Kurds’ struggle blocks Turkey’s entry into EU

NICOSIA, Cyprus — Their uprisings have been drowned in blood, but the cry “Freedom for Kurdistan” reverberates in the barren, wind-swept mountains where Turkey meets Syria, Iraq and Iran.

The unfulfilled quest of the Kurds for statehood is now emerging as a major barrier in Turkey’s path to the European Union and in Ankara’s relations with the United States.

It risks becoming the dominant issue of this year’s Turkish parliamentary and presidential elections, and a considerable diplomatic irritant involving the United States, Europe and a large portion of the Middle East inhabited by Kurds — an ethnic group deprived of self-rule for centuries.

Hardly a day goes by without Turkish threats to enter northern Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish rebels waging a 32-year-old guerrilla war that has claimed an estimated 37,000 lives. It is in that part of Iraq that the Kurds have succeeded in establishing a form of limited autonomy which, to the Turkish government, looms as the possible nucleus of a Kurdish state.

And the very concept, Turkish officials say, is dynamite under the foundations of the Turkish republic, where the Kurdish minority is officially labelled “mountain Turks” and where their national aspirations have been constantly thwarted.

The problem emerged with new urgency last month when two senior Turkish officials, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, the chief of general staff, visited the United States in search of joint action to eliminate Kurdish guerrilla bases in Iraq. They returned home unhappy, if one believes the reaction of the Turkish press.

Turkish officials feel that the United States does not want to antagonize Iraqi Kurds, perhaps the only genuinely pro-American faction on the tormented Iraqi battlefield. Turkish and Greek analysts, unusually in agreement on this issue, claim that Washington wants to establish a firm base in Iraq’s Kurdish areas in order to control Middle Eastern oil routes.

And to Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a key U.S. ally in an area where Europe meets Asia, any form of a Kurdish state is anathema.

Hope for freedom

There are no accurate statistics, but the number of Kurds living in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria is estimated at 15 million to 20 million — most of them in Turkey.

Their history is one of broken pledges, useless appeals for international help, murder, the destruction of entire villages, and an unsatisfied clamor for nationhood.

They have been muzzled in Turkey and Syria, betrayed by the last shah of Iran and massacred by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Yet their slogans of freedom persist in their mountain hide-outs and in the shantytowns on the outskirts of Turkish cities.

In recent months, Turkey has made some concessions, including limited use of the Kurdish language on television. But the reforms are far from satisfying to the Kurds, and to the European Union, which constantly urges a change of policy toward a large minority considered to be downtrodden.

Although a number of Kurds in Turkey have been assimilated and have even reached high government positions, according to Jean-Francois Perouse, a French specialist on the Kurdish question, the Turkish Kurds have been “economically and politically marginalized, becoming the republic’s second-class citizens, prone to violence.”

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