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NY Times, June 29 2017
Amid Turkey’s Purge, a Renewed Attack on Kurdish Culture
By PATRICK KINGSLEY
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — Gosto’s kebab shop is not the only diner on its
block, let alone on its street. It is, however, the one that perhaps
reveals most about the threat to Kurdish culture.
Its owner and manager — the cheery, chubby Vural Tantekin — turned to
the kebab trade only in January, after the city authorities sacked most
members of his municipally run theater troupe.
“The reason,” said Mr. Tantekin, during an interview squeezed between
kebab orders, “was to stop us from performing in Kurdish.”
For people like Mr. Tantekin, the fate of Diyarbakir’s theater troupe is
emblematic of an ongoing assault on Kurdish culture at large.
Since the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923, which enshrined a
monocultural national identity, the country’s sizable Kurdish minority —
around 20 percent of the population — has often been banned from
expressing its own culture or, at times, from speaking the Kurdish language.
Turkey’s current leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, loosened many of these
restrictions toward the end of the last decade, in what some described
as a “Kurdish opening.” But repression began again after a cease-fire
with Kurdish militants fell apart in 2015. It accelerated further during
the crackdown that followed last year’s failed coup.
The crackdown was nominally intended to target the plotters of the
putsch. But it has also been used as a smoke screen to squeeze other
groups and movements that promote narratives deemed problematic by the
government. More than 140,000 people have been fired or suspended from
their jobs, and up to 50,000 have been arrested. Among them are those
who, like Mr. Tantekin, promote the concept of a unique Kurdish culture.
The suffocation of Kurdish expression in Turkey constituted the latest
rollback of reforms Mr. Erdogan put in place during his first decade in
power.
Yet the fate of the Kurds has long been one of the central themes in the
recent history of the region; one that ignores borders. Kurds in Turkey
have been inspired by Kurdish gains in Iraq and Syria, two countries
where the Kurds were repressed. Across Turkey’s southeastern border,
Kurds run an autonomous zone in northeast Iraq and will hold an
independence referendum in September. To Turkey’s south, Syrian Kurds
have carved out a territory in northeast Syria and their militias are
America’s main partner in the campaign to retake Raqqa, the proclaimed
capital of the Islamic State.
And continued successes of those movements will likely further encourage
the ambitions of the Turkish Kurds.
Across southeast Turkey, where most people are Kurdish, Mr. Erdogan’s
government fired over 80 elected mayors and replaced them with
state-appointed trustees. Here in Diyarbakir, the spiritual capital of
Turkish Kurdistan, the trustee not only fired most of the city’s
municipally employed actors, but also 80 percent of the staff of the
municipal department that promoted the teaching of Kurdish and other
minority languages.
In towns across the region, trustees have changed the names of streets
previously named for prominent Kurdish figures, or removed statues of
Kurdish heroes. More than a dozen lawmakers from the main pro-Kurdish
party have been arrested in recent months. A Kurdish artist was jailed
for doing a painting of the ruins of Nusaybin, one of several Kurdish
towns partly destroyed in 2015 during fighting between the Turkish army
and Kurdish militants.
Kurdish or pro-Kurdish journalists are some of the principal victims of
the post-coup crackdown on free speech. According to the Free Journalist
Society, a now-banned, pro-Kurdish news media watchdog, 173 journalists
are now in Turkish prisons; of those, 50 worked for Kurdish or
pro-Kurdish news outlets.
Turkey’s only Kurdish-language newspaper, Azadiya Welat, was closed last
summer — along with at least 10 television channels that broadcast, at
least in part, in Kurdish. Even a Kurdish cartoon channel, Zarok TV, was
banned for several months before being allowed to reopen in December.
The government says all these closures, bans and arrests are legitimate.
Those fired or now in jail were representatives of or apologists for the
P.K.K., the main Kurdish militant group, said Galip Ensarioglu, a
lawmaker from Mr. Erdogan’s party who represents Diyarbakir in
Parliament. Their dismissal, Mr. Ensarioglu added, does not amount to a
crackdown on Kurdish culture, but on the supporters of terrorism.
“There might be some people who were purged because they were considered
dangerous — or people who were doing political activities under the name
of cultural activities — but never, ever have cultural activities been
stopped,” Mr. Ensarioglu said in an interview.
The question of who has the right to speak for Kurdish culture is
complex, since Kurds are not a single homogeneous block. Around 30
percent of Diyarbakir’s residents voted with the government in a
referendum to grant sweeping powers to Mr. Erdogan’s office. Tens of
thousands of Kurds across southeastern Turkey also belong to the Village
Guards, a state-sanctioned militia that assists Turkish soldiers in
their fight against the P.K.K.
Mr. Erdogan’s Kurdish critics, however, say there is nothing ambiguous
about the government’s intentions.
“The aim of the government is very clear,” said Hakki Boltan, the head
of the Free Journalist Society, and a former editor in chief of Azadiya
Welat. “The policy is to end the Kurdish political movement and the
wider Kurdish culture.”
The crackdown on Kurdish culture caught some by surprise, because until
recently Mr. Erdogan was widely perceived to have eased restrictions on
Kurdish life and language. He also brokered a historic cease-fire with
the P.K.K.
Though never enshrining Kurdish as an official language in the Turkish
Constitution, he allowed a limited amount of Kurdish-language classes at
the high school level and opened a Kurdish-language television channel.
But the situation began to unravel in June 2015, when the peace process
broke down, and Mr. Erdogan began once more to tighten restrictions on
Kurdish society. Mr. Erdogan’s supporters argue that his hand had been
forced: “It was the P.K.K. that said they were done with the peace
process,” Mr. Ensarioglu said.
Mr. Erdogan’s critics, however, have another narrative: that by this
point Mr. Erdogan was spoiling for a fight. His party had just suffered
its worst electoral performance in a decade, hemorrhaging votes to both
a new pro-Kurdish alliance and a right-wing nationalist party that
opposed his Kurdish overhauls.
Feeling betrayed by Kurdish voters and seeking to win back the
nationalists, Mr. Erdogan had already decided to revert to the Turkish
state’s traditional stance on Kurdish issues — or so the argument goes.
“Simply to get nationalist support,” said Mehmet Kaya, the head of the
Tigris Social Research Center, a think tank based in Diyarbakir, “there
began a complete cultural and political attack on the Kurds.”
In Diyarbakir, that perceived policy has involved firing the city’s two
co-mayors and canceling plans they promoted to introduce intensive,
yearlong, state-funded Kurdish courses for anyone of any age or standard.
The Kurdish name for the city, Amed, was later removed from some city
signs, in a move that was repeated in other Kurdish towns. In Van, for
instance, about 250 miles away, the state-appointed trustee renamed a
park previously named for Tahir Elci, a popular Kurdish lawyer.
In Sur, the ancient district at the center of Diyarbakir, an even more
controversial transformation is underway. Contained within a ring of
walls first built during the Roman era, Sur was until recently a
charming warren of winding streets that many Kurds regarded as the
symbolic heart of the Kurdish nation.
But now much of Sur is not only destroyed but also sealed off. Some
2,000 buildings are estimated to have been destroyed or damaged in the
fighting and 20,000 residents displaced.
The provincial governor, Huseyin Aksoy, says the area will be rebuilt
according to its original character, along the lines of a renovation
plan agreed to in 2012 by the mayor, who was pro-Kurdish.
“When’s it’s finished,” Mr. Aksoy said in an interview, “the old
atmosphere of Sur will return again.”
Some locals scoff at this.
“They want to Turkify and Islamify the area,” said Abdullah Demirbas, a
former mayor of Sur.
Some caution, nevertheless, that the state is not the only obstacle to
Kurdish cultural expression. After Abdullah Keskin — the head of Avesta,
Turkey’s largest Kurdish-language publisher — criticized Kurdish
insurgents for starting a fight in residential districts like Sur, a
depot housing his books mysteriously burned down a few days later.
Life was also worse in the past for the Kurdish community, Mr. Keskin
says. When he was a child, even Kurdish music was banned. When his
family — who lived just north of the Syrian border — held a wedding,
they had to enlist Syrian Kurds to perform Kurdish music from the
southern side of the border.
Things have not yet reached that level today, Mr. Keskin says. So far
this year, his company alone has published more Kurdish books than the
entire Kurdish community managed to during the first 60 years of the
Turkish republic. But he allows that the government’s actions in the
last two years still constitute “a kind of coup against Kurdish language
and culture.”
Here and there, however, artists and activists are trying to make the
most of a tough situation. Mr. Tantekin, the actor, has left the trade.
But several of his former colleagues have set up their own private
theater in the basement of a mall.
Their former theater fit 1,700. This tiny basement seats just 80. But it
is a start, says Berfin Emektar, one of the players.
“The show,” she said with a smile, “goes on.”
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