The embers of a dormant war have reignited in southeast Turkey with devastating effect just weeks before crucial parliamentary elections.
Last Monday, shocking images emerged of a corpse being dragged through the streets of Sirnak tied behind a Turkish security vehicle. The victim was a 24-year-old man believed to be the brother-in-law of a Kurdish politician and member of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). The party’s entry to parliament in June took away the Turkish government’s overall majority for the first time in over a decade.
Turkey's prime minister and AK Party leader Ahmet Davutoglu condemned the incident, but also in a veiled warning to the media, said publishing the photo was unacceptable.
The same day, footage from Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish-populated city in Turkey, showed a security officer pointing his gun at a journalist’s head, in front of media cameras, while during a military operation on the border town of Nusaybin last week, locals were forced to use blanket blinds along streets to avoid being shot at by government snipers.
Child shot dead
Exactly a year ago last Friday, Besir Remezan Arif (8) was killed by shots fired by Turkish soldiers, and suspicion and anger towards the military and government have made the region a powder keg for violence. Deniz, a lawyer in Nusaybin who asked not to be fully identified, citing security concerns, said three days after the lifting of the siege in the town, checkpoints continued to block civilians from moving around the region.
“There was no electricity, food or medicine and internet access only returned today [Friday],” she said. Three people were killed by security forces during the Nusaybin curfew, which saw security forces fight street battles with youths linked to Kurdish militant groups. Among the dead was a 24-year-old Syrian man who is reported to have been shot after attempting to retrieve bread on October 3rd.
Deniz says the security forces' actions are illegal and deadly. "If you go into the street under a curfew in Turkey by law you are fined 100 lira [€30], but in Kurdistan you get shot dead," she said. In August, the HDP submitted a letter to the United Nations Security Council accusing the Turkish government of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against civilians.
More than 100 “temporary military secure zones” have been set up across eastern Turkey by the authorities as the worst violence to hit Turkey in more than 20 years continues to spiral. About 40,000 people, mostly Kurdish civilians, are thought to have died in the conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK that began in the early 1980s and reached a nadir a decade later.
Critics of the AK Party caretaker government say it is using extreme violence to alienate the general population of Turkey from the Kurdish-rooted HDP ahead of the November 1st elections but at the cost of destroying a nascent peace process with the PKK. Officials say more than 2,400 militants have been killed in the 10 weeks since July while over 140 police officers and soldiers have been assassinated by militants mostly in the east and southeast.
Analysts say that during the 2000s, the AK Party actively worked to solve the PKK conflict by beginning talks with the militants’ leadership and allowing the opening of Kurdish cultural institutes, schools and media. The result saw the AK Party take almost 70 per cent of votes in the Kurdish regions of southeast Turkey at national elections.
However, that outreach to Kurds has been viewed as little more than a tactical move that has now, because of Kurdish involvement in the war across the border in northern Syria, run its course. "However it's parsed, Turkey seems destined for more instability. That is, unless [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan reconsiders his strategy and returns to the AKP's reformist, democratic and inclusive roots," wrote Kemal Kirisci and Sinan Ekim of the Brookings Institution, a think tank.
Worsening security
In light of the worsening security situation in the southeast, both the government and local councils have called for Turkey’s election board authority to move ballot boxes out of urban areas that have been subjected to violence. Though that proposal has been rejected by the election body, locals say moving the boxes would stop opponents of the AK Party from casting their votes.
Mafuz, an engineer from the predominantly Kurdish town of Cizre, subjected to clashes and an eight-day curfew last month, believes the army may soon return. “I think there will be fighting at the time of the election because Erdogan wasn’t able to be elected as the big president he wanted to be.”
