imagining turkish kurdistan

For two weeks I've been meaning to link to Stephen Kinzer's recent article in the NYRoB on the changing status of Kurdish politics in Turkey. Kinzer combines a review of several recent on the Kurds and/or Turkey--including Nadire Mater's Voices from the Front, which I wrote about earlier--with a political travelogue of Kinzer's recent visit to Diyarbakır (a major city in the southeastern Turkey, also known as Turkish Kurdistan) and environs. I should note here my envy: the southeast is the only region of Turkey I've not visited yet--it's a bit harder to travel independently there, especially without one's own transportation--and I very much want to go. Next year, perhaps?

Kinzer's piece is hopeful indeed; he's amazed at the political outspokenness of the Kurdish population, a stark contrast to the state of intense repression, fear, and violence that existed during the civil war, until a half-decade ago. In the last few years, Kurdish politicians have used local politics and cultural activities to assert Kurdish political identity in a peaceful and democratic fashion, in a way that would have been suppressed by the Turkish state or subsumed into separatist rebellion in earlier times. The reasons for the change seem clear:

The men in this barber shop were so outspoken that even my Kurdish traveling companion, who lives in Diyarbakir, was amazed. He told me that as recently as a year ago, a conversation like this in a public place would have been unthinkable. I asked the barber what had changed, and he answered immediately.

"We're becoming part of Europe," he said. "If we're European, we can say whatever we want."

Another says, "[The police] watch us just like before, but they can't do anything to us anymore," one man told me. "This is a democracy now. We're becoming European. The state can't touch us."

Kinzer does discuss the recent attacks on freedom of expression in Turkey, which have included cases against Kurdish reporters and human rights activists. The implementation of promised reforms in language policy has been slow. Most worryingly, there have been recent clashes between state security forces and militants from Kongra-Gel (a splinter group of the PKK) and reports of military abuses against civilians, which could threaten to undo the relative stability of the last few years.

For more interesting material on Kurdish politics, check out Nicole Watts' page--she's a professor at SFSU who studies Kurdish politics both in Turkey and in the diaspora (when I was an undergrad at UW, she was a doctoral student there, and we studied under some of the same people.) She's got photos and video clips from her recent trips, and has links to some of her articles on the subject of contemporary Kurdish politics. At MESA she showed some great photos of Kurdish mayoral candidates campaigning--kissing babies in the marketplace and all--and I know she's made a short documentary based on that trip but I can't seem to find any traces of it online.