January 31st 2008 | Ankara and Diyarbakir | From The Economist print edition

The AK government uses Islam to win over Kurdish support

A SIGN adorned with Ataturk's favourite adage, “Happy is he who calls himself a Turk”, hangs in Diyarbakir, south-east Turkey, as a reminder of Turkey's decades-old policy of forcibly assimilating the region's Kurds. The ruling Justice and Development (AK) party might prefer “Happy is he who calls himself a Muslim”.

“Uniting around our common Islamic identity is the only way to solve the Kurdish problem,” argues one AK leader. “Islam bound us in Ottoman times and during the war of independence, why not today?” Religion has become the mildly Islamist AK's most potent weapon as it seeks to snatch control of Diyarbakir, the unofficial capital of Turkey's estimated 14m Kurds, from the pro-Kurdish Democratic People's Party (DTP) in next year's local election.

In the slums of Diyarbakir sympathy for AK is growing. “They give us free coal, free school textbooks, my vote is for AK,” croaks Fatma Demirci, a shrivelled mother of nine. Generous welfare spending, plus modest reforms to satisfy the Kurds' demands for greater freedom, helped the party to take over 50% of the vote in the mainly Kurdish provinces of Turkey in last July's general election.

Now Turkey's richest Islamic fraternity is helping the AK to win more Kurdish votes. Named after Fetullah Gulen, a liberal Muslim cleric who lives in self-imposed exile in America, the Gulenists distributed meat to some 60,000 families during the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice in December. Scores of Gulenist doctors are offering free check-ups and treatment in Kurdish areas. Their message is that Turks and Kurds are brothers in Islam and that nationalism, whether Turkish or Kurdish, is bad. Such Islamic fraternities (tarikats) have strong roots in the region.

Other AK actions are also burnishing the party's image. A new government proposal to scrap restrictions on wearing the Islamic headscarf in universities has elated pious Kurds as much as it has horrified Turkish secularists. Kurds of all leanings cheered the arrest of 14 members of an ultra-nationalist gang whose leader, a retired army general called Veli Kucuk, is said by some to have plotted the extra-judicial murders of Kurdish dissidents at the height of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) insurgency in the early 1990s.

The government's popularity seems to be surviving even the airstrikes launched in December against PKK targets in northern Iraq. A retaliatory bombing claimed by the PKK killed seven people in Diyarbakir last month, but provoked outrage and rebounded against the DTP. One reason, some say, is that it is in practice run by the captive PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, making it hard for elected DTP politicians to disavow PKK terrorism. Polls suggest that the party's support has slipped.

With much of their time spent in court or in jail, few DTP mayors are able to govern effectively. Diyarbakir's mayor, Osman Baydemir, is facing 23 court cases and other investigations for such crimes as printing new-year greeting cards in Kurdish. Some mayors have been pursued for offences such as building an artificial pool “shaped like the map of Kurdistan”.

Hasim Hasimi, a moderate Kurdish politician, argues that this sort of pressure on the DTP may cause voters to return to it. Even business leaders are disquieted by the government's attempts to dilute Kurdish nationalism. “It is foolish to imagine that the Kurds' demands to develop their language and culture will go away,” says Mehmet Kaya, president of the Diyarbakir chamber of commerce.

On a recent visit, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the AK prime minister, dismissed calls for more Kurdish-language education and broadcasting. He argued that other minorities would agitate for similar rights. His message has reached the state-run maternity clinic. Cetin Bakir, the chief doctor, rejects suggestions that his staff might communicate better with patients if they used Kurdish. “Absolutely not,” he sniffs. Leyla Dincer, a midwife, disagrees. “What use are these?” she asks, pointing to a rack full of pamphlets on birth control. “It's all in Turkish, nobody understands a word.”