For years, the Turkish government has battled the radical Kurdistan’s Workers’ Party (PKK) with air strikes and ground operations. “If military force would be the solution, we would not have a problem today,” said Sezgin Tanrikulu from CHP (Republican People’s Party), the main opposition force in Turkey. His party has attacked what it called a lack of a defined strategy about finding a lasting solution to the Kurdish issue.

Many Middle East analysts agree with such statement. Cengiz Aktar, the professor for EU relations at Istanbul’s Bahçesehir University, said: “The most important thing is to work out a broad plan for after the military interventions”.

Discrimination of national culture

Unable to claim their linguistic and cultural rights, Kurds were for a long time refused their proper and ethnic names: the official etymology of the word “Kurd”, for example, used to be that it merely came from the sound made by boots on snow (“Kart-Kurd”). At other times they were claimed to be the Turks of mountains, speaking in a strange, undecipherable dialect. ‘Little acknowledgement was made of the fact that Turkey’s Kurds, who make up one fifth of the national population, have a distinct sense of their own cultural, religious and political identity, and that they have clashed with the policies of both the Ottoman empire and the modern Turkish nation state,’ – (KAS TAIP SAKO?).

Over the course of the last decade, the Turkish ruling AK party has tried hard to change the official line on the Kurdish population and to engage in negotiation process to put an end to discrimination. However, Kurdish politicians in the Democratic Society party believe that discrimination is far from being over: it just took a different shape. Following last June’s elections the independent Kurdish candidate Hatip Dicle was elected to parliament but was refused entry to Ankara because of a previous terror conviction. This resulted in a stalemate in Turkish politics – Kurdish politicians decided to protest against parliament. Turkey’s Higher Electoral Board (YSK) disqualified seven BDP‑backed candidates, but media reports suggest the board could reverse its decision for at least some of the candidates after it asked them to present additional documents. Lawyers for four of the candidates submitted the requested papers to the board and others are expected to follow, among the first four is Leyla Zana, a Kurdish activist and the winner of the European Parliament’s human rights award. She spent 10 years in jail before being released in 2004.

Terrorism law – challenge to Turkish democracy

“When it comes to the Kurdish question, the courts in Turkey are all too quick to label political opposition as terrorism,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch. “When you close off the space for free speech and association, it has the counterproductive effect of making armed opposition more attractive.”

Over the past three years, courts have relied on broadly drafted terrorism laws introduced as provisions of the 2005 Turkish Penal Code, plus case law, to prosecute demonstrators. The courts have ruled that merely being present at a demonstration that the PKK encouraged people to attend amounts to acting under PKK orders. Demonstrators have been punished severely for acts of terrorism even if their offense was making a victory sign, clapping, shouting a PKK slogan, throwing a stone, or burning a tire.

There is no doubt that Turkey has been using anti-terror law to crush the opposition movements. Many people facing terrorism charges are in fact prominent human rights defenders, and lawyers. Six of the serving mayors and a human rights defender were arrested last December and have been detained since that time. Another 53, including the lawyers, have been detained since April 2009. Across Turkey around 1,700 Kurdish political figures are in detention facing trial on similar charges.

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