The furious row between Turkey and Italy over the extradition of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) raises profound questions about their bilateral relations, but also about Turkey's objective to become a member of the European Union. Failure to resolve the Kurdish question makes it far more difficult to convince other European governments that Turkey fulfils the political conditions necessary to join.
The Kurdish leader is regarded as a terrorist by the Turkish government and held responsible for the deaths of 30,000 people over the last 14 years in the PKK's military struggle. His organisation does not have the support of anything like Turkey's 10-12 million Kurdish population, but the use of brute military force to crush it in the underdeveloped south-east of the country has played into the PKK's hands. It has been able to exploit the state's blanket denial that the Kurds are a separate people and the refusal to extend cultural rights to them to claim the PKK speaks on behalf of the entire Kurdish people. The impression is reinforced by the PKK's strength among the Turkish diaspora in Europe.
The issues involved are complex and historically deep-seated. Modern Turkish nationalism arose from the disintegration of the Ottoman empire during and after the first World War in circumstances that threatened the very continued existence of a recognisably Turkish successor state. The achievement of independence under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk - the 75th anniversary of which is being celebrated this year - is remembered precisely in terms of potential dismemberment by competing imperial powers in Europe. As a result, the state was constructed on strictly integral and unitary lines, and according to a model of cultural homogeneity which left no room for self-proclaimed national minorities. Within this mind-set the Kurds became the object of separatist suspicion whenever they demanded autonomy or cultural rights.
According to opinion polls, most Kurds refuse to support the PKK because of the organisation's ruthless methods, left-wing ideology and ambiguous policy on separation. More than five million Kurds have migrated to the Istanbul area for work in recent decades, found jobs in the extraordinarily dynamic economy there and assimilated in the society. But there is still a taboo on public discussion of their rights as a cultural or national minority, backed up by active prosecution of those suspected of supporting separatism.
Thus Turkey's political class is ill-prepared to assert the leadership required to convince the powerful military that a political solution must be found, especially with the government disintegrating ahead of general elections. Similarly, there is little sign of the political leadership required to handle the diplomatic issues involved. Quite aside from the question of whether Ocalan should be extradited to Turkey, the furious popular response to his presence in Italy threatens to undermine the political elite's European orientation. A genuine effort to address the Kurdish issue politically would nevertheless be the best means of convincing Turkey's European friends, including the Italian government, that its objective to join the EU should be supported.