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ÔÇIDo not sing in Kurdish, leave the stage’ |
31 May 2007View by lale SARIIBRAHIMOGLU, (TZ)
Turkish Professor Baskın Oran asked "Why does the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) exist?" during a TV program last Tuesday. He then answered the question that he posed by reading an excerpt from a brief story that appeared in daily Radikal's May 28 issue.
"Do not sing in Kurdish, leave the stage," was the headline of the quoted story in the Radikal. According to the story, during a festival held on Ağrı Mountain near Iğdır in eastern Turkey, Iğdır Deputy Governor Mithat G+Âzen gave orders to +çoban Ali (shepherd Ali) to leave the stage because he started singing a Kurdish song.
Recalling that incident during the NTV program, Professor Oran said "This is the reason why the PKK exists." He of course meant that policies like the ones the Iğdır deputy governor has been pursuing do not help to reduce the PKK terror threat, but on the contrary only increase it.
The example he cited might seem a simple one, but behind this incident in Iğdır lies a bigger problem of treating individuals badly, embarrassing them and above all depriving them of their ability to even singing a song in their mother tongue.
Here we are not talking about a constitutional violation or legally enforcing Turkish as the only acceptable language. Rather we are considering the right of citizens to enjoy speaking their mother tongue among themselves, even to sing in their language.
Unfortunately we have not learned to act like a great state free from fears of a possible division in the country. On the contrary, small incidents like the one that occurred recently in Iğdır have piled up and the Kurdish issue has for many decades now been an explosive one.
This incident reminded me of an experience of my own, which I went through almost two decades ago, that has proven how the narrow minded approach in my country has not changed in centuries.
It was in the mid-1980s when I was a journalist covering the visit of the foreign ambassadors in Ankara to the Southeast for the first time, accompanied by then Foreign Minister Vahit Halefoğlu.
The main purpose of the visit was to allow the foreign ambassadors to see for themselves the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP). The tour was taking place amid heavy criticism related to the project.
Some Western ambassadors were criticizing GAP as not being aimed at addressing the poverty problems of the region's poor, but rather the interests of their landlords. Iraq and Syria, meanwhile, were complaining that GAP was preventing the flow of water from both the Euphrates and Tigris into their territories.
More than two decades after this visit, it is hard to say that GAP fully met the purpose of helping the region's people to prosper.
Nevertheless, let me share with you my experience. On the way to Mount Nemrut near the Adıyaman township in a minibus with the Tunisian ambassador, the driver of our bus was stopped by the driver of another minibus coming from the opposite direction, who started speaking in a language that none of us understood except the driver.
Strangely enough our driver was not responding to anything said in this language. After this brief pause we continued our way to Mount Nemrut.
In an attempt to soften a slight tension that had developed inside the bus, the Tunisian ambassador jokingly said "I know the driver speaks Arabic."
In fact, as all of us in the minibus guessed, the driver coming from the opposition direction was speaking in Kurdish. Apparently due to fear, our driver did not respond to his remarks, and I never did learn what he said.
Today we are in the year 2007 and in the 22 years that have passed since that experience with the Kurdish language, things do not seem to have changed.
Our decision makers should think not just twice, but several or even thousands of times about the reasons why we have not made any inch of progress in addressing our Kurdish problem and are still losing our loved ones to PKK terrorism.
When addressing the economic problems of the country in general and the Southeast in particular, Turkey lost another opportunity in 1999 when the US handed over to Turkey PKK leader Abdullah +ûcalan -- now serving a life sentence in a Marmara island jail.
Benefiting from the calm atmosphere that emerged in the Southeast, the coalition government of the time should have used this golden opportunity to launch an economic and social mobilization for the region encouraging the private sector to invest there. But engulfed in serious allegations of graft and bad governance, it missed this chance to heal the wounds of the people in the region.
In 2005 Prime Minister and Justice and Development Party (AK Party) leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan identified the problem of the Southeast as a Kurdish problem, amid expectations that he would unveil an economic plan. This also did not happen.
Instead nowadays we are again talking about a military incursion into northern Iraq to crush the PKK terrorists. As one Western diplomat once told me, incursion will only have a short-lived effect though it may satisfy the ultra-nationalist sentiments of the people.
In the long term, though, such an incursion, staged without the support of the US or the Iraqi Kurds, will have irreparable repercussions for the country's fragile economy as well as Turkey's image.
We all know that there are those in Turkey who really do not care about where the country's national interest lies, but at the end of the day short-term gains have not done any good to the country. So we have to rethink the issue, concentrating on solutions to the Kurdish problem within Turkey.
31 May 2007
Todays Zaman |
31 May 2007
View by lale SARIIBRAHIMOGLU
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