Just as I was wondering whether Turkey’s Kurds still had reasons to be grumpy, up pops the country’s Supreme Court to ban the leading Kurdish political party, the DTP, and expel its elected MPs from Parliament. This has happened many times before – a DTP deputy describes Turkey as a “cemetery of banned political parties” – but not usually when the eyes of the world are watching how the nation responds to Kurdish unrest.
Unfortunately the government doesn’t have the power to override Supreme Court decisions – if it did, the pragmatic Prime Minister Tayyip Erdo?an would quickly throw the case out. Banning the DTP, which the Supreme Court claims is “based on blood and takes orders from the terrorist organisation of the PKK,” would be self-defeating. The party has been weakened by the rise of Tayyip’s AKP, which swept the board among Kurds in the 2007 general election, relegating the DTP to a bit part even in its traditional strongholds of Diyarbakir and Bingol. Silencing it now, Erdo?an knows, can only fan Kurdish resentment:
“Everyone should be able to freely express themselves through constitutional and legitimate means in a democratic environment,” he argued this week. “The climate of freedoms is an enemy of violence and terrorism…So let’s maintain pluralistic democracy and strengthen the climate of freedoms in order to secure the ultimate result in the struggle against terrorism…All experience shows there is no other way out.”
The latter is a reference to Turkey’s failure to snuff out earlier Kurdish rebellions using force. OK, the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999 calmed things down for a while, but most of the underlying causes of his people’s frustration remained. It was only a matter of time before some of them regrouped, and the recent troubles show the battle for hearts and minds, as the Prime Minister acknowledges, is far from won. “Let’s look together,” he urges, “for ways of winning over the people instead of alienating them.” Sadly, his plea is likely to fall on deaf ears.
