurdistan-Turkey, DPK-T), supported by the Barzani

movement. Non-organised forms of opposition were also common among

the youth and urban elite. Mehdi Zana, a tailor who would later became

mayor of Diyarbakır, explains in his memoirs that his workshop in the town of

Silvan functioned as a true university, where youth, intellectuals and ‘Kurdist’

artisans

could gather and read available books and articles about the Kurds,

and study the ﬁrst Kurdish alphabet, published in Turkey in 1968.The1967

mass demonstrations against social inequalities, the domination of the land-

lords and the fate of the Kurds (calling for an ‘end to the oppression in the east’)

further accelerated political mobilisation of the Kurdish urban centres.

In spite of its outspoken support for the Barzani rebellion, this mobilisation

was not, initially, synonymous with radicalisation. The main Kurdish demands

were economic development, respect for the constitution and recognition of

the existence of the Kurds and their rights, as well as state-sponsored radio and

education in Kurdish.

The radicalisation took place only after 1968, and was

partly due to state coercion which included the arrest of Kurdish intellectuals

and large-scale military manoeuvres in the Kurdish areas,

and partly to the

growing independence of the Kurdish youth from both the Barzani rebellion

43 See his memoirs, Mehdi Zana, Bekle Diyarbakır (Istanbul: Doz, 1991).

I. Bes¸ikc¸i, Do

gu Anadolu mitingleri’nin analizi (Ankara: Yurt Yayınları, 1992 [1967]).

45 M. Emin Bozarslan, Do

gu’nun sorunları (Ankara: Toplum Yayınları, 1966).

46 See

Ismail Cem’s reportages in his T

urkiye

uzerine aras¸tırmalar (Istanbul: Cem, 1971).

346

Kurds and the Turkish state

and the Turkish left. The Barzani rebellion had been the main reference point

for the Kurdish movement in Turkey throughout the 1960s. Towards the end of

this decade, however, Kurdish left-wing militants started to think of Kurdistan

as a colonised country and argued that they could no longer accept being

passive supporters of the ‘Kurdish national liberation movement’ of Iraq. In

the mean time, the Turkish left had started its own urban guerrilla warfare

against the state, which meant that for the Kurdish youth the liberation of

Kurdistan had become both a revolutionary task in itself, and a condition of

fraternity with the Turkish left. Although many Kurdish militants refused to

abandon the Turkey-wide radical left-wing organisations, some split in 1970

and formed a new organization called the Devrimci Do

gu K

ult

ur Ocakları

(Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Hearths, RECH).

The RECH, which rejected clandestine action, insisted on the existence

of a distinct Kurdish cultural and linguistic entity within Turkey.

Although

young people constituted the main force of the RECH, they remained under

the moral authority of older, experienced intellectuals, who were very suspi-

cious of violent modes of action. But in the situation of extreme radicalisation

that pushed the Turkish left towards military action against the state, the

RECH could not avoid the radicalisation of sections of its own membership.

For instance, by the end of the decade, Dr Said Kırmızıtoprak, a militant who

quit the DPK-T to form his own party,

severely criticised the ‘chauvinist-

minded’ Turkish left and advocated an armed struggle within Turkish

Kurdistan.

In spite of this general radicalisation of Kurdish activists, the majority of the

Kurdish movement in Turkey could still remain within a legal framework and

give birth to a robust political opposition. Nonetheless, it turned to violence

in the 1970s. The ﬁrst reason for this change lay in the 12 March 1971 military

coup in Turkey. The Kurdish movement did not suffer under military rule as

much as the radical Turkish left, which lost many of its leaders. Nevertheless,

hundreds of Kurdish intellectuals and militants were arrested and tortured, and

a widespread repression targeted all kinds of manifestations of Kurdishness.

Most Kurdish prisoners were released by 1974; but in prison many of them had

gone through a further process of radicalisation and had formed the kernels of

neworganisations. Most importantly, almost all Kurdish activists lost their faith

in the constitutional and legal framework, and came to regard underground

47 For documents, see Komal, DDKO Dava Dosyası, vol. I (Ankara: Komal Yayınları, 1975).

48 T

urkiye’de K

urdistan Demokrat Partisi (Kurdistan Democratic Party in Turkey).

49 Sait Kırmızıtoprak, K

urt millet hareketleri ve Irak’ta K

urdistan ihtilali (Stockholm: Apec

Yayınları, 1997).

347

ham

it bozarslan

structures (though not necessarily violence) as the only proactive means for

the survival of their movement.

Immediately after the general amnesty in 1974 that released Kurdish activists

from prison, the Kurdish movement faced a major challenge with the sudden

end of the Barzani rebellion in 1975. The decline of the Barzani movement,

mainly the result of massive Soviet support of Ba‘thist Iraq and the with-

drawal of the American and Israeli military and logistical support to the

Kurds, dampened Kurdish aspirations throughout the Middle East. While

many guerrilla movements throughout Africa and Asia were achieving vic-

tories in 1975–6, the catastrophic failure of the Kurdish liberation struggle

only reinforced the belief of young Kurds that ‘the mountains were their only

friends’. Many of them came to feel that they were now at the frontline of

the struggle for the liberation of Kurdistan, and should therefore undertake

action in order to save their honour at any cost. Those who had been only

eleven or twelve in 1971 had turned ﬁfteen or sixteen by 1975, and rapidly

became the agents of a generational ﬁssure, holding not only Barzani and his

‘feudal clique’, but also their own elder brothers, responsible for this national

tragedy. They would provide the sociological basis for the violent struggles of

the late 1970s. Finally, the impact of Turkey-wide violence, which left almost

5,750 dead from 1975 until the 12 September 1980 military coup, was the out-

come of a widespread process of fragmentation and polarisation of Turk-

ish society, and created a tragic sense of impending civil war in the entire

country.

At least until 1977, the mainstream Kurdish left-wing organisations, among

them Devrimci Do

gu K

ult

ur Dernekleri (the Revolutionary Eastern Cul-

tural Associations, henceforth RECA), created by the followers of Dr Said

Kırmızıtoprak, and Partiya Sosyalista Kurdistan-Tirkiye (Kurdistan Socialist

Party-Turkey, KSP-T), founded by Kemal Burkay, were able to eschew violence

and retain control over Kurdish youth. While remaining partly underground,

they could also take political and civil action, such as participating in elections.

For instance, the 1977 local elections permitted Mehdi Zana, a supporter of

KSP-T rather than a militant, to win the mayoralty of the major Kurdish city

of Diyarbakır. Other Kurdish activists were elected in Silvan and Lice. These

strong signs of the emergence of a distinctive Kurdish political space were

somewhat misleading. At the very moment these victories were registered, in

fact, the generational ﬁssure mentioned above was about to give birth to two

new organizations: K

urdistan Ulusal Kurtulus¸c¸uları (National Liberators of

Kurdistan, NLK) and Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (Kurdistan Workers’ Party,

widely known by its Kurdish acronym PKK).

348

Kurds and the Turkish state

The NLK and the PKK, founded by Abdullah

Ocalan in 1978, shared a similar

sociological basis and somewhat similar programmes.

While their leaders

came from the generation socialised during the late 1960s, their followers

were often teenagers. Both parties deﬁned themselves as Marxist-Leninist

and refused to take part in the Soviet–Chinese conﬂict that was dramatically

dividing both the Kurdish and the Turkish left. Both saw violence as the

only means to end Turkish colonialism, achieve the national liberation of

Kurdistan as a uniﬁed country and bring about socialist revolution. Similarly,

they both considered armed struggle to be the main method for eliminating

the ‘Kurdish collaborators of the Turkish colonialism’. They targeted some

Kurdish tribal leaders known for their close links with Ankara and the JP. One

such family, the Bucaks, were attacked in Siverek by PKK militants in 1978.

The two organisations also experienced considerable internal ﬁghting, which,

according to some non-conﬁrmed estimates, caused several hundred casualties

between1978 and 1980. Along with the inter-ethnic and inter-sectarian violence

in the mixed (Alevi and Sunni, Turkish and Kurdish) provinces, the NLK and

PKK conﬂict considerably worsened the security conditions in all the Kurdish

regions.

The coup d’

etat of 1980 and the era

of guerrilla warfare

By the beginning of the 1980s, Kurdish political life was dominated by three

camps. The majority of politicians were still members of mainstream political

parties, such as the JP, the RPP and the Islamist Milli Selamet Partisi (National

Salvation Party, NSP). Many of these politicians, such as S¸erafettin Elc¸i, Nuret-

tin Yılmaz and Abd

ulmelik Fırat, presented themselves openly as Kurds, if

not as defenders of the Kurdish case and people. The last of these parties, the

NSP, succeeded in integrating Kurdish notables and religious ﬁgures in the

Zaza-speaking regions, thus rehabilitating Islam as a ground of coexistence

for the Kurds and the Turks. The second group was that of the ‘newcomers’,

the followers of the RECA and KSP-T, who had a much more openly asserted

Kurdish identity in places such as Diyarbakır, where they maintained local

power. By their very existence, they testiﬁed that commitment to the Kurdish

cause was becoming the main prerequisite of politics in the Kurdish provinces.

50 Hamit Bozarslan, ‘T

urkiye’de K

urt Sol Hareketi’, in Modern T

urkiye’de siyasi d

unce,

vol. VIII (Istanbul:

Iletis¸im, 2006).

349

ham

it bozarslan

The last category was that of the much younger generation, which domi-

nated the street. These activists emanated primarily from the plebian strata of

Kurdish society. Many of them belonged either to recently urbanised families

or hailed from the rural areas. Economically, they were in a very precari-

ous situation – and often had low levels of education. By becoming afﬁliated

with the NLK or the PKK, these militants formed a parallel world of social-

isation and action through violence, and challenged the domination of the

older generations. While enjoying, like Turkish left- and right-wing militants,

a ‘socio-psychological moratorium’,

these young militants also provoked

astonishment and anger among the urban population.

It is no wonder, then, that, like the Turkish population, the Kurdish pop-

ulation initially welcomed the 12 September 1980 coup d’

etat, seeing it as a

chance to stop the widespread violence. The military did effectively suppress

the violence, but at a very high cost, both in Turkey and in the Kurdish regions.

The new authorities considered Kurdishness, like left-wing ideologies, to be

a pathology that needed to be cured by an overdose of Kemalism and Turk-

ishness. All forms of expression of Kurdishness were banned, legally elected

mayors were dismissed (and some of them, like Mehdi Zana, imprisoned

and severely tortured) and thousands of people, mainly KUK and the PKK

members, were arrested. Thousands of young militants were tortured, some

of them killed, and others immolated themselves in order to ‘maintain the

ﬂames of the Newroz’ (Kurdish new year), which had become a symbol of

political mobilisation among Kurds.

Members of some Kurdish organisations, such the RECA, the KSP-T, Kawa

and the NLK, escaped the repression and sought asylum ﬁrst in Syria, and

later in Europe.

Many militants of the PKK, including its leader, Abdullah

Ocalan, who had left Turkey before the coup, remained in Syria. Most of them

subsequently moved to Lebanon and participated in the war against Israeli

occupation (1982), before receiving their own military bases and sophisticated

training. The decades-long Turkish–Syrian crisis helped

Ocalan, who also

received some support from Iraqi Kurds and Iran in the early 1980s. These

involvements in regional conﬂicts attested that, like many other non-state

actors during this period, the PKK had become part of a regional system of

instability and drew material and logistical beneﬁts from it. Drawing on this

broadened ﬁeld of action, after having silenced any internal opposition with

51 For this concept, meaning that the older generations are obliged to accept the legitimacy

of otherwise ‘deviant’ behaviours of the youth, see H. Erik Erikson, Identity, Youth and

Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1968).

52 Except for the KSP-T, none of these organisations has survived exile.

350

Kurds and the Turkish state

exile or execution,

Ocalan launched his guerrilla campaign on 15 August

1984. With some interruptions, the PKK’s guerrilla warfare continued until

1999, when

Ocalan was captured, and has shown signs of revival since the

second half of 2005.

TheSyrian and other external support, however, can onlymarginally explain

the success of this armed struggle. Much of

Ocalan’s effectiveness can be

attributed to the suffering of the Kurdish population under the military regime.

Omer Lac¸iner and Philip Robins emphasised

(and many PKK leaders

acknowledged), Kurdish urban centres were truly traumatised by military

repression, and as a result welcomed the previously rejected PKK’s 1984 offen-

sive as Kurdish revenge against the military regime and, increasingly, against

a Turkish state pejoratively nicknamed the ‘RT State’ or the ‘Roma State’

(TC Devleti/dewleta Rom

ı). A young generation of teenagers, who had been

raised with the accounts of the sufferings of their elder brothers and sisters in

prisons, welcomed guerrilla action as an honour-restoring means of revenge

and as an end to their silent and largely introverted socialisation. The guerrilla

war offered them the possibility of gaining collective prestige and, at the same

time, a venue for individual commitment and emancipation.

The second reason for

Ocalan’s success derived from the tremendous

changes that his party had gone through during its short period in exile. Before

1980,

Ocalan was still a primus inter pares in the PKK. During the Syrian and

Lebanese years, however, and along the lines of Atat

urk in Turkey, and those

of other Middle Eastern ‘leaders’, he remodelled the PKK into a party domi-

nated by a single man.

Ocalan henceforth represented the party, and the party

represented the whole Kurdish nation. Together with the ‘martyrs’, he consti-

tuted the ‘leadership’ and was accountable only to the martyrs and the nation.

Absolute obedience to this ‘leadership’ replaced any form of comradeship.

The name of

Ocalan allowed the Kurdish youth to follow a sacralised ﬁgure

in place of Mustafa Kemal. Other symbols of Turkish nationalism were also

Kurdiﬁed. For instance, the idea of Mesopotamian roots and a Golden Age of

Kurdishness, keeping in its purest virtues the promise of a glorious future, was

to a large extent the Kurdish equivalent of the myths of Turkish Ergenekon,

the mythical homeland of the Turkish nationalist discourse. The imagination

of the Kurdish nation as destined for national emancipation through an armed

struggle, and the belief that the territory could become ‘national’ only ‘at the

53 Martin van Bruinessen, ‘Between Guerilla War and Political Murder: The Workers’ Party

of Kurdistan’, MERIP 432 (1988).

Omer Lac¸iner, K

urt sorunu. Hen

uz vakit varken (Istanbul: Birikim, 1991); Philip Robins,

Turkey and the Middle East (New York: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1991).

351

ham

it bozarslan

cost of martyrs’ blood’, were other elements also strongly present in Kemalist

(and modern Middle Eastern) political language. Thanks to this nationalist

vocabulary, the PKK could respond, almost point for point, to the vocabulary

and symbols of Turkish nationalism. The omnipresence of these themes in

the party’s organs, memoirs and texts, and their deep impact on the minds of

Kurdish youth, were the reasons

Ocalan could enjoy such an unprecedented

form of charisma, qualitatively very different from that of all the other Kurdish

leaders of the twentieth century.

The PKK was inﬂuenced by the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and the theories

of guerrilla warfare developed by the leaders of the radical Turkish left (espe-

cially

Ibrahim Kaypakkaya) during the 1970s. The movement’s success among

Kurdish youth, who had been traumatised by the end of the Barzani rebellion

in 1975 and the repression of the 1980 military coup, can be attributed to a world

view that can be described as Fanonian. Like Franz Fanon,

Ocalan considered

violent struggle to be not simply a means of national liberation, but the very

condition of personal emancipation. This emancipation required the destruc-

tion of the individual’s own identity and the building, through following the

example of the leader and displaying devotion to him, of a new identity. The

constant fear of betraying the leader, and therefore the nation, went hand-in-

hand with the hope of achieving personal, and therefore national, salvation.

Such a reinterpretation of identity created a truly sectarian universe and an

almost religious outlook, which explained the willingness of many militants to

submit to

Ocalan, and their astonishing acts of self-sacriﬁce under emotional

pressure.

It also explains why, in spite of many criticisms of

Ocalan and the

PKK from others in Kurdish society, the man and his party became inevitable

reference points for the Kurdish issue.

The guerrilla campaign, the coercive response of the state and the counter-

insurgency policy adopted in the beginning of the 1990s had tremendous

effects both on Kurdish society and on Turkey as a whole. An estimated 40,000

people, among them 5,000 civilians and 5,000 members of the security forces,

lost their lives, while the military and security forces spent more than $100

billion.

Almost 3 million people were also displaced. In 1987, Ola

gan

ust

55 On

Ocalan’s charisma, see Paul J. White, Primitive Rebels or Revolutionary Modernizers?

The Kurdish Nationalist Movement in Turkey (London: Zed Books, 2000).

56 Bozarslan, ‘T

urkiye’de K

urt Sol Hareketi’.

57 There is no reliable ﬁgure concerning the total cost of the war. According to Tansu

C¸ iller, Turkish prime minister 1993–5, the total cost was evaluated to DM 95 billion from

1984 to 1993: see M. S¸ahin, ‘1993’

un K

urdistan panoraması’, Deng 27 (1994). After the full

implementation of the ‘low-intensity conﬂict’ doctrine by the military, this cost increased

to $8–10 billion per annum (A. E. Bilgin, ‘Kirli savas¸ ve krizdeki ekonomi’,

Ozg

ur G

undem,

352

Kurds and the Turkish state

Hal (a military regime of ‘exceptional administration’ (covering almost the

entire Kurdish region) was established, and under the framework of Law

413 (1989), many basic freedoms, including freedom of expression and resi-

dence, were either restricted or suspended. A parallel army, called the Village

Guards and recruited mainly from members of the pro-government tribes,

was formed. The unity of this army, whose troops reached some 100,000 in

the 1990s, depended not on the army’s hierarchy but on the de facto autonomy

of tribal chiefs. More than 3,500 villages and hamlets, as well as some small

cities (such as S¸ırnak, Kulp and Lice) were targets of massive military attacks

and were either totally or partially destroyed. In the wake of the expansion

of the security and intelligence agencies during the 1990s, ultra-nationalist

far-right militants, and some pro-state tribal leaders, formed death squads.

According to ofﬁcial accounts,

these squads, as well as the militants of the

Hizbullahi group)

tolerated by the state, killed some 2,000 people, mainly

Kurdish intellectuals. The PKK also committed many atrocities, including the

killing of civilians (most notably in 1987) and teachers, as well as the summary

executions of Village Guards and many of the PKK ﬁghters. Some of the PKK

commanders also developed privatised forms of violence and became genuine

warlords.

Parallel to the guerrilla war, a political and legal Kurdish movement also

emerged during these years and, thanks to its short-lived alliance with the

SHP of Erdal

u, achieved important results in the 1991 elections. The new

Kurdish party, called Halkın Emek Partisi (People’s Labour Party, PLP), was

quickly banned, as were the other parties that succeeded it. Many members

of Demokrasi Partisi (Democracy Party, DEP) and one of its deputies were

killed by the ofﬁcially ‘unknown killers’, who were in fact members of the

death squads, and other deputies were dismissed from parliament.

Some of

them, including the well-known Leyla Zana, wife of former Diyarbakır mayor

Mehdi Zana, and winner of the European Parliament’s Shakarov Prize, were

imprisoned from 1994 to 2004. Halkın Demokrasi Partisi (People’s Democracy

Party, PDP) and Demokratik Halk Partisi (Democratic People’s Party, DPP),

the successors to the DEP, were unable to obtain more than between 5 and

17 January 1994). According to some sources, the 1995 spring operations against the PKK

bases in the Iraqi Kurdistan alone required $1 billion 200 million (H

urriyet, 4 April 1995).

58 Savas¸ Kutlu, Bas¸bakanlı

ga Sunulan, vol. II: Susurluk raporu (Istanbul: Bir & Y

ore, 1998) Veli

Ozdemir, IBMM Susurluk arastırma Komisyonu ifade tutanakları (Istanbul: SCALA, 1997);

Veli

Ozdemir, TBMM tutanakları, Susurluk belgeleri, TBMM Komisyon Raporu’na muhalefet

s¸erhleri ile birlikte (Istanbul: SCALA, 1997).

59 Rus¸en C¸akır,Derin Hizbullah.

Islamcı s¸iddetin gelece

gi (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2001).

60 Barkey and Fuller, Turkey’s Kurdish Question.

353