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Guardian -Turkish Kurd teenagers turn to the PKK after enduring years of
brutality
Tue, 06. Jun 2006
Sevder is seething. Growing up in poverty and squalor, he has seen
schoolmates shot dead by Turkish security forces and had to put up with the
vulgar taunts of Turkish policemen towards his mother and sisters. His
grudges have been nourished by endless tales of family and friends burnt out
of their villages in the hills and decanted into the slums of Diyarbakir.
"We've had enough," says the 17-year-old Kurd, wearing a Ronaldinho Brazil
T-shirt and crouching in the heat and dirt of the teeming city, a couple of
hours from the Iraqi and Syrian borders.
Sevder and his friends are part of a new wave of militancy among young
Turkish Kurds. "There is a different generation now in Diyarbakir," says
Sezgin Tanrikulu, a lawyer. "These youths are aged 14 to 20. They've grown
up in this place feeling they don't belong. We can't communicate with them."
Hisyar Ozsoy, an anthropologist and expert on Kurdish politics, says: "There
is something new here. These are the children of serhildan [the Kurdish word
for intifada or uprising]."
Turkey's long war with its repressed minority of Kurds, who comprise up to
20% of the population of 73 million, runs in cycles. After dying down seven
years ago, it is now spiralling into a new and threatening phase.
Subversive nationalist elements within the Turkish security apparatus appear
to be exploiting the conflict to try to destabilise the country and at the
same time Kurdish warlords, clan leaders and political elites are also
stirring up trouble in internal power struggles.
Meanwhile the successes of Kurdish autonomy in neighbouring northern Iraq
are exerting a magnetic attraction on the Kurds of south-eastern Turkey
eager to share in the freedoms enjoyed across the border.
For Sevder and his friends Cevat and Sinan, their debut as street fighters
in a new youth-led intifada came two months ago during three days of
disaster in Diyarbakir that left 10 dead, hundreds injured, hundreds more
arrested and beaten and plenty of scores to be settled.
The rioting erupted during the funerals of four of 14 Kurdish guerrillas
ambushed and killed by Turkish security forces. The guerrillas, from the
Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK) that is considered a terrorist organisation
by Turkey, Europe and the US, have a tight grip on this city of one million
people, rewarding loyalty, punishing "traitors" and enforcing discipline.