A religious revival
Jan 31st 2008 | ANKARA AND DIYARBAKIR
The Economist
The AK government Uses Islam to Win Over Kurdish Support
A SIGN adorned with Ataturk's favourite adage, “Happy is he who calls himself a
Turk”, hangs in Diyarbakir, south-east Turkey, as a reminder of Turkey's
decades-old policy of forcibly assimilating the region's Kurds. The ruling
Justice and Development (AK) party might prefer “Happy is he who calls himself a
Muslim”.
“Uniting around our common Islamic identity is the only way to solve the Kurdish
problem,” argues one AK leader. “Islam bound us in Ottoman times and during the
war of independence, why not today?” Religion has become the mildly Islamist
AK's most potent weapon as it seeks to snatch control of Diyarbakir, the
unofficial capital of Turkey's estimated 14m Kurds, from the pro-Kurdish
Democratic People's Party (DTP) in next year's local election.
In the slums of Diyarbakir sympathy for AK is growing. “They give us free coal,
free school textbooks, my vote is for AK,” croaks Fatma Demirci, a shrivelled
mother of nine. Generous welfare spending, plus modest reforms to satisfy the
Kurds' demands for greater freedom, helped the party to take over 50% of the
vote in the mainly Kurdish provinces of Turkey in last July's general election.
Now Turkey's richest Islamic fraternity is helping the AK to win more Kurdish
votes. Named after Fetullah Gulen, a liberal Muslim cleric who lives in
self-imposed exile in America, the Gulenists distributed meat to some 60,000
families during the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice in December. Scores of Gulenist
doctors are offering free check-ups and treatment in Kurdish areas. Their
message is that Turks and Kurds are brothers in Islam and that nationalism,
whether Turkish or Kurdish, is bad. Such Islamic fraternities (tarikats) have
strong roots in the region.
Other AK actions are also burnishing the party's image. A new government
proposal to scrap restrictions on wearing the Islamic headscarf in universities
has elated pious Kurds as much as it has horrified Turkish secularists. Kurds of
all leanings cheered the arrest of 14 members of an ultra-nationalist gang whose
leader, a retired army general called Veli Kucuk, is said by some to have
plotted the extra-judicial murders of Kurdish dissidents at the height of the
Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) insurgency in the early 1990s.
The government's popularity seems to be surviving even the airstrikes launched
in December against PKK targets in northern Iraq. A retaliatory bombing claimed
by the PKK killed seven people in Diyarbakir last month, but provoked outrage
and rebounded against the DTP. One reason, some say, is that it is in practice
run by the captive PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, making it hard for elected DTP
politicians to disavow PKK terrorism. Polls suggest that the party's support has
slipped.
With much of their time spent in court or in jail, few DTP mayors are able to
govern effectively. Diyarbakir's mayor, Osman Baydemir, is facing 23 court cases
and other investigations for such crimes as printing new-year greeting cards in
Kurdish. Some mayors have been pursued for offences such as building an
artificial pool “shaped like the map of Kurdistan”.
Hasim Hasimi, a moderate Kurdish politician, argues that this sort of pressure
on the DTP may cause voters to return to it. Even business leaders are
disquieted by the government's attempts to dilute Kurdish nationalism. “It is
foolish to imagine that the Kurds' demands to develop their language and culture
will go away,” says Mehmet Kaya, president of the Diyarbakir chamber of
commerce.
On a recent visit, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the AK prime minister, dismissed calls
for more Kurdish-language education and broadcasting. He argued that other
minorities would agitate for similar rights. His message has reached the
state-run maternity clinic. Cetin Bakir, the chief doctor, rejects suggestions
that his staff might communicate better with patients if they used Kurdish.
“Absolutely not,” he sniffs. Leyla Dincer, a midwife, disagrees. “What use are
these?” she asks, pointing to a rack full of pamphlets on birth control. “It's
all in Turkish, nobody understands a word.”
