LONDON – This is the edge of tomorrow’s Europe, at least if Turkey gets its way. A desolate, mud-built, village, close up to the Syrian border, reduced to rubble by the Turkish army battling the terrorists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), is slowly being repopulated by a brave few. The families are understandably nervous. The PKK has recently restarted its insurgency, breaking a five year truce, angry with the government’s slow delivery on its promises to allow Kurdish in the primary schools, full scale broadcasting in Kurdish and to invest in economic development. “This violence is what we don’t want”, says one man, living with his extended family under nothing more than a homemade canopy.
Five minutes drive from the river Tigris that watered downstream the first of humankind’s civilizations, we engage in what seems to be almost surreal conversation. On the one hand, the grandfather, who has fathered twelve children, explains how they make a living with their herd of sheep out of what appears to be a stony, barren land without a blade of green grass to be seen. On the other, he says, although in their hearts they feel Asian they want to enter the Europe Union. “Europe will give us peace and give us Kurds our rights”, he says. “And give us food and jobs” adds one of his sons.
A few kilometres away is another larger, more prosperous, village that escaped the war unscathed. The villagers grow wheat and lentils, and although they say the water is of poor quality every house has a television and half the men of the village, as they converse with me in a large circle, show me their mobile phones. The refrain is the same, even from the young men who hover standing at the back: “We don’t want to fight again. We Kurds want Europe to accept Turkey. We feel deep in ourselves Asian, but now we want to be European”.
But how can modern Europe swallow all this? The poverty, the ignorance (girls are rarely educated out here), and now the renewed bubbling and boiling of war. This is not the civilization of contemporary Europe, and probably not even of ancient Mesopotamia. This is life almost, if not quite, at its most elementary and unsparing.
The Turkish government, as one senior official told me, “seems never to miss a chance to shoot itself in the foot”. Desperate as it is to cement on October 3rd the agreement of the EU to begin its negotiations for entry, it has this year seen not only the police beating up women demonstrators, the indictment of Turkey’s best known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, for writing that the Armenian accusations of Turkish genocide in the days of the Ottoman empire need to be looked at openly but, most importantly, the bureaucratic go-slow on implementing what was promised to the Kurds, and thus providing the kindling for a renewal of the insurgency.
Some of the country’s liberal voices are driven to wonder what is really going on behind the scenes. Inur Cevik, who was once a prime minister’s senior aide and now publishes the English language newspaper, The Anatolian, and who is described by one senior European ambassador as someone who “is pretty damned true”, tells me that he is convinced that parts of the army are conniving with the PKK to restart the fighting so as to derail the Turkish approach to Europe.
But, for all the ineptness of the Turkish government that gives rise to such conspiracy theories, the likelihood is that these are rogue elements. Moreover, apart from the fact that the high command of the Turkish army is firmly pro Europe, as their mentor Ataturk would have expected them to be, the PKK itself is also split on Europe. The PKK appears to realize that an anti-European stance is not popular in this southeastern corner of Turkey.
Neither, for all its romantic allure, is their occasional talk of a united Kurdistan. Once again the militants of the PKK are split. Kurds are impressed with the degree of political and economic autonomy that the Iraqi Kurds have won during the recent negotiations on the Iraqi constitution, but they are also aware that it is a precarious autonomy and that the government of that province is still, despite elections, essentially feudal, dominated by two families.
Most of the country’s Kurds want to be European and are neither seriously tempted by the PKK or a united Kurdistan. But Turkey still doesn’t know how to bring its Kurds up to the starting line. And in making this grave mistake it is probably delaying the chances of Turkey of entering as quickly into the Europe Union as it wants to.
