Turkey should be noble in victory

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Next Monday May 31, Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), goes on trial in a heavily guarded courtroom on the island of Imrali, off Istanbul. He is charged with responsibility for 14,000 murders committed during the PKK's 14-year war for Kurdish independence from Turkey, and the prosecutor is demanding the death penalty. But on one thing, he and Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit are agreed.

"The Turks and the Kurds of Turkey are one nation," said Ecevit in February, after Ocalan was seized outside the Greek embassy in Kenya and transferred to a Turkish jail. And since 1993, when Ocalan accepted that the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey could never win its independence by force and began to seek a political settlement instead, he has been singing the same tune: "We are so close, we are like the finger and the fingernail."

Many fingernails have been separated from fingers in the Kurdish parts of Turkey since the insurgency began. An estimated 30,000 people have been killed by the Turkish army or the PKK's enforcers, who routinely slaughtered not just suspected collaborators but their whole families.

Millions have been relocated to "protected villages", and the southeast, already Turkey's poorest area, has fallen even farther behind. But now, perhaps, it is over.

The PKK, certainly, is almost finished. There will doubtless be bombs during Ocalan's trial, but the state of emergency has already been lifted in most of southeastern Turkey. Ocalan's expulsion from his base in Syria at Turkey's demand, his fugitive odyssey around Europe from Moscow to Rome to Athens, and his ultimate capture in Kenya were proof of how badly weakened the PKK already was, and the trial will hit it even harder.

Ocalan's nickname in Kurdish is "Apo" (uncle), and to millions of Kurds he is an almost sacred figure, the living incarnation of their identity as a people. But as a human being he combines Stalin's deep reverence for human life with Mao's openness to dissent -- and in captivity he seem to be behaving with about as much dignity as one suspects those gentlemen would have shown in the same situation.

What defense Ocalan offers will not be known until the trial opens next week, but his babbling pleas for mercy on the flight back from Kenya (which the Turkish government released on video) suggest that he will not seek the martyr's crown. His position is made even more precarious by the fact that his former deputy commander, Semdin Sakik -- universally known as "Fingerless Zeki" -- will probably testify against him at the trial.

Last Thursday on May 20, Sakik, the PKK's field commander until he fell out with Ocalan, was sentenced to death for treason. Most Kurds assume he has been collaborating with Turkish intelligence since he was captured last year, and that he will give testimony against Ocalan next month in order to persuade the Turkish parliament to commute his death sentence.

They also assume that Sakik will link many legal Kurdish organizations with the illegal PKK, smashing much of the infrastructure that has allowed it to "tax" millions of Kurds. And though few Kurds, who tend to idolize Ocalan, would accept this prediction, I suspect that he too will end up trying to strike a bargain with the hangman.

In normal times, there is not much to fear from the Turkish hangman. Turkey sees itself as a European country, and has not actually executed anybody since 1984. However, the death penalty is still on the books: each sentence has to be commuted by parliament.

One of the biggest winners in last month's Turkish election is the right-wing Nationalist Action Party, and its gains were largely due to its campaign in favor of Ocalan's execution. Popular feeling against Ocalan is running high among the Turkish majority (only 12 million of Turkey's 65 million people are Kurdish), for in a country where military service is still compulsory almost every town and village has lost somebody in the Kurdish war.

So if Ocalan wants to avoid being the first man hanged in Turkey since 1984, he would be well advised to bargain. His whole history suggests that he will -- which will create an historic opportunity for Turkey to escape from its Kurdish dilemma.

"It was my idea alone," Ocalan has said of his decision to launch a separatist war against the Turkish state. "At first, there were no sympathizers for it, even among the Kurds." And to a large extent he is telling the truth -- which means that his fall creates an opportunity.

Hardly a Kurd over the age of 10 in Turkey is not bilingual in Turkish. What the Kurds want falls far short of the cultural and linguistic dominance that French-Canadians, Tamils in India, and Basques and Catalans in Spain confidently demand for their own region. They just want the Turkish state to acknowledge their existence and give them schools and mass media in their own language.

The time to be magnanimous is when you've won. Turkey has, for now --- but Ocalan will be far more use to Turkey's security as a long-term prisoner than a martyr dangling at the end of a rope. If the Turkish government doesn't want the insurgency to come back in five or 10 years, it will use the opportunity of this victory to give the Kurds the rights they deserve.