Kurds Uneasy About Turkish Protests

LONDON â€" Turkey’s historically marginalized Kurdish community has been largely absent from the anti-government protests that drew thousands to Taksim Square in Istanbul.

“Turkish protests, Kurdish indifference,” read a headline at the Kurd.net Web site this week above an article by Kani Xulam, a Washington-based Kurdish activist.

“Do we not want to curb the power of sultan wannabe prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan?” Mr. Xulam asked. “Apparently not.”

“In Taksim Square, where are the Kurds?” asked Jenna Krajeski in a New Yorker blog. “With some notable exceptions, Kurds, usually Turkey’s most robust anti-government protesters, had been absent,” she wrote.

The reticence of Turkey’s Kurds, which represent about 20 percent of the population, to embrace the protest movement is partly because Mr. Erdogan has offered them the best chance in decades of achieving a settlement of their grievances through a landmark peace agreement with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the P.K.K.

Mutlu Civiroglu, writing at the Rudaw Kurdish Web site, said Kurdish leaders, including those linked to the P.K.K., had expressed sympathy with the protesters. Sirri Sureyya Onder, the Istanbul representative of the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, or B.D.P., had been prominent in the protests from the start.

But although they might sympathize with the protests, Mr. Civiroglu wrote of Turkey’s Kurds, “they worry how they will impact the unfolding peace process, which is in its sensitive first stages.”

Armed fighters of the P.K.K., which has waged a 30-year guerrilla war against the state, have begun withdrawing to the mountains of northern Iraq as part of a peace deal the Erdogan government brokered with Abdullah Ocalan, the movement’s jailed leader.

Kurdish leaders expressed concern that the anti-Erdogan protests might be exploited by ultranationalist groups that have opposed the prime minister’s rapprochement with the Kurds.

“We will not allow the events in Gezi Park to turn against the peace process,” said Selahattin Demirtas, co-chairman of the B.D.P., referring to the development of a park in Taksim Square that started the protests.

David Romano, author of “The Kurdish Nationalist Movement,” wrote on the Rudaw site that prominent amongst the protesters were nationalists from the Republican People’s Party and the National People’s Party, “two political groupings that historically played a large role in suppressing Kurdish identity and rights in Turkey.”

While acknowledging that some Kurds had reacted to the anti-Erdogan protests with indifference or even antipathy, he said that those who supported the movement were right to do so.

“Just as Turkish democracy could never be truly healthy as long it suppresses ethnic minorities like the Kurds,” Mr. Romano wrote, “Kurds will never be free under a government that ignores the rights of other groups.”