AKIN Testimony To CSCE Hearing - Se

[kurd-l at burn.ucsd.edu]

From: mail06672 at pop.net (AKIN)
Subject: AKIN Testimony To CSCE Hearing - September 19, 1995

The Turkish Ship Is Sinking
The U.S. Government Is Guiding It To The Rocks

Statement by the American Kurdish Information Network before the 
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe hearing on
"Turkey - U.S. Relations: Potential and Peril"

Tuesday, September 19, 1995
Washington, DC

----
The Turkish Ship Is Sinking
The U.S. Government Is Guiding It To The Rocks

   We live in an age that has witnessed some remarkable changes. Films 
such as "The Day After", which chilled us with the thought that we may be 
the last generation, can now be forgotten. Apocalyptic books such as Endgame 
may for now, we hope, gather some dust. But the new times, though 
promising, have brought new challenges in their wake.  The emerging scenes, 
the clearer they become, now seem like vistas from "The Killing Fields". The 
beast in us has a way of prevailing over our nascent humanity to inflict 
untold misery and sufferings upon the human family. Reported and under-
reported tragedies in places like Rwanda, Bosnia, Kurdistan, and East Timor 
clearly show how fragile is the bond of our civility. In some cases greed, in 
others racism prevents us from making this world a better place for all.
   One realm which has remained impervious to the vast changes that 
have taken us by surprise is that of Turkish/American relations. Ankara has 
insisted that the special relationship it enjoyed throughout the Cold War 
remain intact, arguing that nothing has changed to its north, and that even 
greater menaces now lie to its east (Iran) and southeast (the Kurds). The
United States government seems to have accepted this Turkish logic, or as
some cynics would put it, the Foggy Bottom has not yet awakened to the
fact that the Soviet threat is gone. 
   In our view, this unchanged policy endangers Turkey's stability and 
imperils American interests.  The problem is the Kurdish question, -- every 
night it is the number one issue on Turkish television news, -- which has 
demanded a civil solution but has thus far only received a military response. 
Such an approach is nothing new in Turkey. What is new this time, 
however, is that Turkey faces an organized resistance from a popular mass 
movement that has passed the threshold of unbecoming by means of force. 
   A cursory look at the origins of this problem will reveal some rather 
disturbing facts. First divided between the Ottomans and the Persians in 1514, 
the Kurds lived quietly on their mountains, oblivious to the world until 1923. 
To be sure, they were the subjects of the far-flung Ottoman and Persian 
Empires and suffered their share of the indignities that are the lot of captive 
peoples. But, most important for the subject of this paper, their land, 
Kurdistan, and their language, Kurdish, were respected and tolerated in a 
relatively free environment which preserved them to our own time.
   The Turkish Republic, which rose from the ashes of the Ottoman 
Empire, was conceived on a promise of full rights for the Kurds. Mustafa 
Kemal, the Turkish general who courted the Kurds to join with the Turks to 
liberate the remnants of the empire, said nothing at the time of the unitary 
state that he later advocated and to this day his successors have defended. He 
knew of the promises of self-determination made to the Kurds at the Treaty 
of Sevres in 1920, and yet he succeeded in convincing them that an Islamic 
comity of two peoples, that of the Turks and those of the Kurds, had a better 
prospect than the Kurds' allegiance to the "infidels" of the West.
   The Turkish and Kurdish war of liberating what is today called Turkey 
lasted some four years. At the peace talks in Lausanne in 1923, Mustafa Kemal 
sought legitimacy for his gains. In a symbolic act which his successors are 
emulating with the same adroitness, he sent a Kurdish envoy, Ismet Inonu, 
to the negotiating table. Mr. Inonu pleaded with his British interlocutor that 
the Kurds wanted no special rights and were happy to be part of the Turkish 
Republic. To assure the British that this indeed was the case, Ankara even 
stooped to the time-honored ploy of having reputable Kurdish 
representatives send telegraphic messages to the British at the peace 
conference stating that the Kurds were in favor of a "union" with the Turks. 
   The Lausanne Treaty of June 24, 1923 officially sanctioned the division 
of the Kurdish lands among five states. Turkey proved to be the largest 
beneficiary holding onto 43% of the land. Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Soviet 
Union got 31%, 18%, 6%, and 2% respectively.1 It is difficult to establish the 
current Kurdish population figures in these states, since the governments 
that have the Kurds in their custody choose to ignore the question or offer 
figures that run contrary to demographic trends. Unofficial figures vary from 
a low of 25 million to higher estimates of some 40 million Kurds. Of these, 
some 15 to 20 million live in Turkey. 
   The life of the Kurds after Lausanne made the theocracy of the 
Ottomans seem enviable by comparison. Soon after the agreement, Ataturk 
(meaning "Father of the Turks", the name now given to Mustafa Kemal) 
abandoned all of his pre-war promises to the Kurds and conceived of Turkey 
as being a unitary state comprised of one, and only one, people: the Turks. His 
rallying cry "Turkey belongs to the Turks!" became the creed which to this day 
forms the basis for Turkish national consciousness.2 Even today, the Turkish 
Constitution reads: "The Turkish state, its territory and people, is one and 
indivisible. The language is Turkish. These facts cannot be changed, nor can 
changes be proposed."3
   What the "facts" of the Turkish Constitution overlooked were the 
rights of the Kurds, the Armenians, the Greeks, and other natives of Anatolia 
who now were told to call themselves Turks because Ataturk had so decreed. 
The Greeks, as late as the 1950s, were systematically uprooted, sometimes by 
force and sometimes by provocative acts which compelled them to flee and 
leave everything that they had behind.4 The Armenians were silenced by the 
massacre of 1915, prompting Hitler two decades later to argue that what the 
Turks had done with impunity, the Germans could emulate against the Jews. 
The Kurds were a different matter. To begin with, there were more of them, 
and they were Muslims like the Turks. Something more than brute force was 
required to undo them. 
   Meticulous plans were made for this act of social engineering. The 
solution was sought in forced assimilation. In a generation or two, the 
Turkish social engineers wanted to erase all the references to the Kurds. 
Beginning in 1924, the Kurdish language was banned. Then came the laws 
which enabled the authorities to give Turkish names to everything that had a 
Kurdish name. All at once, Kurdish cities, town, villages, and hamlets 
acquired new Turkish names. For example, the maps that were printed when 
the Ottomans ruled the area have references to the Kurds and their land, 
Kurdistan; modern Turkish maps, leaving aside the impartiality of science, 
refer to the entire region as Turkey. 
   As can be expected, the Kurds did not take lightly to the death warrant 
that was issued in their name. They rose to undo the legislation that was 
condemning them to the dustbin of history. Long before United Nations 
Resolution 31035 sanctioned the use of force in liberation struggles, the Kurds 
fought on several occasions (most notably in 1925, 1930, and 1937/38) to gain 
control over their destiny.
   Up until the 1980s, however, all their uprisings were crushed. Known 
Kurdish leaders were hanged. Their relatives and followers were deported. As 
if the memory of the defeats were not enough, the Kurdish landscape, 
especially visible sites such as high mountain slopes, were selected for 
onerous expressions such as "How happy I am to be a Turk!", which were 
spelled out with stones in large fonts. If there ever was a psychotherapist for 
nations, he or she would treat the Turkish case as one that suffers from a 
severe inferiority complex. In no other part of the world has one witnessed 
such blatant self-adulation or environmental degradation over the lands of 
subject peoples.
   If the purpose of these Turkish maxims all over the Kurdish landscape 
were to instill love and respect for the Turks, the opposite has happened.The 
Kurds have resisted and the Turks have enforced the racist laws that were 
instituted by Ataturk and his cronies. Today, the struggle has taken the form 
of a massive resistance led by the armed forces of the ARGK, the People's 
Liberation Army of Kurdistan, the military wing of the PKK. This struggle has 
become an all-out war on the part of the Kurds to prevail over death, while 
the Turkish military does all it can to keep the fascist legacy of Ataturk
intact. 
   There are a number of published reports which document the cost of 
this Kurdish struggle for freedom and liberty. One of the most compelling is a 
small book entitled File of Torture: Deaths in Detention Places or Prisons, 
published by the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey in 1994. It lists the 
violent deaths of 420 political prisoners in custody since 1980. And, as the 
fighting intensifies, other reports keep surfacing. Derya Sazak, in the
July 25th edition of the Turkish daily Milliyet, quotes the governor of
State of 
Emergency Region, stating that 2,665 Kurdish villages have been destroyed in 
the conflict. That is an official Turkish government statistic. The uprooted 
villagers, their numbers now in the millions, have moved to the cities where 
they live in shantytowns, without jobs; they are vexing with anger and 
restlessness against the system.
   The Kurdish liberation struggle has no friends at Foggy Bottom. 
Washington is not even a disinterested party in this conflict. The U.S. 
administration has literally given a blank check to Turkey. Jennifer 
Washburn, a research associate at the World Policy Institute in New York, in 
a recent commentary in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had this to say about 
Turkish/U.S. relations: "Since the Turkish crackdown on the Kurdistan 
Workers Party began in 1984, the United States has contributed to the conflict 
by arming Turkey to the hilt, exporting more than $6.3 billion worth of 
weapons to an undemocratic, military-led government engaged in a ruthless 
campaign of terror against its Kurdish population. From 1987-91, Turkey 
bought 76% of its weapons from the United States. From 1990-93, when the 
counterinsurgency war intensified and human rights abuses worsened, that 
number increased to 80%."6
   There is a saying in Turkish that might shed some light on the nature 
of Turkey/U.S. relations. It goes something like this: "Give a man a hammer 
and he will think all problems are nails." Turkey has been supplied with 
plenty of hammers by the United States government, and it is the Kurds who 
are being ruthlessly pounded like nails. This obviously has engendered anti-
American feelings among some Kurds. They assert, and the available data 
supports them, that the Turkish government could not continue its dirty war 
against the Kurds without massive amounts of aid and assistance from 
Washington.
   The continuation of present policy does not serve the interests of this 
country for a number of reasons. Sooner rather than later, it will backfire. 
Notwithstanding Turkish claims, it is not just one group of Kurds but rather 
the Kurdish people as a whole who are targeted by American-made weapons. 
If the United States government wishes to avoid a debacle in Ankara, it needs 
to seriously rethink the ties that have blinded it to Turkey's war aims.
Lest it 
not be clear, a few Turkish generals who have appointed themselves to the 
National Security Council in Ankara are pushing the country to the brink of 
an abyss. It will not serve the United States government well to associate with 
such brutes. 
   The following are our recommendations for putting Turkey/U.S. 
relations on a more healthy course:  

1. The U.S. government should demand that Turkey make fundamental 
changes to its Constitution and grant democratic and political rights to the 
Kurds. Turkey says it wants the fighting to stop, but it refuses to deal with 
Kurdish demands for a civil solution to the conflict. This is like trying to 
solve an equation without dealing with one of the given variables. In 
mathematics, this is impossible; in politics, it is no different. The Turkish 
government would do itself a favor by distancing itself from the fascist 
ideology of Ataturk and accepting the values of democracy and humanity, 
and the laws of science, and thereby recognize the existence of the Kurds by 
reforming the republic's anachronistic Constitution. The United States 
government would be a beneficiary of such a step as peace and stability would 
then revisit Turkey. 

2. The U.S. government should advocate that Turkey address its Kurdish 
problem by means of democratic policy and reconciliation, rather than taking 
the more dangerous route of courting Islamic fundamentalism. Turkey is 
keeping the Islamic card up its sleeve, so to speak, so as to blackmail support 
from the West. In the words of a recent Foreign Relations Committee 
delegation which just returned from Turkey: "Despite claims that it regards 
fundamentalism as a threat to its secular heritage, the government of Turkey 
appears to be encouraging and even sponsoring Islamic activities in an 
attempt to bind the country together and defuse separatist sentiment."7 But 
the Islamic movement in Turkey has a different compass than the 
government officials would like it to follow, and Turkey's present policy 
"could backfire and inadvertently provide a foothold for Islamic extremists."8 
In 1994, voters in two of Turkey's largest cities, Istanbul and Ankara, elected 
Islamic mayors from the fundamentalist Refah Party who oppose the 
separation of religion from the state. Turkey is edging dangerously close to 
Iranian-style Islamic fundamentalism. It is not in the interests of the United 
States government to see an Islamic theocracy come to power in Ankara.  
Rather than trying to subvert the rising Kurdish movement by fomenting 
religious strife (remember the massacre in Sivas in 1993 and the bloody scenes 
in Istanbul in March of this year), Turkey should take a more sound and 
reasoned approach to the issue. Only this can guarantee a place for Turkey 
among the nations of the West, thus preserving a vital ally of American 
foreign policy in the troubled region of the Middle East.
 
3. The U.S. government should encourage negotiations between the Turkish 
government and Kurdish representatives.  One step in this direction would 
be to recognize the right of the Kurdish Parliament in Exile. The Kurds of 
Turkey are a fact of life. When their duly elected representatives to the 
Turkish Parliament were jailed in December 1994, Kurds in Europe 
responded by forming a Parliament in Exile in April of this year. This body 
has stated that a political solution to the Kurdish question is the preferred 
option for a durable settlement. It would be in the interest of the United 
States government to recognize the Kurdish Parliament in Exile to serve as a 
starting point for negotiations with the Turkish government. Such a gesture 
would give much needed encouragement to those Kurds who have tried 
again and again to seek a peaceful and democratic solution to this question, 
but who have met with nothing but violence and repression at the hands of 
the Turkish state. 

   The Kurds of Turkey, as the philosophers would put it, have freed 
themselves in their thoughts. No amount of force will cause them to 
abandon their natural right to a life with dignity. But even the PKK, the most 
militant of all Kurdish parties, has time and again expressed its
willingness to 
forgo its stated goal of creating an independent Kurdistan and to entrust the 
complexities of the situation to the negotiating table, hinting that a federal 
model could be the basis for a solution. Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of PKK, 
on March 17, 1993 and again on May 25, 1995, has gone on record for wanting 
to do his share to bring an end to the this enduring conflict. But a deafening 
silence has prevailed in Ankara. 
   Historians have noted that it is the mark of statesmanship when the 
policy makers have foreseen problems and charted courses that have cleared 
the ship of state from rocky paths. The present Turkish government is 
refusing to deal with the problem at hand, because the Turkish military is not 
letting them do so. The top brass simply has too many hammers to allow the 
tedious but essential work of the politicians to take over. With each passing 
day, more and more body bags are flown back to western Turkey as more and 
more Turkish soldiers are sent to the eastern provinces to fight in a war 
which has lasted for far too long.
   It is an irony of history that the head of the present U.S. 
administration, President Bill Clinton, refused to serve in the armed forces 
because he opposed a war which he felt was unjust; now, two decades later, he 
is fueling a conflict which nearly everyone would agree is inhumane. 
President Clinton on numerous occasions has expressed his "understanding" 
for Turkey's armed forays against the Kurds. How can a man who felt the 
Vietnam War was immoral now "understand" the need to wipe out 
thousands of Kurdish villages and condemn millions of Kurdish civilians to 
live their lives as refugees? Twenty years ago, the adventure in Vietnam was 
wrong; student Bill Clinton was right to protest. Today, the war in Kurdistan 
is just as wrong; President Bill Clinton, however, is pursuing a policy which 
is wholly misguided from the standpoint of human rights. We trust that Bill 
Clinton will right this wrong soon, for the sake of humanity.

American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
2309 Calvert Street NW #3
Washington, DC 20008-2603
Tel: (202) 483-6444 - Fax: (202) 483-6476 - Email: mail06672 at pop.net

----
ENDNOTES:

1 "Kurds and Kurdistan: Facts and Figures", The International Journal of
Kurdish Studies, Volume 8, Numbers 1&2 1995, p.160. 

2 The second best selling Turkish daily, H]rr/yet, now uses this
expression, "Turkiye Turklerindir", as its motto.

3 Turkiye Cumhuriyet Anayasasi 1995, Article 3.

4 Charles William Maynes, "Bye-Bye Bosnia", The Washington Post, Sunday,
August 6, 1995, p.C1.

5 This 1973 resolution, which was passed by a vote of 83 in favor, 13
opposed, and 19 abstentions, read as follows: "The struggle of a people
under colonial or foreign rule or under a racist regime to gain their
rights to self-determination and independence is legitimate and in full
agreement with the Principles of the Rights of Peoples."

6 Jennifer Washburh, "Turkey Uses U.S. Arms To Attack Kurds", St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, Thursday, September 7, 1995, p.7B.

7 Foreign Relations Committee Staff Report on Turkey, September 15, 1995.

8 ibid.

-- 
American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
2309 Calvert Street, NW
Suite #3
Washington, DC 20008-2603

Tel: (202) 483-6444
Fax: (202) 483-6476
Email: mail06672 at pop.net