Turkish Kurds: some back the state

Though embattled, not all Kurds support the militant Kurdistan Workers Party.

By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the July 6, 2007 edition

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Sirnak, Turkey - He may be a Turkish Kurd, but Mehmet Gungor says he has every reason to "hate" the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Twenty years ago, armed Kurdish separatists visited his uncle's house, asking the extended family to provide food and one or two children as PKK recruits. Citing their poverty in remote southeast Turkey, the family refused.

Mr. Gungor, then barely a teenager, watched through his window as the militants set fire to the place, killing 13 relatives. Then they torched his family's house. "If the security forces had come five minutes later, we would have died," he says.

The result of that event has led him to a rare position among Turkey's long-embattled Kurds: standing firmly alongside the military and state authorities.

"While the terrorists try to gain their Kurdish rights, at the same time they kill their own Kurdish people," says Gungor, who heads the Sirnak branch of the national Association of Veterans and Martyrs and whose stance has spurred him to pack a pistol. "If they want to establish a separate Kurdish [state], why do they choose to kill civilians? That is not the way."

The PKK waged a brutal fight against the state from 1984 through the 1990s that left some 37,000 dead, the majority of them guerrillas. The conflict was marked by PKK killings of teachers, village guards, and other civilians, beside Turkish troops, causing the US and European Union to list the PKK as a "terrorist" group.

That designation continues. Last week the US special envoy for countering the PKK, retired Gen. Joseph Ralston, said: "[The PKK] should be treated as murderers by everyone, including the United States."

Turkey's military responded in the early 1990s with a harsh state of emergency, under which 3,000 villages were evacuated in a scorched-earth policy, hundreds of thousands were displaced, and abuses included killings and torture.

Fighting calmed after the PKK said in 1999 that it had given up its separatist demands and would struggle for Kurdish rights peacefully. But PKK attacks have mounted in recent months, spurring Turkey's military and government to threaten a cross-border operation into Iraq and order recruitment of 50,000 more local village guards.

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