The Peace Process between Turkey and the Kurds

Anatomy of a Failure

Burak Özpek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351347785
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In January 2013, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government initiated a peace process in order to settle the Kurdish question through peaceful means. However, this sanguine atmosphere gradually disappeared, before finally collapsing after the general elections of 7 June 2015.

This book addresses the question of why the peace building attempts that culminated between 2013 and 2015 failed. It deals with the historical background of the Kurdish question and contemporary complexities of the Turkish politics to explain how they eventually jeopardized the peace process. This is an important and relevant research question because the Kurdish question has been viewed as a variable shaping Turkey's domestic politics and its foreign relations. The Kurdish question's influence on Turkish foreign policy is not confined to its neighbors. Turkey's relations with the United States and the European Union was also shaped by the issues stemmed from the Kurdish question. As this was the first serious peace attempt in a conflict that lasted over three decades, examination of why it failed will inform any future attempts at peace and will help pinpoint the potential path that Turkey might face in both the domestic and international realm.

This book will appeal to students and scholars with an interest in Turkey and the Kurdish issue, peacekeeping, security studies and Middle East Politics.

1
Was the peace process a deviation?

“The Turkish Republic is one nation on this soil. That one nation includes everyone. Whoever pursues ethnic nationalism is of ill-intent. No one should come to us about being Turks or being Kurds. We have no separatism or divisions. Our nationalism is about patriotism and about humanism,” said Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to explain the details of the “peace process”, which aims to solve the long-lasting Kurdish question and started on 3 January 2013.¹ On the other hand, Öcalan, jailed leader of the PKK, appeared as the counterpart of the “peace process” and the government allowed Öcalan’s letter to be publicly read during the Nawroz celebrations in Diyarbakır in March 2013. Eventually Öcalan’s isolation ended and he was provided opportunities to contact influential actors of the Kurdish political movement in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan.

Following the initiation of the “peace process”, a legal framework making the National Intelligence Agency (MIT) responsible for conducting the negotiations with Öcalan was enacted with the votes of AKP lawmakers in Parliament. In addition to that move, the government formed the “Wise People Committee”, which consisted of 63 members from academia, civil society, business associations, media and the cultural world in order to deal with the “public relations” dimension of the “peace process”.² It would not be wrong to argue that normalization of Kurdish identity and the positive image of the peace rapidly increased during the “peace process”.

This was a departure from Turkey’s traditional policy towards the Kurdish question, which had been regarded as a security issue since the founding of the republic. This security-based paradigm had led Turkey to deal with the Kurdish question by military measures. According to Yeğen, founding principles of the republic have played a key role in shaping Turkey’s approach to the Kurdish question. For example, the founders of the republic opted for building a nation-state, which did not allow the society to be defined as ethnically plural. Thus, unlike the Ottoman practice, the Kurdish identity was totally rejected and Turkishness constituted the legal spirit of the official discourse and policy. In addition to that, the Turkish state exercised the privilege to identify the attempts to revise the status quo in favor of the Kurds. For example, the Sheikh Said Rebellion in 1925 was regarded as a religion-based reactionary movement aspiring to undermine the progressive reforms made by the young republic. Similarly, it was not uncommon to assume that the Kurdish question derived from the Kurds’ resistance against the modern way of life introduced by the republic. Accordingly, the Kurds’ persistence in preserving their autonomy against the intervention-ist nature of the nation-state was viewed as an indication that they were a tribal and uncivilized community. This kind of approach is accompanied by the idea that the Kurdish question stems from economic problems and underdevelopment of the Kurdish-populated areas in Turkey. Finally, the Kurdish movements are seen as extensions of the foreign powers³ that aim to destablize Turkey. Accordingly, the Kurdish question is assumed to be artificially created and provoked by the foreign states.⁴ To sum up, in line with the points of Yeğen, it is safe to argue that the Turkish state failed to conceive and identify the Kurdish question. That is to say, political goals of the Kurdish movements were ignored and demonized.

The marginalization of the Kurdish question in the eye of the Ankara government also shaped its reaction towards the instruments that the Kurdish movements used. In other words, violent and non-violent activities of the Kurdish groups were indiscriminately suppressed since the Kurds’ political ends were already not recognized as legitimate by the establishment. Therefore, the Kurdish question remained as a matter of national security and it was kept away from the political agenda. Political parties refrained from suggesting comprehensive peace plans to solve this problem due to the fear of violating the security architecture of Turkey. And this leads us to discuss whether the Kurdish question was a security problem or a securitized problem manipulated by the security elite to dominate the political space. This question is highlighted by the fact that the Turkish state insistently kept the Kurdish question out of the legal and political framework.

Most of the literature examined so far points out a causal connection between how the Kurdish question was defined and how the Turkish government reacted. According to mainstream opinion, Ankara governments used military instruments since the Kurdish question was believed to be a security problem impeding the nation-state principle. On the other hand, it could be argued that regarding the Kurdish question as a security issue might also be related to the strategies of the domestic political actors’ survival game in Ankara. For example, Özoğul argues that the Sheikh Said Rebellion in 1925 was viewed as an opportunity by the Turkish government to eliminate the political opposition, the Progressive Republic Party (PRP), led by prominent commanders of the liberation war, including Kazım Karabekir, Rauf Orbay and Refet Bele. Accordingly, the radical wing of the government party, the Republican People’s Party (RPP), exaggerated and manipulated the Sheikh Said Rebellion to suppress the opposition. That is why the infamous Takrir-i Sükun Law (Maintenance of Order) passed and the Progressive Republic Party was eliminated.

Somer is one of the few scholars who considered the role of inter-elite competition on the development of the Kurdish question. Political rivalry between and within the secularist and Islamist circles has prevented them from building a consensus on the Kurdish question. Each circle has perceived the other’s attempt to settle the Kurdish question as a step toward domination of the political space. For example, the radical wing of the Republican People’s Party eliminated the moderate conservatives, Islamists and moderate seculars by using its struggle against the Kurdish rebellion in 1920s.⁵ Likewise, Kemalists abstained from the Islamists’ agenda to solve the Kurdish question with the help of the Islamic brotherhood discourse due to similar reasons in 1990s. Bozarslan is another scholar who argues that the Turkish state’s use of force to supress internal threats, including the Kurdish question, is the product of certain actors’ bid for legitimizing their positions in power relations. For example, Turkey’s military-bureaucratic complex is inclined to use fighting against security problems as an method of dominating a power group (or some power groups) within the political space.⁶ In a similar vein, Cizre also includes the military in the political competition game and points out how the Kurdish question was an efficient and useful tool in the hands of the military to keep their position in the system and intervene in politics. This explains how the National Security Council functioned like a shadow cabinet in the 1990s, during the heydays of the struggle against the PKK.

In line with these points, it is safe to argue that the Turkish government’s reaction to the Kurdish question before the peace process was shaped by two parameters. First, military measures were taken and almost no room was left for the legal activities of the Kurdish political movements. Second, the necessity of dealing with the Kurdish question was exploited by the ruling elite to consolidate its political position. Thus, examining the progress of the Kurdish national movement allows us to explore this continuity, possibly enabling us to identify whether or not the peace process was a deviation.

As introduced previously, the founding of the republic on the basis of secularism and the nation-state undermined the solidarity between Turks and Kurds during the days of the Liberation War. The first Kurdish rebellion burst out in 1925, immediately after the abolishment of the sultanate and caliphate. Under the leadership of Sheikh Said, a Kurdish rebellion aiming at restoring the caliphate broke out. According to Jwaideh, shortly before the rebellion started, some of the Kurdish tribe leaders, intellectual and nationalist activists, had been exiled to western Asia Minor and use of the Kurdish language had been prohibited. In other words, nationalist sentiments contributed to the outbreak of the Sheikh Said Rebellion.⁷ Therefore, it could be argued that the Islamic tone of the rebellion might be regarded as a claim to preserve ethnic equality with the Turks. Nevertheless, the Kurds’ first attempt was harshly suppressed and hierarchy between Turks and Kurds continued in the later periods of the republic.

On the other hand, the strategy that the Ankara government pursued during the Sheikh Said crisis determined a framework for its approach towards the Kurdish question in the forthcoming years. According to Tunçay, the radical wing of the Republican People’s Party viewed the Sheikh Said Rebellion as an opportunity to establish and consolidate the single-party rule. In doing so, moderate figures inside the RPP were eliminated, a state of emergency was declared, the press was silenced and the Progressive Republic Party was closed down. In addition, suppression of the Sheikh Said Rebellion cost the lives of thousands of soldiers, more than the losses of the Liberation War.⁸ In search of a pattern, it could be argued the first Kurdish rebellion was responded to via military action, coupled with authoritarian suppression of internal criticisms. In other words, militarization of the Kurdish question and restriction of political liberties had gone hand in hand since the beginning of the republic. And the founding principles of the Turkish republic justified both militarism and authoritarianism.

This pattern continued in the following years. Kirişçi and Winrow argue that there remained no sign of the Kurdish nationalism when the Democrat Party (DP) took over the government in 1950, which became possible only after a multi-party system was allowed in 1945. Accordingly, RPP authoritarianism had dramatically increased under the single-party rule. This enabled the RPP to accomplish its nation-building project by suppressing the weak and disorganized Kurdish uprisings and implementing assimilation policies.⁹ During this time period, the Ankara government dealt with 16 Kurdish rebellions, including the Ağrı Rebellion (1927–1930) and Dersim Rebellion (1936–1937). At the end of the day, the authority of the central government over the Kurdish populated areas was fully established.

The Democrat Party’s takeover of government in 1950 introduced a new atmosphere of political liberalization and created new opportunities for the Kurds to join the intellectual and political system. In the 1950 general elections, the DP nominated the Kurdish figures who, and whose fathers, had been sentenced during the single-party regime. For example, Abdülmelik Fırat, grandson of Sheikh Said, was chosen as a deputy of Erzurum village. Similarly, Halis Öztürk, one of the commanders of the Ağrı Rebellion, became the deputy of Ağrı. It should be noted that prominent figures of the Kurdish national movement such as Remzi Bucak and Yusuf Azizoğulu were also elected as deputies from the list of the Democrat Party.¹⁰

Nevertheless, the Democrat Party did not deviate from the official line of the Turkish state regarding the Kurdish question, although it pragmatically took advantage of Kurdish voters’ discontent with the single-party regime of the RPP. That is to say, the DP remained committed to the principles of nation-state and secularism. Ozbudun and Hale argue that the DP attracted religiously oriented conservatives but made few concessions to them. The DP governments did not attempt to change the secular civil and criminal legal codes and undermine the secular identity of the republic. That is why “trying to destroy secularism” was not among the charges levelled against the DP when the military junta of 1960 executed Prime Minister Adnan Menderes.¹¹ On the other hand, it is safe to argue that the DP did not take any concrete or large-scale steps to settle the Kurdish question. According to Romano, the strategy of political clientelism, or cronyism, was adopted by the DP in order to appeal to voters from the Kurdish-populated areas. In doing so, local patrons were allocated additional economic sources to distribute to their clients. In return for this, the clients were expected to vote for the DP.¹² Furthermore, Tan argues that most of the local patrons were integrated into the “system of Ankara” after getting a seat in the Parliament. As a result, they were easily pacified and controlled. That is to say, the DP viewed the Kurdish question as nothing but an election issue.¹³

The 49ers event fully unmasked the DP and its pragmatic approach towards the Kurdish question. It should be noted that the 49ers file was the product of the General Qasem coup in Iraq in 1958. General Qasem toppled the Iraqi monarchy, which had close ties with the Menderes government, and opened the doors of government to the representatives of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish communities. Thanks to the political atmosphere that emerged after the coup, Mullah Mustafa Barzani returned from exile to Iraq and the Iraqi Kurdistan Democratic Party supported the Qasem administration. However, the increasing role of the Kurds in Iraqi politics alarmed Turkey’s security elite, which regarded any kind of Kurdish autonomy in the north of Iraq as a threat to the territorial integrity of Turkey. The Turkish security elite believed that political achievements of the Iraqi Kurds would automatically trigger Kurdish secessionist sentiments in Turkey. According to an intelligence report leaked by Yön magazine in 1959, Kurdish nationalism, encouraged by the 1958 revolution in Iraq, gained ground among university students. To intimidate these Kurdish organizations, imprisonment of some 40 or 50 of these students was recommended. This policy brief was implemented when the clashes between Turcoman and Kurdish groups in Kirkuk, Iraq, became an issue in Turkish domestic politics. In December 1959, 50 Kurdish university students, activists and intellectuals protesting the anti-Kurdish statements made by Asım Eren, an RPP member of Parliament, were arrested and imprisoned. They were accused of being involved in subversive activities. After one of them died, the remaining 49 people were released in 1961. This event became known as “49ers”.¹⁴

The 49ers event verifies the argument that the Kurdish movements were criminalized regardless of the method they used to challenge the nation-state understanding; even the non-violent actions were harshly suppressed. In addition to that, the Kurdish question was seen as an instrument that regulated relations among the ruling elite. Towards the end of the 1950s, opposition parties and university students began to criticize the Democrat Party government for its anti-democratic practices. Then the Qasem coup happened in Iraq. Prime Minister Menderes was concerned about the possibility of a military coup against his government inspired by the Qasem coup. That is why he opted for intimidating the opposition by curtailing democratic principles while remaining loyal to the statist understanding of s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Was the peace process a deviation?
• 2 Conceptualization of the peace process
• 3 Why did the peace process fail?
• 4 The year after the “peace process”
• 5 Conclusion
• Appendix: Chronology of the peace process
• Index