A claim of responsibility on Friday by the little-known Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (Tak) for last Wednesday's bombing in Ankara, which killed 28 people, means Kurdish civilians in southeast Turkey are likely to see further unrest. Turkey's prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, had previously laid the blame for the bombing at the door of a Syrian-Kurdish militia.
Prominent writer and activist Nurcan Baysal was a teenager in Diyarbakir during the 1990s when Turkish security forces drove fear into the heart of the predominantly Kurdish city. Today, she says, life is even worse.
“In the 1990s we knew that the state was bad,” she says. “They did torture, they killed if you sell Kurdish newspapers or music CDs, but today everything is so arbitrary. Today there are some new things that we didn’t experience in the 1990s: the state doesn’t give permission to take the dead bodies of your loved one from the streets and doesn’t give you permission to bury them.”
On Friday, Tak, thought to be an offshoot or splinter group of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), claimed responsibility for the Ankara attack, which it said was a response to the military’s operations in Kurdish towns.
The Turkish government says it hopes soon to end a two-month military operation in the southeast. Mr Davutoglu has announced an €8 billion fund for the conflict-hit region, yet the true cost of the violence is only beginning to be unearthed.
Civilians targeted
According to human rights watchdogs and the Kurdish-focused Peoples
' Democratic Party
(HDP), government tanks and snipers have targeted civilians, including children and the elderly. The Human Rights Foundation of Turkey says that more than 220 civilians, including 42 children, have died during the unrest.
The government says it has eliminated 718 Kurdish terrorists across the region, including 597 militants since December in a siege on Cizre, a town of 100,000 people close to the Turkish border with Syria and Iraq. Several districts of Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish-populated city in Turkey, now resemble the war zones commonly seen in neighbouring Syria.
Until last July, reconciliation with separatist Kurds seemed almost within reach. Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party, or AK Party, had for 15 months cultivated a delicate peace with the rebels of the PKK. For a brief time, the assassinations, military operations and roadside bombings that characterised the three-decade conflict ceased.
As part of the process, thousands of Kurdish fighters agreed to withdraw to northern Iraq. The imprisoned leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, called for young Kurdish men to stop attacks on security forces when the latter entered their neighbourhoods.
However, when the AK Party temporarily lost its parliamentary majority, and its ability to govern unhindered, in last June's elections, it turned on the HDP, whose entry into parliamentary politics briefly cost the AK Party its single-party rule. The AK Party has since regained its majority, but critics say that has been in large part down to the virulent rhetoric used by the government, which in turn has fuelled nationalism and fear of Kurdish intentions among Turks. Along with Ankara, the European Union and the United States designate the PKK a terrorist organisation.
Whereas ending hostilities between Ankara and the PKK three years ago was brought about by an agreement on better constitutional and human rights for Kurds in Turkey, the conflict today is inextricably tied to the machinations of the war in Syria. There, Kurdish militias have won control of swathes of border territories from Islamic State and rebel groups, a development that Turkey fears will see Kurds in Turkey also press for autonomy or set up a de-facto state to bridge the current national border.
That possibility, in addition to the HDP’s rising popularity among Kurds, has, observers say, motivated the Turkish authorities to crack down ferociously on separatists.
Despite the government declaring an imminent end to its campaign, many on the ground say clashes are ongoing. Faysal Sariyildiz, an HDP deputy who has been under 24-hour curfew for almost two months in Cizre, says he saw smoke rising from the town days after the declared end of operations.
Separatists
Meanwhile, police officers and soldiers continue to be assassinated by PKK separatists.
For residents in the region, some of the biggest problems include the closing of schools and medical services as a result of the clashes. The destruction wrought by two months of shelling has “severely damaged” between 5,000 and 7,000 homes, Sariyildiz says. Water supplies, and electricity grids too, have been ruined, prompting an opposition politician to say that residents may have to wait up to six years to return home.
It is the absence of these crucial resources that may intensify further the unrest festering among the Kurdish population, say those living with the conflict every day.
“Thousands of people are homeless, there is big destruction in Kurdish cities, more than 700 people killed,” says writer Nurcan Baysal. “It will be harder to sit at the peace table again, and Kurdish people will not forget this.”
