A New Language in an Abant-sort of Frankness
It will not be better unless it gets worse. The accelerating pace of developments in Turkey consolidates the impression that the path the country will take, by redefinition of identity and resetting of objectives on many levels — and the confrontation thereof — will not be painless. What is unknown at the moment is the degree of trauma we are destined to face.
I spent the last three days revisiting a profoundly troubled part of Turkey: the Kurdish issue. Having been witness to rational analysis and emotional outbursts, this time in the Abant Platform context, one realizes with shock how Turkey has been run in a constant, completely unrelaxed crisis-management mode since 1908. Yet its human structures are still willing to coexist, hoping for a new social contract.
The speaker who surprised everybody was a civil servant who, defying softly yet courageously the rigid code of conduct of the state, delivered an utterly sharp self-critique of its policies of mistreating its citizens. İbrahim Akpinar, governor of Bolu, originally from Maras, told a flabbergasted crowd of Turks and Kurds something I had already heard: Turkey is run by some 5,000 bureaucrats, a privileged elite that only helped problems become bigger.
In an astonishing manner that would make any proponent of full transparency cry in pride, the governor shared discomforting data from the latest military coup, mentioning over half a million people tortured in the early '80s, the sheer horror of the prison in Diyarbakir for Kurds at that time, and other crimes against humanity.
He was funny. He said, "I want patience, and I want it now!" and gave voice to a demand everybody in the conference hall had absolutely no objections to. "I am 46 years old," the governor said. "I told high-placed people in Ankara [meaning of course the prime minister] that I do not want to wait until I am 70 years old to see democracy come to Turkey!"
In the evening he shared with us in full disclosure his anecdotes of humanity and pain from his time as local governor in the province of Agri. He told us about the poor Kurdish peasant who had lost many relatives: emigrating from his village he was first robbed by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and then mishandled by the military the morning after because "he had helped the terrorists." He told us how he had to travel from the city to another with the protection of local Kurds because the local troop commander who disliked his social policies there refused to give him protection. He told us the heart-wrenching story of the imam in a village whose beard was shaved by force by an officer who wrongly claimed that "all civil servants of the Turkish state must work without a beard." His motto after all the experience (he learned and addressed Kurds in broken and limited Kurdish) was clear: "If you give people one, you take back five."
You may take him to be exceptional, a maverick. But no. Akpinar is a new breed of bureaucrat who puts emphasis on conscience. There are a growing number of fresh bureaucrats starting to challenge the old elite in bureaucracy who felt completely free to harass people, as some of them did in Hakkari and two other provinces during nevruz celebrations. The openness is to be taken as part of the struggle between the old and new Turkey. Discourses change and attitudes surprise. The more "the 5,000 that de facto rule Turkey" are challenged, the more quickly the transformation to democracy will be.
Pro-PKK Democratic Society Party (DTP) party representatives were deliberately absent from the conference in Abant. It would have been better, certainly, if they had not been. The conduct of politics in the region, by its politicized nature, is already transparent: Every actor there knows what the other does. In that sense, Abant would have been even a more sincere gathering. Sadly, the DTP, by isolating itself from the persistent debate about the Kurds, in an environment troubled by party closure cases, alienates itself from a platform that needs a search for common ground for new contract. It may face yet another backlash in the upcoming local elections, in March 2009.
The Abant conference on Kurds brought a debate in the periphery more toward the center. It was broadcast live by TV channels in its entirety, and such transparency will have an impact. And everything that had to be said was said during those two days, except two things: Iraq and the EU. The pale perspective of the EU leaves Kurds uneasy and confused, in fatigue. The more distant the EU destination became in the past two or three years (due to the lack of an aim within the Justice and Development Party, AKP, and undermining attempts by France), the stricter the tutelage of the PKK in the region. If Turkey is able to get out of its mess "in one piece," the only way out to win back the Kurds to Turkey and stabilize Iraq by soft power goes through reviving the EU process.
Kurds are running out of patience, and they need to see the light. The EU should pay attention.
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