As Turkey Reaches Out, Kurdish Politicians Look Back

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey -- Despite a dramatic overture from Turkey's prime minister and deep fatigue among minority Kurds weary of a civil war that has killed tens of thousands, Kurdish politics remains dominated by men more acquainted with conflict than with conciliation.

In a speech here in August, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, "People are asking me what we are planning to do about the 'Kurdish problem.' " His answer -- "more democracy" -- was widely regarded as a significant overture for peace, giving new context to an issue that official Turkey has long cast as a question of law and order.

Kurdish politicians say they saw it as exactly that. The war here, which has killed more than 30,000 and still claims several lives a week, is rooted in Turkey's long, sometimes brutal suppression of Kurdish ethnic identity.

"The words of Prime Minister Erdogan are our wishes," said Selim Sadak, a Kurdish politician who spent 10 years in prison for defying the state. "If such words came before all our pain and suffering, then maybe the pain and suffering could have been avoided."

The challenge now facing Turkey's Kurds is how to answer Erdogan's invitation and shift the issue from the battlefield to the political arena. A solution would also remove a headache for the United States in neighboring Iraq, where several thousand armed Turkish Kurds have taken refuge.

The difficulty that Kurds face is distilled in the effort by Sadak and others to form a new party. The major figures are, like him, former lawmakers who were imprisoned until recently for association with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, known by its Kurdish-language initials PKK.

More an army than a party, the PKK is regarded as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, chiefly for attacks on civilian targets. Yet the now-forming political party, the Democratic Society Movement, appears intent on associating itself with the PKK and its imprisoned founder, Abdullah Ocalan. The new party's most prominent organizer, former legislator Leyla Zana, made headlines by publicly kissing the hand of Ocalan's sister.

Political professionals argue that, at the grass roots, Ocalan's abiding potency as a symbol of resistance counts for more in Kurdish politics than the disdain he inspires even among many who wish the Kurds well.

"There are a lot of people here who feel not only sympathy with him but blood -- their brothers', their sisters', their sons'," said Mahmut Simsek, an aide to the mayor in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir. "When you talk about 35,000 dead, 30,000 of them were from the Kurdish side."

Ocalan organized the PKK on Marxist lines, enforcing discipline that some regarded as brainwashing. Though a brutal infighter who left several rivals dead, Ocalan led from the rear as a commander, surrounding himself with female bodyguards in Syria while young Kurds died in Turkey's barren mountains.

After his 1999 capture in Nairobi by Turkish special forces acting on a U.S. tip, Ocalan was videotaped telling his captors: "I have a hunch I can be of service to the Turkish people and the Kurdish people. My mother is a Turk." From prison, he ordered the PKK to withdraw to northern Iraq, and the Turkish countryside was quiet for five years.

During that interval, things began to change in Turkey, at least on the government side. The state, founded on a concept of "Turkishness," for decades had imposed that view even on non-Turks with their own strong ethnic identities. Kurds were officially dubbed "mountain Turks" and forbidden to publicly express their language, music and customs.