Turkish Kurd teenagers turn to the PKK after enduring years of brutality

Ian Traynor in Diyarbakir, Turkey - Monday June 5, 2006

Guardian

Sevder is seething. Growing up in poverty and squalor, he has seen schoolmates shot dead by Turkish security forces and had to put up with the vulgar taunts of Turkish policemen towards his mother and sisters. His grudges have been nourished by endless tales of family and friends burnt out of their villages in the hills and decanted into the slums of Diyarbakir.

"We've had enough," says the 17-year-old Kurd, wearing a Ronaldinho Brazil T-shirt and crouching in the heat and dirt of the teeming city, a couple of hours from the Iraqi and Syrian borders.

Sevder and his friends are part of a new wave of militancy among young Turkish Kurds. "There is a different generation now in Diyarbakir," says Sezgin Tanrikulu, a lawyer. "These youths are aged 14 to 20. They've grown up in this place feeling they don't belong. We can't communicate with them."

Hisyar Ozsoy, an anthropologist and expert on Kurdish politics, says: "There is something new here. These are the children of serhildan [the Kurdish word for intifada or uprising]."

Turkey's long war with its repressed minority of Kurds, who comprise up to 20% of the population of 73 million, runs in cycles. After dying down seven years ago, it is now spiralling into a new and threatening phase.

Subversive nationalist elements within the Turkish security apparatus appear to be exploiting the conflict to try to destabilise the country and at the same time Kurdish warlords, clan leaders and political elites are also stirring up trouble in internal power struggles.

Meanwhile the successes of Kurdish autonomy in neighbouring northern Iraq are exerting a magnetic attraction on the Kurds of south-eastern Turkey eager to share in the freedoms enjoyed across the border.

For Sevder and his friends Cevat and Sinan, their debut as street fighters in a new youth-led intifada came two months ago during three days of disaster in Diyarbakir that left 10 dead, hundreds injured, hundreds more arrested and beaten and plenty of scores to be settled.

The rioting erupted during the funerals of four of 14 Kurdish guerrillas ambushed and killed by Turkish security forces. The guerrillas, from the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) that is considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, Europe and the US, have a tight grip on this city of one million people, rewarding loyalty, punishing "traitors" and enforcing discipline.

"Of course, we all support the PKK," says Cevat, 17. "Every family here has someone in the PKK. "

The rioting in March and the brutal response of the Turkish security forces have worked as an effective recruitment drive for the PKK. "We're fed up of the discrimination. It doesn't have to be like this," says Cevat. "But every time they do something like this, more people go into the mountains."

"Going into the mountains" is a common phrase in Diyarbakir. It means going to join the PKK fighters, thought to number around 5,000, in their bases in nearby northern Iraq.

At least 100 local youths have gone into the mountains in the past month, says Mr Ozsoy. "Guys I know have just disappeared. They're like ghosts. You would see them in the cafes and now they're not here."

Selamettin Ata, a 44-year-old grocer whose seven-year-old son, Enes, was shot dead by Turkish police on March 30, said at least 90% of the city sympathised with the PKK. Enes had told his father he was going to visit his aunt 200 metres away. He became curious about the protests and went to take a look - only to receive a bullet in the heart. Enes was the youngest of the 10 civilians to be killed during a 48-hour period. The oldest was 78. Five of the dead were teenagers, one of whom died from a cracked skull. Another 500 people were wounded.

The clashes were the worst experienced here in more than a decade. Their consequences and the general poverty in a city simmering with pent-up frustration help to explain why a youth-led intifada could explode with greater force at any time.

During and after the trouble, 180 under-18s were detained. According to a report from the Diyarbakir bar association based on witness statements and medical reports, all of them were subjected to severe abuse in detention.

"Mistreatment and illegal torture was applied. The unlawful behaviour of the police lent a new dimension to the situation," the report says.

The teenagers said they had been repeatedly beaten, threatened with death and rape, stripped naked, immersed in cold water, subjected to high pressure hosing and had cigarettes stubbed out on their bodies.

Three-quarters of the detainees were originally from hill villages surrounding Diyarbakir, their militancy a legacy of the dirty war that peaked in the early 1990s in this region when the Turkish army used a scorched earth policy to depopulate thousands of Kurdish villages in the mountains.

As a result 1.5 million Kurds were displaced, pouring into cities such as Diyarbakir, which has tripled in size in little more than a decade. Unemployment is almost 70% and there are estimated to be 28,000 children spending most of their lives on the streets - 700 of them scratching a living from combing the city's rubbish dumps.

The Turks emptied the mountain villages partly to try to destroy the rural base of the guerrillas. Instead, they have created an urban guerrilla movement.

Faced with this crisis, the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to be at a loss. Mr Erdogan has won plaudits for coming to Diyarbakir twice during the past year, signalling a policy shift towards conciliation and concession. But he has not followed up the promises and the Kurdish political leadership is disenchanted.

The Democratic Society party (DTP), the main Kurdish nationalist party generally seen as the PKK's political wing or the Kurds' Sinn FÃﾃ©in, runs 56 town halls across south-eastern Turkey. But the real power in the region is wielded by the Turkish military and Ankara bureaucrats dispatched as regional governors.

The Turkish electoral system is structured to keep the Kurdish nationalists out of parliament in Ankara. A party needs 10% of the national vote to enter parliament. The DTP, which gained 45% of the vote across much of the south-east in the last election in 2002, cannot obtain 10% nationally.

In the absence of political channels, the men of violence on both sides hold sway. The children of Diyarbakir are growing up to swell the ranks of the "terrorists".

In the centre of Diyarbakir hangs a red and white banner draped across a main road. "Happy is he who is a Turk," it reads, a mockery to Selamettin Ata mourning the death of his son. "I'm not allowed to say I'm a Kurd and be proud of it," he says.

Backstory

Kurds, a 20 million-strong mountain and tribal people of Sunni Muslims, are divided between northern Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, which has the biggest community, of up to 15 million - the exact figure is not known. After a long history of uprising and brutal suppression through the 20th century, the current Turkish-Kurdish conflict erupted in 1984, with Abdullah Ocalan, the charismatic guerrilla leader of the Kurdistan Workers' party, leading the rebellion.

A long dirty war followed, with Turkish death squads and ruthless Kurdish guerrillas sowing terror. Thousands of Kurdish villages in the south-east were torched and 1.5 million Kurds uprooted before the Kurds called a ceasefire in 1999 after Ocalan, Turkey's enemy number one, was arrested and incarcerated. The war resumed in 2004 when the rebels called off their truce. The conflict is currently escalating. In 20 years , it has resulted in around 40,000 deaths

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006