The PKK (Rebels) by Paul White

Author:Paul White [White, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2015-08-14T22:00:00+00:00

Turkish responses to the Turkish/Kurdish peace process

Milliyet columnist Kadri Gürsel cites three forces that have opposed the AKP government since 2002: ‘the prime minister, the prisoner and the preacher’ (cited in Dombey, 2013a). This observation also neatly captures the powers that must be secured for the peace process to succeed. The evolving stances of ‘the prisoner’ (i.e. Abdullah Öcalan) have been discussed in earlier chapters. The responses to the peace process of the prime minister and his chief opponents both within and outside the state are considered in the present chapter. The power politics reviewed here, it will be shown, relates directly to an attempt to return Turkey to its previous status as a praetorian state under direct military tutelage. The factors driving this conspiracy derive in large part from fears of rapprochement between Ankara and the PKK.

The AKP in power

As a party of so-called ‘moderate political Islam’ the AKP is an unusual – but not unprecedented – government in modern Turkey. The Republic of Turkey was founded on 29 October 1923, with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as its first president. Atatürk comprehensively dismantled the Ottoman Islamic Caliphate, outlawing religion in all spheres of public life, with secularism and virulent Turkish nationalism becoming the new state’s first principles. It took over four and a half decades for political parties inspired by Islamic values to reappear in Turkish public life. Despite this success, these parties have all been stalked perpetually by the threat of judicial abolition – if not removal by the Kemalist military apparatus. These parties have also often been important players in the politics of Turkey’s Kurdish region and therefore factors in the PKK/Ankara peace process. Indeed, the Kurdish issue has been a constant factor prompting powerful opposition by sections of the Turkish state.

The Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi led by Prime Minister Erdoğan derives from deeply conservative Islamic organizations – some of which were closed by the Kemalists for supposedly planning to establish an ‘Islamic state’. One of these predecessor parties, the Refah Partisi (RP – Welfare Party), led by Necmettin Erbakan, became the junior partner in a coalition on 28 June 1996 with the arch-secularist Doğru Yol Partisi (DYP – True Path Party) (Yeşilada, 1999: 123–4). The Genelkurmay (military general staff) of the Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri (TSK – Turkish Armed Forces) exerted mounting pressure on the coalition. In the face of this, perhaps, Erbakan sought to broaden his base in Turkey’s Kurdish region. The Erbakanists – in all their various incarnations —struck a real chord in Turkish Kurdistan, consistently polling ‘well above the national average’ in that region during the 1970s and 1980s (van Bruinessen, 1991: 22).

Kurdish nationalist votes had in fact become crucial to Erbakan’s political project, as legal Kurdish parties were outlawed or heavily repressed, and electoral support for them was transferred to the RP (Barkey and Fuller, 1998: 101–7; see also Gunter, 1997: 85, 87). However, the Kurdish question was also the RP’s undoing. In late July 1996 the RP attempted to explore seriously the possibility of a peaceful settlement in the war between the Turkish military and the PKK.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.