Kurdish peace process divides Turks
By Caleb Lauer
ISTANBUL - Inside the grounds of Seka Hospital, in Izmit, Turkey, on the steps of a low building, gendarmes stand guard with machine guns. A paper sign, taped to a curtained window, says Prisoner Ward. Seven imprisoned Kurdish hunger strikers, brought by ambulance that morning from Kandira Prison, lie inside, hooked-up to intravenous drips. Three of them, including Suphi Yalcinkaya, a 26-year-old tourism studies graduate, are in critical condition.
It is November 18, 2012, the last day of a 67-day hunger strike by Kurdish people. This was the end of the beginning. Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) have since taken unprecedented
moves towards peace.
Last September, Kurds in prisons across Turkey began refusing food, demanding Kurdish-language schools, the freedom to speak Kurdish in court, and that Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the rebel PKK, be brought out of isolation and given access to his lawyers, which he had not seen for much of 2011 and 2012.
Most of the hunger strikers were not convicts, but detainees charged with membership in the Union of Communities in Kurdistan, known in Turkey as the KCK. Prosecutors say the KCK is essentially a PKK organization and thousands of detained people - journalists, teachers, medical students, and almost three dozen mayors - are, by virtue of their alleged membership, guilty of terrorism.
Other prisoners joined the hunger strike in staggered, coordinated groups. After two months, more than 650 were striking, intending to continue to the death unless their demands were met. Thousands more, inside and outside prison, were fasting in solidarity.
Then, suddenly, Abdullah Ocalan called it off.
The next day, in the rolling countryside 96 kilometers east of Istanbul, guards in the towers and at the gates of Kandira Prison watched as 200 people gathered at the roadside to celebrate deliverance from tragedy - no strikers had died - and victory.
They celebrated not because the demands had been met (they weren't) but because Ocalan, in a Turkish prison since his 1999 capture, had successfully demonstrated his command.
"Others tried to end the strike, but no one listened. Ocalan makes one statement and the strike ends immediately," a university student said outside the jail. "This shows that for prisoners, and for Kurds, there is one leader - Abdullah Ocalan."
Outside the prison, mothers and sloganeers made megaphone speeches. The crowd danced the halay. Sometimes they would all fall silent, straining to hear the faint chorus of prisoners singing behind the prison walls.
A few hours later, the triumphant crowd had dispersed and only a few family members remained. The mother of Yasin Yilmaz paced along the road, waiting to learn whether she would be let into the prison to see her 31-year-old son - said to be in good condition - who had gone without food for almost 10 weeks. Later that evening, the mother of 25-year-old Omer Faruk Caliskan, stood outside the Seka Hospital Prisoner Ward, still waiting for her son - in need of serious medical attention, according to his lawyer - to be brought to hospital.
By what mix of opportunity and design Ocalan was able to make the life-saving intervention to end the hunger strike is not clear - the Turkish government, after all, also feared deaths, and presumably understood how Ocalan's demonstration could be harnessed.
The irony, however, is clear. If the process underway today does lead to peace, it will be thanks in part to the hunger strike, and to the boost Ocalan got from ending it as he did. But during the strike few Turks had sympathy for either the hunger strikers or Ocalan's plight as a leader cut-off from his followers. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan even concluded he would gain by suggesting the strikers were bluffing and that the death penalty might be reinstated (for the sake of Ocalan).
Each evening during the strike, several dozen Kurds and Turks gathered in support outside a ferry terminal in Kadikoy, Istanbul. Thousands of commuters ignored them, some insulted them. Plainclothes police - monitoring supporters - more than once prevented fist fights. "Too many Turkish families have lost sons in this conflict," one man told supporters. Another commuter, taking a flyer, liked the strikers' language demands. "But Ocalan," she said, handing back the flyer as she walked away, "is a murderer".
From five storys up, the bright Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) Kadikoy branch office looks down on a narrow street of shops, shady nightclubs, and single-star hotels. The party, which belongs to the same movement as the PKK, has 33 seats in Turkey's 550-seat parliament. Most hunger strikers were BDP supporters; many worked for the party.
On the office's conference table there were Turkish and Kurdish newspapers; on a whiteboard, the previous week's Kurdish lesson.
"Yes, [Ocalan] is a murderer. Let's accept it," Dicle Ozturk, a branch official said during the strike. The conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK is a war, and though the Turkish state rejects the term, Ocalan is no different from Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the warrior who founded modern Turkey, she said.
With millions of Kurds in Turkey saying Ocalan is their leader, Turks "must accept that even a murderer can be loved by many people", said Ozturk, who is a computer science graduate student and teaching assistant at a university in Istanbul. Her father is in prison, charged with KCK membership, and participated in the hunger strike.
Eleven pictures of Ocalan hung on the BDP office walls. There were also portraits of four PKK leaders who died on hunger strike in 1982. In another, a woman in fatigues ran in a crouch with her AK-47; another, a portrait of a Kurdish girl killed by Turkish soldiers. "The fact is, the people who vote for the BDP all have some connections with the [PKK] guerillas - they are their friends, their children, their fathers," Ms Ozturk said. "We are here by [Ocalan's] uprising ... Turkish people have to accept this."
The insurgency has cost 40,000 dead PKK fighters, Turkish army conscripts, and civilians. Many more have suffered. Now, in a bid for peace, the Turkish government has recognized Ocalan and others in the PKK leadership as de facto statesmen, something anathema to many Turkish voters.
The hunger strikers - hundreds of young people that took on an intense burden - helped put Ocalan in the unexpected and unlikely position he is in today, and one that the Turkish government intends to benefit from. These young people are still detained in prisons across Turkey, but not convicted of any crime.
Caleb Lauer is a Canadian freelance journalist living in Istanbul and covering Turkey since 2006.
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