By Appo Jabarian
Executive Publisher/Managing Editor
USA Armenian Life Magazine
Before focusing on the Kurdish Crisis in what is now called Turkey, it is necessary to point out that besides Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Alevis, Arabs, Circassians, Lezkis and Assyrians, the Turkish populace has a set of valid grievances against the current leadership.
Long alienated by the Turkish elite class, the average Turkish citizens have long been sidestepped in terms of economic and political opportunities.
The Western neo-cons have lavished financial benefits exclusively to the Turkish deep state effectively antagonizing the Turkish masses against the Turkish oligarchs who have been monopolizing the collective economic and political power for over several decades, emulating their Ottoman predecessors.
Reportedly, Turkish prosperity has been quarantined in Western Turkey, effectively bypassing the impoverished Turkish east, widely known as Turkish-occupied Western Armenia; and Kurdish southeast, also known as Northern Kurdistan. Average Turks, Kurds, and other minorities are affected by the seemingly perpetual great blight of rampant unemployment.
The southeast has been especially consumed by several decades of conflicts between autonomy-seeking Kurds and Turkish occupation forces. Known as Kurdish Crisis, the animosity between the Kurdish population and Turkey has taken away over 40,000 lives and counting. A recent worldwide syndicated article, published in The Christian Science Monitor and several world media, featured a photo of mourning women holding enlarged photos of their loved ones who were killed in clashes between Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) fighters and Turkish security forces. They were protesting the killings during a demonstration in central Istanbul May 18, 2011.
On May 25, Kurdishaspect.com issued an appeal to “Tweet to Break Silence on Kurdish Question in Turkey,” calling on bloggers “to take part in a 3-day campaign to help highlight the Kurdish issue in Turkey and support the Kurds’ Civil Disobedience Campaign by trying to use all possible ways and tactics to raise the Kurdish issue in Turkey with media outlets, journalists, tweets, blogs, etc!”
The statement also urged concerned activists to join the organizers “every Friday before the Turkish General Election [June 12] to use twitter to try to break the silence and to think and plan for that day, collectively and discuss what stories we may use, what hash tags, who to target and what strategies to use!” using the topic “TwitterKurds as a central base to discuss and organize.” The participants can meet up at TwitterKurds or the following link:http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23TwitterKurds.
In a May 23 article in Hurriyet Daily News, Ahmet Insel lamented: “There is no political-social project in Turkey today crazier than providing a realistic and concrete solution to the Kurdish dispute. … If the Kurdish conflict is not resolved quickly and peacefully, a most-probable social conflict will likely paralyze the expected profit [social and business life] and that would help us realize the truth. … People are dying and hundreds of them are arrested everyday as the gap between Turks and Kurds deepens; therefore, it could give birth to more serious incidents. So, could there be a crazier project than settling this issue in the country today?”
“Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as the architect of these crazy projects, dreams of being the chief of this country. In fact, he is choosing the easy way which will be diverted and ruined by the difficulties he is trying to underestimate,” underlined Insel.
“Today, the Kurdish question has irreversibly passed the point of settlement that had simply based on the recognition of the Kurdish identity,” he concluded.
In a related article in Today’s Zaman, Turkish sociologist Ismail Besikci, an expert on the history of the Kurdish question, has said that the Kurdish question is inextricably linked to problems faced by Turkey’s Armenian and Syriac communities in the Southeast in the past. He has spent 17 years in prison after being convicted for his writings on the subject.
He stressed that Armenian and Syriac communities were driven out of the country, leaving behind their businesses, banks, agricultural fields and even factories. He said “the transfer of property from these communities, particularly from the Armenians, who were victims of a forced deportation campaign when the Unionists were in power at the end of the Ottoman era in 1915, to Kurds in the region and the aftermath of the mass deportation had unified into a single problem.”
Besikci added that the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), who were in power during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, had extensive plans to reorganize the empire so as to “Turkify” it. This also called for the nationalization of the Ottoman economy, which brought the problem of what to do with Turkey’s then-sizable communities of Armenians, Greeks and Alevis. Most of the events that took place at the turn of the past century, such as a population exchange between Greece and Turkey, and the deportation and killings of Armenians, which they say amounted to genocide, took place as part of the CUP and the early Republic of Turkey governments’ plans to nationalize the economy.
He revealed that “once the new regime did away with its Greeks and Armenians, transferring their assets to Turkish (Sunni) Muslim and Kurdish (Sunni) Muslim communities, they had to face the problem of the Alevi community, which they decided could easily be converted to Sunni Islam. A similar strategy of assimilation was assumed for the Kurds, who were allowed to keep the capital, buildings, livestock, fields and other assets left from the exiled, as long as they denied their Kurdish identity. … You can invest in the south or the west as a Kurdish businessman, and they will give you all the loans in the world to do that, but you will not be allowed to open a factory in, say, Diyarbekır or Van.”
He explained “Kurdish people who owned capital were persistently directed toward the Western provinces. This was to enable further assimilation. “A local bourgeoisie and Kurdish investments in the region would keep the Kurds in Kurdistan, which is in violation of the policy of assimilation. … There are immovable assets left over from the Armenian and Syriac communities that are under the control of the Kurds. When the Armenians were forced out and weren’t allowed to return, the state allowed Kurds to keep their assets. After 1915, Kurds started migrating from rural areas toward the cities where the Armenians lived. In fact, today, the source of the Turkish bourgeoisie’s wealth is Armenian and Greek property, although books on Turkish economic history never mention this,” he said.
Thanks to Erdogan’s and his allies’ hypocritical approach to lingering Kurdish Crisis and problems affecting other minorities, Turkey may well be on its way to experiencing an Arab Spring of its own.
