Northern Kurdistan

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The North of Kurdistan which is situated within the borders of modern-day Turkey is the largest part of Kurdistan and there are about 20 million Kurds living within the Turkish state. The fierce repression which they have endured at the hands of successive Turkish governments has recieved surprisingly little international media coverage and despite the huge numbers of western tourists that travel to Turkey each year, few people in Europe actually know of the plight of this vast number of people on their very doorstep.

In the past 15 years, the Turkish army has raised about 5,000 villages and according to Amnesty International there are now about 3 million Kurdish refugees within Turkey itself who have been rendered homeless. These refugees are not allowed to return to the villages to rebuild their homes or cultivate their land, but end up either in refugee camps guarded by soldiers or end up in the shanty towns which have grown up around big cities. The camps are very basic and brutality from the guards is common place - these people are not prisoners, but innocent families who have had their homes burnt and their land taken from them. Malnutrition has been noted in the children of the shanty towns and disease, unemployment and hopelessness are rife.

The Turks deny that the Kurds are a distinct people and refer to them as mountain Turks who have forgotten their Turkish language and culture. The fact that the Kurds have lived in the same region for thousands of years before the Turks arrived in the Middle East is ignored by them and the Turkish government is doing all it can to ensure that the Kurds forget their own Kurdish language and culture by crushing any manifestation of it. Until 1991 it was illegal to speak Kurdish in Turkey. This law was repealed due to international pressure in the wake of the Gulf War, but in fact it is still illegal to use Kurdish almost anywhere but at home. In direct contravention of all human rights agreements to which Turkey is a signatory, publishing in Kurdish is illegal, as is the use of Kurdish in schools.

Turkey still recieves subsidies from many western countries, notably the USA - if you are a taxpayer in any country that makes loans or subsidies to Turkey, write to your political representative to protest at their use of your money in an immoral cause. We have the privilege of democracy and representation which we must use ensure that we are not turned into accomplices in the destruction of the Kurds in Turkey.

Please write to holiday companies who advertise holidays to Turkey and even more importantly to any television programmes featuring Turkish trips to tell them of your concern about the policies of repression employed against the Kurds by the Turkish state which have killed, maimed and displaced so many people. The international community banded together to oppose Apartheid in South Africa and ordinary people introduced their own economic sanctions by refusing to visit or buy South African produce. Turkey makes a vast amount of revenue from tourism each year and tourists have a right to know what their money is funding.

GAP or the South Anatolia Project is a series of planned dams which are being built in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. According to the Turkish government, this project will provide the area with economic growth and the whole of Turkey will benefit from a new source of power. The reality, however, is far less bright. Kurdish communities are being drowned along with their economic livelihood and their history. Thousands of people have already been displaced and countless archaeological treasures lost. The great new source of power is in fact going to provide less than Turkey could produce even now just by rationalising their existing electricity grid and cutting down on waste. Environmentally the whole project is going to irrevocably change this part of Kurdistan and deprive the downstream areas of valuable water and fertile silt. Water politics are ever important in the Middle East and these dams will threaten the flow of the Euphrates into Syria and Iraq. Please see our page on the Ilisu dam for more information and links.

Since the end of the Gulf War and the creation of the so-called Safe Havens for the Kurds in Northern Iraq (or Southern Kurdistan!), the Kurds of the area have been self-governing, but find themselves in the difficult position of not being part of Iraq nor an independent identity. The Turkish Government has been consistently opposed to this fledgling Kurdish state on its borders which it regards as a bad precedent for its own Kurdish "problem" and has taken advantage of this loophole in international law to attack endlessly Iraqi Kurdistan. Their pretext is that they are trying to stop PKK attacks being launched from there, but in fact they have killed countless innocent civilians and littered the agricultural land of Iraqi Kurdistan with dangerous ordinance. Why does the international community allow these attacks on another state to continue when they are very concerned about other situations such as Kosovo? Please write to your representative and ask for a meeting to discuss why.

The Turkish Government has recently shown its true determination to support Human Rights by reclosing the Human Rights Association of Turkey (IHD) only days after it was re-opened because of a letter-writing campaign directed against isolation-cell prisons. It was originally closed when the Secretary General of IHD, Nazmi Gur was arrested and tried for writing a pro-peace article about the Kurdish situation in Turkey, which was published on World Peace Day called "It is not difficult to achieve peace". A copy of the report on the trial of Nazmi Gur is available from the Kurdish Human Rights Project.

The Turkish State has been repeatedly accused of the systematic practice of torture against every sector of the Kurdish population. Politicians, activists, lawyers, journalists, students and ordinary men, women and even children have been the victims of Turkey's policy of torture in many well-documented cases, yet the international community refuses to exert any real pressure on Turkey to stop.

There are some very good websites which provide a lot of information about the Kurds in Turkey and there are many organisations around the world which run useful campaigns.