{"id":71147,"date":"2016-03-28T12:00:30","date_gmt":"2016-03-28T11:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=71147"},"modified":"2016-03-28T03:24:53","modified_gmt":"2016-03-28T02:24:53","slug":"turkeys-covert-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/03\/turkeys-covert-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkey\u2019s Covert War"},"content":{"rendered":"

A dispatch from Diyarbak\u0131r, Turkey, where Erdo\u011fan continues his military assault on the Kurdish resistance.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"People<\/a>

People walk over rubble left by an explosion in Diyarbak\u0131r\u2019s Sur district. Diego Capulo \/ Jacobin<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a025 Mar 2016 – <\/em>In Diyarbak\u0131r, Turkey, large pieces of white tarp hang vertically in the alleys, blocking the view of anyone trying to peer inside. In front of them, police with automatic rifles stand between sandbag barricades, denying entrance to civilians, as much of the city\u2019s central district remains under curfew.<\/p>\n

Still, if one waits, the occasional gust of wind will sway the plastic sheets just enough to glimpse the burned-out buildings and storefronts sprayed with bullet holes that lay behind.<\/p>\n

This is the Turkish state\u2019s cheapest way to cover up the months-long war<\/a> it has been waging on Kurdish fighters in the nation\u2019s southeast. More advanced forms of censorship involve detaining academics, denying media access, deporting foreign journalists, and much worse.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A father and daughter walk through the streets in Diyarbak\u0131r\u2019s Sur district. Diego Cupolo \/ Jacobin<\/p><\/div>\n

The tactics have effectively limited coverage of a war conducted largely outside of international law. Locals tell stories of bodies being left in the street so long that dogs and cats begin to feed on them, of tanks entering residential neighborhoods and firing indiscriminately at houses, and of deceased women being found stripped naked with their breasts cut off.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Turkey has signed a deal<\/a> with the European Union (EU) to stem the flow of refugees arriving in Greece. In exchange for reducing human trafficking and improving living conditions for 2.5 million refugees within its borders, the parties announced last week, Turkey will receive in return: \u20ac3 billion in financial aid, the possibility of visa-free travel for its citizens, and a reopening of EU membership talks.<\/p>\n

What the implementation process will look like remains unclear. But after enduring more than three months of fighting in Diyarbak\u0131r, Kurdish residents see the EU deal as evidence of indifference toward, if not support for, President Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan\u2019s ongoing military campaign in the nation\u2019s southeast.<\/p>\n

Campaign Strategy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Erdo\u011fan went into Turkey\u2019s June 2015 election hoping for a sweeping victory that would give him enough parliamentary seats to pass major constitutional changes. But a strong showing by the pro-Kurdish People\u2019s Democratic Party (HDP) denied him his coveted super-majority.<\/p>\n

Unsatisfied with the results, Erdo\u011fan called a snap election for the fall, and Turkish armed forces launched assaults on militias linked to the Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party (PKK), who tend to be based in southeastern cities.<\/p>\n

The move, which ended a two-and-a-half-year ceasefire in the region, helped the AKP regain its majority<\/a> in November. But the roots of Erod\u011fan\u2019s actions extend far beyond the most recent elections.<\/p>\n

For almost a hundred years, Kurds have been one of the world\u2019s largest groups of stateless people. Nearly half of the globe\u2019s thirty million Kurds live in Turkey (the remaining are divided between Iraq, Syria, and Iran), where they\u2019ve long endured state repression. The Turkish government only officially acknowledged Kurds\u2019 existence in the 1990s; today, Kurds in Turkey continue to face restrictions on their linguistic and cultural heritage, including a ban on public Kurdish-language education.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The martyrs\u2019 section of the Diyarbak\u0131r cemetery, where fighters from the PKK-linked militias are buried. As their tombstones reveal, most were born in the 1980s and \u201990s. Diego Cupolo \/ Jacobin<\/p><\/div>\n

Abdullah \u00d6calan founded the PKK in the late 1970s to counter this subjugation, aiming to expand Kurdish rights through an armed struggle against the Turkish government. Though the militia has fallen short of achieving an independent Kurdish state, it has spurred a significant reawakening among Kurds, who have become more vocal in their demands to be recognized as an ethnic minority in Turkey.<\/p>\n

Citizens in Diyarbak\u0131r have mixed opinions about the PKK and its loosely affiliated organizations \u2014 which have proliferated since the PKK\u2019s rise and \u00d6calan\u2019s arrest in 1999 \u2014 but many tend to look beyond \u00d6calan\u2019s autocratic faults<\/a> and identify with the vision for greater autonomy.<\/p>\n

More than anything, it is this undying ambition for independence that the Turkish government is fighting.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t recognize a central authority, if you want self-governance or autonomy, then you will be destroyed,\u201d says Harun Ercan, international relations advisor for the Peoples\u2019 Democratic Party<\/a> (HDP), a pro-Kurdish, left-wing formation. \u201cIn my opinion, this is the association the Turkish government wants people to make with [the actions they are taking].\u201d<\/p>\n

On the Ground in Diyarbak\u0131r<\/strong><\/p>\n

On March 9, Turkish forces announced they were ending military operations in Diyarbak\u0131r. But two weeks later, fighting continues, and half of the city center remains inaccessible to the public. Gunfire and the occasional explosion ring out in Diyarbak\u0131r\u2019s Sur district, and helicopters hover overhead day and night.<\/p>\n

Police checkpoints dot the area in and around Sur, a historic district surrounded by UNESCO-listed castle walls that has been the epicenter of urban warfare in Diyarbak\u0131r. With winding streets too narrow for tanks and countless alleyways, the old city\u2019s residential areas seem to invite guerilla warfare and place countless civilians in the crossfire. The government says it has lost approximately 275 soldiers in the battles throughout the region, while claiming to have killed at least 500 opposition fighters in Diyarbak\u0131r alone.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A mother holds the portrait of her missing son in Diyarbak\u0131r\u2019s Dicle Firat Cultural Center. Diego Cupolo \/ Jacobin<\/p><\/div>\n

At the moment, about forty people are unaccounted for in the city. Their relatives fear they may be buried beneath collapsed buildings or, worse, rotting in the streets. Mothers and fathers of the missing gather daily at the Dicle Firat Cultural Center, where they hold protests begging the government to return the bodies of their sons and daughters, some of whom disappeared more than three months ago.<\/p>\n

In conversations with people at the center, one hears similar stories of disappearances without a trace. With vacant eyes, mothers hold framed portraits of their sons as they pose for visiting journalists. Many explain that they have gone to local morgues to identify family members, but the bodies were so mangled and burnt that it was difficult to discern their sex.<\/p>\n

Street battles persist in Sur as well as outside the old city walls in the Ba\u011flar district. In addition, the government has announced new curfews and kicked off military campaigns in Y\u00fcksekova, Nusaybin, and \u015eirnak, all predominately Kurdish cities. (Separate military operations are winding down, and curfews are being lifted, in the southeastern cities of Cizre, \u0130dil, Silopi, and Darge\u00e7it.)<\/p>\n

If fighting continues, an out-and-out civil war could erupt, creating an entirely new source of refugees.<\/p>\n

A Financial Dilemma<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last Friday, European leaders met with Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davuto\u011flu to finalize the refugee plan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Observing the deal from Diyarbak\u0131r, opposition party members say the government\u2019s mismanagement of the refugee crisis was used to blackmail Europe for financial and political gain.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe economic instability is increasing every day,\u201d says Ramazan Tunc, an adviser to the Democratic Regions Party, a Kurdish group allied with the HDP. \u201cForeign investors are turning away from Turkey and exports are [decreasing with] other Middle Eastern countries due to conflicts, so Turkey needs money from the outside to stimulate the economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"An<\/a>

An elderly man walks in front of a burned-out buildings in Diyarbak\u0131r\u2019s Sur district. Diego Cupolo \/ Jacobin<\/p><\/div>\n

Through much of last year, police in \u0130zmir, a hotbed of smuggling rings, stood idly by as asylum-seekers openly negotiated with smugglers and loaded their bags into vans headed for the Aegean coast. Bright orange life jackets hung in the city\u2019s Basmane district, a marker of the thriving human-trafficking economy.<\/p>\n

Only when the potential for EU financial support materialized last fall did Turkish authorities begin to arrest a significant number of the smugglers, at times detaining groups of refugees before they could take off for the Greek islands.<\/p>\n

A Moral Dilemma<\/strong><\/p>\n

Back at Diyarbak\u0131r\u2019s Dicle Firat Cultural Center, the manager, Mahmut Simsek, consoles grieving families who\u2019ve launched a hunger strike, determined to retrieve the bodies of relatives lost in the clashes.<\/p>\n

As the atrocities pile up, Simsek says the Erdo\u011fan government \u2014 intent on quashing the Kurdish resistance and possessing a questionable record on refugees, human rights, and press freedoms \u2014 is more apt to use the EU funding to finance the ongoing war than to devote it to refugee initiatives.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis money will come back to us as bombs, as artillery, as new weapons,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s what I believe.\u201d<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

Diego Cupolo is a photojournalist based in Istanbul.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 jacobinmag.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A dispatch from Diyarbak\u0131r, Turkey, where Erdo\u011fan continues his military assault on the Kurdish resistance. Locals tell stories of bodies being left in the street so long that dogs and cats begin to feed on them, and of tanks entering residential neighborhoods and firing indiscriminately at houses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle-east-north-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}