Kurdish women wave flags of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party during celebrations of Nowruz, the Persian New Year festival, on March 21, 2013 in Diyarbakir. STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images[/caption]
It is only a fish restaurant, but Memet gasps with surprise when he sees it. “I’ve never seen this in Diyarbakır before,” he says. “The sign is written in Kurdish.” In the Kurdish heartlands of southeastern Turkey, language has been a cultural battleground for far longer than the militants have fought in the mountains. Memet, now forty, remembers being introduced to his teacher as a Kurdish-speaking seven-year-old. “She taught us in Turkish, and we only spoke Kurdish,” he laughs. “We didn’t understand a word she said in eight years.”
What Orwell explained through fiction, Memet understands through experience: language is a political weapon, and one that is as powerful as a gun. “I don’t know how to express myself politically in Kurdish, because I stopped developing those language skills when I started school,” he says. In its steadfast refusal to recognize the Kurdish language and its persecution of those who speak it, the Turkish state has robbed generations of Kurds of the very words with which to fight for their cause. Only in the past decade have Kurds been able to speak their mother tongue in public without fear of arrest, and rules entrenched over decades are proving hard to break. On the streets of Diyarbakır, a city with an almost exclusively Kurdish population, Turkish is still the lingua franca.
Away from the fanfare of last month’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) ceasefire, Kurdish politicians of more moderate persuasions take a tentatively optimistic view of how Turkey’s relationship with its Kurdish minority is developing. “It’s very important that the violence stops, but that alone won’t mean that the Kurdish problem is solved,” says Bayram Bozyel, deputy chairman of the Rights and Freedoms Party (HAK-PAR). “When we speak about the Kurdish problem, we’re speaking about the rights that we don’t have: most importantly, to speak our language in public.”
HAK-PAR is one of a clutch of Kurdish parties that attract regional support but struggle to exercise power at a national level. Rhetorically dominated by nationalism but divided by political differences, Turkey’s Kurds lack a single legitimate front strong enough to represent them in Turkey’s parliamentary processes. So, in the absence of political dialogue, the PKK and their guerrilla leaders in the mountains have been the loudest voice in Kurdish politics for three decades. Boyzel acknowledges the stultifying impact of thirty years of insurgency: “The conflict has not only caused pain, it has also controlled Kurdish politics. How can it be otherwise, when thousands of Kurds are still in prison just for asking for change?”
But the fish restaurant is part of a quiet revolution. In recent months, the Turkish government has passed a series of new laws that have opened up swathes of civil society to Kurdish speakers. Since January, Turkey’s Kurds have been able to speak their own language in the country’s courts; schools are beginning to offer Kurdish lessons to their students. Linguists are working on the first official Kurdish–Turkish dictionary, and it is on schedule to be ready by the end of this school year.
While the headlines from southeastern Turkey have focused on the negotiations between the Turkish government and jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, they tell only half the story of a pivotal moment in Kurdish history. The ceasefire is just a preliminary step in a long journey; real change will only come with the kind of constitutional reform that the Turkish government is now starting to implement. “The Kurdish problem is nothing new,” says Boyzel. “It has existed for two hundred years, and it will only be solved when we have the freedom to meet and discuss, and explain ourselves to the world.”
