TURKISH LETTER:An influential newspaper editor is annoyed by plans to commemorate an army massacre of 33 people in 1943
WHAT IS Turkey’s Kurdish problem and how can it be solved? These are two questions furiously debated in ministries and newspapers since the country’s prime minister talked last month of an “opening” aimed at ending a war that has killed more than 40,000 people since 1984.
To find an answer, policy-makers could do worse than to look at the row that erupted after the mayor of the small Kurdish town of Ozalp announced plans in June to erect a monument to 33 villagers machine-gunned to death without trial 66 years ago.
“This is a dangerous and unnecessary show ... Stop being so stubborn, little brother,” the chief editor of Turkey’s most influential newspaper wrote on August 4th in an open letter to mayor Murat Durmaz. “What have we been saying for days, what has the Interior Minister been saying”, Ertugrul Ozkok went on. “Some things need to be forgotten.”
What Ozkok all but glossed over in his article was that the newly elected mayor’s decision to build the monument was a response to the 2004 renaming of the local military barracks after the general who ordered the 1943 executions.
Durmaz plans to put his statue up right opposite the barracks on the outskirts of town, a thin, satisfying limestone finger, a Kurdish nationalist response to the Turkish state.
As for the fact that Gen Mustafa Muglali had been sentenced to death for his crime, and died in prison in 1950, that got no mention at all in Ozkok’s open letter.
Nor did the court case seeking to have the barracks name changed which the two surviving brothers of Muglali’s victims opened against the ministry of defence in 2005.
The brothers are still waiting for justice. At a first hearing, ministry of defence lawyers argued that renaming the barracks after Muglali was in line with army directives requiring military facilities to be named after “commanders who have served successfully, or are remembered, in the region”. The court threw the plaintiffs’ case out.
The High Court has yet to rule.
Unable – unlike Ertugrul Ozkok – to make use of a column read by hundreds of thousands of people every day, Ozalp’s mayor posted his response to the open letter on a small Kurdish website on August 7th.
Using the same informal tone (he addressed Ozkok as “big brother”), Durmaz asked one crucial question. “You talk of dangerous and unnecessary shows,” he said. “So where were you in 2004, when the military decided to rename the barracks in the first place? The answer – and this applies to the entire mainstream Turkish media with the exception of two or three columnists – is nowhere. Nobody said a word.”
To be fair, the cringing power worship that has characterised Turkey’s media for decades is crumbling, at least when it comes to the military.
And while they haven’t got round yet to removing Mustafa Muglali’s bust from the Military Academy pedestal it was placed on in 1997, even Turkey’s top generals now acknowledge that Turkey’s Kurdish problem predates the separatist war that the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, launched in 1984.
Yet amid all the excited talk these days about Turkey being closer to solving its Kurdish problem than at any time in the past, Ozkok’s August 4th letter shows just how long the road to be travelled still is. Indeed it is questionable whether any progress has been made at all: in its bullying tone, the letter is oddly reminiscent of probably the most famous statement ever of Turkey’s state-centric mindset.
“Who the hell are you?” an Ankara governor is supposed to have shouted at left-wing students hauled into his office one night by the police. “If this country needs communism, we’ll introduce it ourselves.”
The governor was speaking less than a year after the Ozalp massacre.
In Ozalp today, Mayor Durmaz wonders how a country that ties itself in knots over a statue can possibly hope to solve its oldest and bloodiest problem. He’s probably being over-pessimistic.
There is strong evidence now that Turkey – in co-operation with Washington and the authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan – is gearing up to push through a package of reforms it hopes will persuade some 4,000 PKK members to drop their arms and leave their bases in the mountains of southern Turkey and northern Iraq.
The likeliest scenario, analysts say, is that some 11,000 Turkish Kurdish refugees who fled to Iraq in the 1990s will be persuaded to come back home, freeing their United Nations-controlled camp up to become a transit camp for PKK members.
But the affair of the Ozalp memorial – emblematic of Kurdish mistrust of the state and the lopsidedness of what goes as social compromise in Turkey – is a telling little snapshot of the obstacles Turkey will face as it attempts to forge ahead.