Turkey in turmoil as PKK erases progress in fight for survival

It was known as the forgotten war: 15 years of conflict between the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, and Turkey. More than 35,000 people killed, over 2,000 villages destroyed, most by security forces, at least half a million villagers forced into poverty in towns and cities. After a five-year ceasefire, war has returned, and the death toll in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast is rising fast. According to human rights organisations, 219 people were killed last year, more than twice as many as in the year before the ceasefire. This year has been bloodier, with at least 60 Turkish soldiers killed and perhaps four times as many PKK militants. 'Why are they doing this?' asks Halil Sincar, a businessman in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir. 'War will only benefit the Turkish [military] general staff.' It's the question on everybody's lips, not just in Turkey but in Kurdish northern Iraq. 'What makes the timing of the war so baffling,' says Izzedin Berwari, a senior Iraqi Kurdish politician, 'is that with European Union accession on its agenda, Turkey has begun to give some rights to its Kurds.' It's even odder considering that Zubeyir Aydar, head of the PKK's civilian wing, insists his party supports Turkey's efforts to join the EU. Pro-EU sentiment in Turkey is nowhere stronger than in the impoverished, militarised Kurdish southeast. In Qandil, the Iraqi Kurdish mountain where the PKK has been based since the early 1990s, answers to these riddles are hard to come by. Behind the flagrant contradictions, though, there is a solid base of bitterness at Turkey's refusal to engage in any form of dialogue. 'We declared ceasefires in 1993 and 1999; in 2000, we sent two 20-man 'peace groups' back to Turkey,' says Haydar Ali, a member of PKK's political bureau. 'What did we get in return? The ceasefires were ignored and the peace group members were imprisoned.' In Seyyed Sadiq, to the south, there is evidence his words are not just an expression of piqued pride. This dusty, conservative town near the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah is now home to several hundred ex-PKK fighters. Zuhal Serhat, 26, insists she doesn't regret the nine years she spent in the party. She joined, she says, to avenge the injustices done to her people, and because the organisation offered an alternative to the house-bound lives of most Kurdish women. Since the 1999 ceasefire, though, when PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was arrested, tried and imprisoned, she thinks the heart has gone out of the organisation. 'When we were fighting, we accepted the need for orders, hierarchy, and hardship,' she says. 'After 1999, the blinkers came off: the PKK was good only for war and destroying individuality.' Gabar Botan, a 30-year-old from Eruh, the mountain town in southeastern Turkey where the PKK staged its first attack in 1984, agrees. 'We used to watch our commanders on TV describing the PKK as the most democratic organisation in the Middle East,' he says. 'Then we looked around us: free speech a sham, leaders who hadn't changed in 20 years.' Like most of the ex-fighters in Seyyed Sadiq, Mr Botan quit the PKK last autumn, when the party decided to allow those who wanted to, to leave. Ms Serhat fled in April, walking 13 hours through Saddam Hussein-era minefields to escape her pursuers. 'The open-door policy only lasted about six weeks,' she says. 'So many fighters left that the leaders decided not to allow anybody else out.' Some ex-fighters say a second open-door policy would reduce the party to its leaders. Life in Iraq is hardly any easier. After quitting last year, Hayri Dersim, a 29-year-old former commander, had his false passport confiscated in Iran as he tried to catch a plane to Switzerland. Without papers, he survived the next six months eating out of restaurant rubbish bags. He is emaciated. There is also evidence, say fighters who left recently, that the mass-resignations and new conflict have speeded up recruitment. With pro-PKK media describing the ex-fighters as traitors, they say, a new generation is going to the mountains determined to succeed where their elders failed. Nobody believes the organisation can return to its heyday in the early 1990s, when it fielded as many as 15,000 militants and controlled large swathes of southeastern Turkey. Yet the past 12 months are proof enough that a smaller band of fighters can wreak considerable mayhem. And they may be able to do more than that. Quite apart from raising eyebrows in European capitals, the renewed conflict also comes at a time when Kurdish civilian politics within Turkey is in transformation. Long monopolised by parties whose politics is a watered-down version of the PKK's leftism, Kurdish nationalism seems to be going nowhere. Real hopes of change came last year, when four former Kurdish MPs were released from 10 years in jail and vowed to set up a new political movement. One of them is Leyla Zana, winner of the European Union's Sakharov Peace Prize. The difficulty they faced was finding a balance between the sensibilities of their supporters and Turkey's demands that they condemn the PKK as terrorists. The renewed conflict - which started the same month the four were released from prison - has made the balancing act almost impossible. 'The PKK is increasingly afraid of falling into irrelevance,' says Henri Barkey, a US-based expert on Turkey. 'A new war is their way of making sure they retain influence inside Turkey.' If it wants to end the violence quickly, though, Turkey's first step should be to do what ex-fighters, Kurdish politicians and Turkish liberals have been demanding for years - allow people such as Ms Serhat to go back home. To do so would be a radical departure from Ankara's long-standing habit of seeing the PKK insurgency solely as a military issue. And with nationalism on the rise in Turkey, and the government there looking increasingly weak, the chances of it happening any time soon are slender.