Conflict and Kurdish Rights in Southeast Turkey
For the past 25 years, the Turkish military and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) have been locked in conflict in the southeast and eastern provinces of the country. The fighting has killed an estimated 44,000 people: soldiers, PKK members, and civilians. During the 1990s, human rights groups documented gross violations of human rights by both the Turkish security forces and the PKK. There were thousands of enforced disappearances and unresolved killings suspected to have been carried out by state perpetrators. A state policy of burning down villages, ostensibly to prevent them from being used as PKK bases, led to the displacement of 950,000 to 1.2 million people.4 State agents conducted torture on a mass scale, and both state forces and the PKK attacked civilians.
For many years, much of the southeast and eastern regions were governed by emergency laws, which severely curtailed the rights to assembly, association, and expression. Fighting lessened after the 1999 capture of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and the PKK’s announcement of a ceasefire. Yet violence escalated again at various times from 2004 to mid-2010, typically taking the form of armed clashes between the military and the PKK in remote mountainous regions away from population centers. The PKK, or groups affiliated with it, have occasionally launched attacks on civilian targets in cities and holiday resorts. Most recently, since May 2010, the PKK has carried out a series of deadly attacks on military and police targets.
Over the last decade, the Justice and Development Party government (which has served two terms between November 2002 and the present), and the coalition government that preceded it, undertook important reforms to advance fundamental rights and freedoms. However, the conflict has had a profound impact on the way legislation has been drafted in this era, and has also influenced the way courts have interpreted laws. The lawmakers who amended the Penal Code and Anti-Terror Law, and the courts, most notably the Court of Cassation, have focused primarily on measures to enhance security, often at the expense of human rights. The pattern of prosecutions and convictions addressed in this report is a direct legacy of the conflict: vague and overly broad laws, and harsh, potentially discriminatory, implementation of those laws by Turkey’s Court of Cassation.
While the previous AKP government (November 2002-July 2007) introduced many legal reforms, countless laws continue to affect Kurds and other minority groups disproportionately, restricting their right to use their mother tongue in public life, to organize politically on the basis of their ethnic or religious identities, and to enjoy other cultural rights. Until recently, Turkish government and state officials viewed the Kurdish question solely as about the PKK, a problem of security and territorial integrity. They did not focus on or attempt to address the roots of the problem. The history of minority rights in Turkey and of Kurdish rights in particular has been extensively surveyed elsewhere, and the following section gives only a brief overview. |