World

Turkey’s Shaky Foundations — Global Issues


Diyarbakir city center after the military operation launched by Ankara in 2015-2016 across the main Kurdish cities in the country. Credit: KNK.

  • by Karlos Zurutuza (Roman)
  • Associated Press Service

The epicenter of the earthquake lies in an abyss that has widened since World War I (1914-1918), when the Kurds were stateless. More than 40 million Kurds still live scattered across the borders of Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

Half of them live in the southeastern region of Turkey. It is no coincidence that the North-South socioeconomic divide that was broken in Anatolia actually unfolded from west to east.

Tour operators offer two main travel packages: a clockwise or anti-clockwise tour of the western part of the country.

The east is never an option, even if you miss the incredible Neolithic archaeological site of Gobekli, or the source of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, among other treasures.

In fact, “Kurdistan” has always been a taboo word for Turkey’s national narrative, which favors euphemisms like “southeast” to refer to that part of the country. After all, what name can be given to something that does not even exist?

For decades there was no talk of the Kurds, but of “the Turks of the mountain”. Their language, Kurmanji, has yet to reach the press or schools. There is actually a TV channel in Kurdish – there are about 50 in neighboring Iraq – but it is funded by the government. Accordingly, there is no deviation from the official discourse.

Not leaving the epicenter of the earthquake, the city of Kahramanmaras is named after its original Turkishization of Maras (of disputed origin), added to the Turkish Kahraman, “hero”. Also, it’s better not to search for “Amed” on the map when trying to get to Diyarbakir, the main Kurdish city in Turkey.

These are just two of thousands of examples of this effort to remove any “foreign” traces from the map. The next step is to do it physically. city ​​of hasankeyfA 12,000-year-old archaeological treasure once protected by UNESCO, was completely submerged in 2020.

Today, Hasankey lies out of reach under a network of dams through which the water supply from the Tigris and Eufrates rivers to Syria and Iraq is often cut off.

The most modern cities are not spared either. During the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of Kurdish towns were burned down by the Turkish Army in its fight against the Kurdish guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

After the eleventh military operation launched by Ankara in 2015 and 2016, the wreckage in some of them is reminiscent of earlier earthquakes. Once again, the common people bore the worst part.

“You are not Kurdish, you are Armenian and we will do the same thing as we did to you hundreds of years ago,” this reporter heard a Turkish police officer shout over the loudspeaker. in the press conference. A curfew is enforced in the Kurdish city of Cizrein September 2015.

Two earthquakes (in 1912 and 1914) announced what would become the first genocide of the 20th century, when more than a million and a half Armenians were swallowed up by that mistake.

Today, in Turkey, only about 60,000 people have left that Eurasian plate, and the waves are still hitting neighboring Armenia, which is still sandwiched between two Turkic states (the second being the Azerbaijani).

“How happy you are to say I’m Turkish,” reads murals across Turkey, paraphrasing Kemal Ataturk, the republic’s controversial father. “The indivisible homeland” is also a story that repeats itself over and over again.

The most cruel paradox determines that the country celebrates the first centenary of its existence open. Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdoğan has declared a three-month state of emergency in ten devastated areas.

Complaints that relief is not coming are piling up, creating an even more precarious situation for over three million Syrian refugees who have crossed the border into Turkey since the war began in Syria in 2011.

The earth seemed to burst under their feet more than a decade after war broke out in their country. They are the most direct victims of the Arab array, which is ruled by autocrats like Bashar al Assad in Syria, General Abdulfatah al Sissi in Egypt or the satraps of the Persian Gulf.

They all shared with Erdoğ an obsession with maintaining their power and an exclusive discourse to articulate their respective national models.

More paradoxes in history led Erdoğan to power after the 1999 Izmir earthquake – which killed more than 17,000 people -, and the last occurred on the eve of a decisive election next May.

But perhaps the most profound fault is democracy.

After more than two decades in power, Erdoğan defended his re-election by removing Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul and his most direct rival in the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).

He has also outlawed a third political force, the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP). Their leaders, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yüksekdağ, have been in prison since 2016.

Musa Anter, a Kurdish journalist and writer assassinated by Turkish intelligence in 1992, said: “If my mother tongue shakes the foundations of your state, it probably means you built his state on my land.”

Add to that the devastating tremors of geology, and disaster ensued.

© Inter Press Service (2023) — All rights reservedOrigin: Inter Press Service

news7f

News7F: Update the world's latest breaking news online of the day, breaking news, politics, society today, international mainstream news .Updated news 24/7: Entertainment, Sports...at the World everyday world. Hot news, images, video clips that are updated quickly and reliably

Related Articles

Back to top button