Turkeys Kurds Guests at a B tter Feast The re L ttIe Known V ct ms ot Po ert , V oknce, Oppr
Aliman I D
Los Angeics i,nu s (1923 CuitentFilc), D c c 13, )79
ioQues H s oncal Ne papers T os Ange es Ti 1 es (I I 1 9S7)
pg Dl i
Turkey's Kurds: Guests at a Bitter Feast
yT ft ALLMAN
IVER L Turkey—It s 835 am in this
medieval Kurd h town and the stark
morning light makes the unsheathed
bayonets of the Turkish so1dier glint like
Ottoman swords. There seems to be soldier
in the doorway of every shop. Three Kurds
already have been shot dead on the main
street today.
‘Yes yes three ar dead, nd t,s n even
9 a.m ” Th local leader of Prime Minister
Bulent Etevit' Repubh an P op1&s Party
roars with laughter, and walks with a limp.
You see ” he said, “that s only breakfast here
rnSiverek .”
The problems of the 4 million Kurds in Iran
.nd the 2 m on . 1r a. h2ve rpceived f r
more attention But Turkey s 6 miUioi Kurd
also find themselves unwilling guests at a
bitter fees of poverty and violence. foreign
cppre 1on and feudal exploitatrnn by their
vm kind.
“You Am&rnans condemn Khomeini
because he stands ICurd up against the wall
in Iran and shoots theme” complains Au R. a
I9 y ar old I urdish youth who 1earn d bi
fluent German while he was a guest worker in
Europe. ‘ But of course Turkey is too demo
cratie, too Western too progressive too much
your precious NATO ally for you to notice
wha goes on bere,”
Like a1m st U Kurds wham one meets in
Turkey Au is eager to talk, and afraid to gve
h f l1 nair Ws b tterne5 i unde standab1e.
This town is only 375 miles southe t of the
Turkish capital of Ankara but rn terms of
social justice it irnght be a m llion nules The
contrast between Turkish Kurdizt n and the
rest of urkey is shoddng as shocking as the
gap between Park Avenue and Selma, Ala.,
once wa
For 50 years Turkey has been a nation of
ambitious, Western style ref rrns mass edu
cation, universal suffrage, separation of
church and staW, equal rights for women, free
speeth trade union rights and sweeping land
reform that, in most pam of Turkey, means
those who till th knd also own t. But not for
the Kurd .
Here in Siv rak it s as though those two
generations of reform never happened at d l i.
Women cower behind the veil, Unschooled
children run the streets. On the farms and in
the villages there ar none of the tractors,
insecticides, television sets and electric lights
that oi e sees in other rural rea of Turkey.
The young thildren, illiterate women and
embittered men seen scratchrng the rocky soil
are not Turkish farmers. They are Kurdish
serfs landless peasants, rn constant deb to
thc handful of Kurdish agas ,” or feudal lords,
who own almost all the land and act as if the
Dark Ages had never come to an end.
Why have the reforms that have changed
the face of the rest of Turkey gone uflimp1e
mented here? Aside from Turkish chauvinism
and neglect, th explanation goes to the eart
f Turkey 's u1tradern rati farm f gov rn
ment
Thanks to prop i n l repre entatiQfl t is
increasingly diffi u1t for either of Turkey's
major, mainstream po1 tica1 parties to win a
ruling majonty in p r1iainent Both Prune
Minister E evit and his arch rival, Suleyman
Demir l, head of the opposition Just Party.
have found their social programS the hostag
Cf sfl 1L arch onservative parties, with
which they have been obliged to form coall
tions in order to govern at all.
“Siv rek, like the rest of Turkey, i caught
in a vicious circle,” the local po1it ca1 1ead r
said. The ga force their sei s to vote as
they wish. The reactio 1ar1eS and landowners
elected to p rh m nt here in eastern Turkey
prevent either major party from forming a
strong government in Mkara With no strong
governmenl, land reform goes unenforced
thus maintaining the powers of feudal lords”
Though Eeevfl s party is somewhat to the
left of the Den rat c Party in the United
States,' clings to powcr only through a coah
Oppression, Exploitation
standards of all is Kurdish Turkey likely t
explvdt mtu a mdJur as have Kurdish
re s of Iran and Iraq
It seems unlikely for several reasons, For
al it economic soci I and political problems,
the Turkish state is probably the strongest
and most cohesive in the Midd'e East. And t
also seems likely that th Kurds own internal
divisions will cantrnue to exploit them even
more cruelly than out ider do
But there is one new element in th age old
Kurdish history of rnt rna thv on and
foreign conquest and cooptian Far the first
tune in history, a whole gei eration f young
Kurds is learning to read and wilte, and i
seeing the outside world for it e1f,
j worked in a cafeteria før two years rn
Mu inter,” explained Mehmet Polat, a former
guest worlcer “until the Germans bern me
back I 've not juzt seen Istanbul, I 've seen
Munich and Berlin He went on “Its all very
clear how the world is connected, even here in
Siverek . Because tb agas h4d all the knd and
my family had none, my parents were never
edu ted , And because they were ignorant
teen ager when they married today we are
12 brothers and sisters with n money, no jobs
and no hope,”
P nothcally the world deve1 ps a htt1
sympathy for the Kurds—especially when
their oppressors are people whom one does
nDt like But rn th end, mere irnportan
facwrs Ie ses on bases , supplies of oil,
strategic stability —always outwe gh an
ob ure if romantic case of human rights The
Tur} s—1ike the baq s and ranian will
alw3ys be left, once the headlines fade, to do
with their Kurth what they Will But the time
s long gone when the Kurd could be
deceived as to the nature of th r fate 0
7' D. Al2r,w., z contr fr t&n editor of
Harper s m 2 ne. His artwle was slLpplied b
P czfic News Service
They're Little Known Victims of Poverty, Violence,
tion with groups that would make nght wing
Repub1i aflS seem a vacates of radical reform
The right winge s' price for supporting Ece
viV Thmds off the privileges that their main
fin nciai backers mostly big landowners
here in eastern Turkey—are amaous o retain
The result s that the d mocrat c syStem
that Turkey's Western friends so often admire
a tive1y supports what even Turkish affici I
here cncede z a gxossly un3ust social systeni
While e1 ewhere in Thrkey the state serves
as a force for devel pm nt and a court of last
resort for the poor, here Turkey's code of civil
law protects he ag s' property iights as uc
essfu1ly as its Swig mod 1 protects a nuin
bered bank account, in Zurich One s s Turk
!sh gendarmes patr l1ing fields to p o ect the
landlord? men from outraged peasants.
The de facto alliance between the Io a1
landlords nd the government in Ankara is as
old as the prrnclpie of divide-and ru1e Like
the Turks, the Iranians and Iraqis also have
preferred policies of neg ect and of indirect
rule through conservative Kurdish elites, of
any real attempt to so.ve the social and
economic problems that beset the Kurds no
matter under what fbg they hve
The result in Turkey is that if the Kurdish
provinces were allowed to vote on th ir
future rather than just elect depu i s to par
hament it is doubtful whether anyone under
40 would vote to reTi am a part of the Turkish
state, We re not 1ik the Kurds in Iran ,' a
member f the natio ial teathers orgaruzatlon
said. ‘We want to a rndeo nd n
So far the Turks rcmain unwilling even to
concede officially that the Kurds are Kurds.
They re called mountain Turks” in govern
ment parlance Kurds are forbidden to speak
Kurd sh in government offices schoo s and
other public pIa s,
With Turkey's Kurds in many ways worse
off than thcse in Iran and Iraq where oil
wealth, t least, s rve to raise the living
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