In the shadow of a countrywide purge and campaign of arrests following last month’s failed coup d’etat, Turkey has escalated its operations in restive Kurdish districts.
Around the country, in bus stations, on billboards and in the media, ads have been pulled down and replaced with images of the Turkish flag and slogans pledging allegiance to the nation. On August 7th, a huge rally in Istanbul saw the leaders of three major political parties – once opponents – share a stage to declare the importance of protecting the state.
However, a major party representing millions of people that holds 59 parliamentary seats was not invited to the event: the Kurdish-rooted Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP).
Wider crackdown
Instead, even as the
HDP
calls for Kurdish separatists of the
PKK
to lay down arms, its party offices in Istanbul have been raided as part of a wider crackdown on the PKK, which is designated a terrorist organisation by the EU and US. On Sunday, the HDP’s co-chair,
Selahattin Demirtas
, was indicted on charges of “promoting terrorist propaganda” and “insulting the state”. He faces a five-year jail term.
A central component of Turkish nationalism for decades has focused on national unity to face off real or imagined outside threats: Armenians, western states and, most crucially, the country’s own Kurdish population. This state-driven nationalism, along with the war against separatist Kurdish militias that since the 1980s has taken 40,000 lives, has proved popular with the majority of Turks struggling to make sense of a post-coup Turkey devoid of independent voices.
In the southeast, the war between Kurdish rebels and the military has reached new levels of violence. Thirty-five militants were killed on July 30th while attempting to take a military base in Hakkari province, close to the Iraqi border.
PKK fighters are also launching increasingly indiscriminate attacks. Dozens of security forces, their families and civilians, including five members of one household, have died in PKK bomb attacks this month.
According to the International Crisis Group (ICG), which monitors conflicts around the world, 634 members of Turkey's security forces have been killed since the resumption of the conflict in July 2015, with car bombings and IEDs the biggest source of militant-attack deaths.
The PKK has traditionally fought its war in the Kurdish-populated southeast districts of Turkey and clashes in rural areas have been on the rise since March, despite the state’s previous focus on weeding out urban militant activity that devastated many towns.
But an offshoot of the PKK, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (Tak), has this year brought the war into Turkey’s major cities, killing dozens of security officers in Ankara and Istanbul.
Caught in the crossfire are hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians.
“Some of these people are subsisting in tents and some are staying temporarily with their families in the nearby districts,” said HDP deputy Ali Alatan, who went on a hunger strike last November to protest against the military curfew in Nusaybin, a town abutting the Syrian border. “A large portion of the devastation is caused by the state’s attack with heavy artillery. Now these houses are demolished with excavators without making any damage assessment.”
Alatan said that although the authorities declared an end to operations on June 3rd, curfews in sections of Nusaybin remain in place.
Fear of retribution
Now Ankara plans to move provincial capitals to two restive towns, Yuksekova and Cizre, in order to strengthen control over their rebellious populations, a move likely to deepen animosity between locals and security forces.
“There are many areas which have been destroyed,” said a health worker resident in Cizre. “There are a big population from Sirnak who live in Cizre and Silopi now. They have the worst situation. Some of them live in tents.” He asked not to be identified for fear of retribution by the authorities.
“They can’t reach health services and they really worry about winter.”
Some fear the deepening humanitarian situation which has seen half a million people displaced may see Kurds turn to Europe for asylum. According to Alatan, the authorities are now enacting a plan to double down on Kurdish regions.
“In the west [of Turkey], the state seems to demilitarise the urban space, while it does the opposite in the east. The Kurdish region is left to the initiative of the police and military,” he said.
Ankara blames US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen for the failed coup, while pro-government media outlets claim Gülen has also been conspiring with the PKK and Kurdish militants in Syria.
Though no evidence to support this has been brought forward, such claims mean Kurds are set to face increasing isolation.
