After two years of relative calm the sounds of war have returned to south-eastern Turkey. The Kurds are worried, but they’re also angry – and many blame Erdoğan

The Turkish Kurds who want peace – but not at any price

The Turkish Kurds who want peace – but not at any price

The racket of machine-gun fire rips through the evening silence. Plumes of smoke rise from the surrounding mountains where salvoes of missiles have set forests and farmland ablaze.

For the Kurds living for decades on the frontline of the bloody, longstanding conflict between the Turkish state and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), these are familiar sights and sounds. But they are also ones they had hoped to leave behind after tentative peace negotiations between the two foes were launched in 2012.

“For two years, we had a taste of calm,” says one local journalist, who wishes to remain anonymous. “Now it feels like we are back at the beginning. But this time, people are not only disappointed, not only scared; they are also angry. If there’s war again, it will be all-out civil war.”

In Şemdinli, a small town nestling in Turkey’s easternmost corner between the Iranian and Iraqi borders, and where PKK fighters led their first armed attack against Turkish security forces in 1984, hope for peace is hanging by a thread.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Turkey’s Semdinli district is surrounded by mountains in Iran, right, and Iraq, left. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty

At nightfall, the town is deserted. The shops are closed; only a couple of cafes remain open and they, too, are almost empty. The streets are shrouded in darkness. Few people dare to venture out.

“The city is dead after nightfall,” says Pinar Yilmaz, 35, member of the local women’s committee of the leftist People’s Democratic party (HDP). “People are afraid, worried about an attack. Anything could happen at any moment.”

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The latest clashes were arguably triggered in July by a suicide bomber who killed 32 Kurdish and Turkish activists in Suruç, a small town on the Turkish-Syrian border. The Turkish government blamed the attack on Islamic State.

But, with many Kurds in Turkey long believing the government of actively supporting Isis fighters against the Kurdish opposition in Syria and at home, Kurdish militants then killed two Turkish policemen in retaliation. Ankara responded with ongoing air strikes against PKK positions in northern Iraq and in Turkey. The PKK resumed attacks on Turkish security forces. In nationwide sweeps, hundreds of Kurds suspected of links to the militant group have been detained.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fatma Sarpkaya mourns over the coffin of her son, Ziya Sarpkaya, who was shot by a masked separatist. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty

The tension marks a radical change from the atmosphere only two months ago, when locals in south-eastern Turkey celebrated the election victory of the HDP, a leftist group with strong pro-Kurdish leanings. Taking 13% of the national vote, the party surmounted Turkey’s unusually high 10% threshold to send 80 MPs to parliament, granting the country’s Kurdish minority unprecedented political representation.

“We celebrated for three days and three nights,” says Avashin*, 16, from a village just outside Şemdinli. “We were so happy. We thought that now we would finally have a chance to obtain our rights as Kurds, that we would have real peace. But now it has become clear that the AK party [the ruling Justice and Development party] has no interest in either. They want to get rid of us.”

She is not alone in thinking that the renewed spate of attacks on the PKK – which ostensibly began with the Suruç attack and its aftermath – has domestic political motivations. The AKP lost its parliamentary majority in the 7 June national elections for the first time since it came to power in 2002, not least because of the HDP’s success. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan saw his hopes of establishing an executive presidency crushed as a result.

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Fikri Elmas, 55, who works at the local HDP office, thinks that the renewed pressure on Kurds is Erdoğan’s way of punishing them for voting the wrong way. In his eyes, the AKP and Erdoğan pretend to fight Isis while using the opportunity to stir up anti-Kurdish and anti-HDP sentiment.

“By whipping up war, Erdoğan tries to push for early elections in the hope that voters will turn away from the HDP and push us below the 10% hurdle,” says Elmas.

The AKP has until 23 August to form a coalition government, and, if it fails, Erdoğan can call snap elections. Many believe that he hopes to woo nationalist voters and conservative Kurds critical of the PKK, many of whom deserted his party before the latest parliamentary elections in favour of the HDP.

“They have started a veritable smear campaign against our party,” says Elmas. “The lies they tell about us make our jaws drop. We are a legal political party and we want to stand up for everyone’s rights. That is why people voted for us, many of them not Kurds. We are not terrorists, like they claim.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Supporters of the Pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party wave flags during election celebrations in June. Photograph: Burak Kara/Getty

Ihsan Özcan Er, 25, who works as a hairdresser on the main street of Şemdinli, agrees. “This is not a conflict between the Turks and the Kurds. It’s not even a conflict between the PKK and the army. The only problem is that the AKP is not in the majority any more, and that Erdoğan did not get his presidency. And he knows that he will go to court and be tried if he loses his grip on power. He is willing to throw the whole country into the flames to save his own skin.”

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Er says that business has collapsed since the start of the clashes. Instead of keeping his shop open until midnight, he now closes about 5pm for lack of customers. He is not the only one angry about the return to Şemdinli’s dark days.

Ahmet Balci*, a farmer, says the military authorities asked villagers to abandon their mountain pastures and drive their livestock back to the villages. He and many others flatly refused. “We just got our pastures back when peace came,” says Balci, who owns dozens of goats and horses that he bought in recent years.

“This time we will not simply give them up again. Before, we could not look after our land because of the war, but many have bought new herds now. Where are all these animals supposed to go?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pro-Kurdish graffiti on the house where imprisoned Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan and a group of friends formed the Kurdistan Workers Party in 1978. Photograph: Desmond Butler/AP

In the neighbouring district of Yüksekova, the military declared several grazing lands to be temporary security zones this week, telling villagers to leave or face the risk of losing their animals – or their lives – to air raids against PKK camps in the region.

“They have burned down our forests for years,” Balci says, defiantly. “They have driven us from our lands and our villages. But we will stay this time, even if it means that they will kill us.”

In the mountain villages outside Şemdinli, the tension is palpable. On the night of the first air raids against PKK positions in late July, the mothers in the villages were crying, Avashin recalls. Many families here have children in the ranks of the Kurdish rebels.

“We heard the planes overhead and heard them throw their bombs at the mountains. We all thought: ‘This is it. This time they will kill them all.’ We felt betrayed. Again,” she says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman walks along a street in the southeastern Turkish town of Silopi, near the Turkish-Iraqi border crossing of Habur Photograph: Reuters

Two of Avashin’s brothers joined the PKK last year, motivated by the PKK’s successful fight against Isis.

Her sentiments echo those of one PKK commander, who says she was not surprised about the sudden breakdown of the peace process. “We never trusted the Turkish state, and anything is to be expected from Erdoğan,” she says. “He has a king’s attitude. It was clear for a long time that they didn’t intend to comply with any of our demands.”

Having fought in the ranks of the PKK for more than a decade, the commander expressed dismay with the government’s calls for the militants to disarm as a first step.

“How can we speak of disarming now? Disarming should come at the end of successful peace negotiations, not at the beginning. Disarming now would mean surrender, nothing else. And that we will not do, not after everything we have sacrificed, and everything we have gained.”

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Trust between the two warring parties, which has been a fragile commodity even at the best of times, has broken down. When a local military outpost invited Kurdish youths to use their indoor football field, the boys declined. “We thought: what if we all go and then they throw a missile at the hall and we all die?” one of the boys say.

Police stations and military checkpoints are heavily fortified, and, after the killing of a policeman in the centre of Şemdinli in July, often deserted. Local residents are frightened of walking past military stations, lest a nervous recruit pulls the trigger out of fear.

Many blame the attitude of nationalist and pro-government Turkish media for stigmatising Kurds and the predominantly Kurdish south-east, stoking hate and mistrust.

“Many Turks don’t know us, and they don’t know anything about our region,” says the local journalist. “Turks only come when they have to, as officers, teachers or nurses, and even then they count the days until they can leave. If more Turks came to visit, the government would not be able to call for war so easily.”

The PKK commander underlines that her organisation is still showing restraint, arguing that the attacks on security forces were merely retaliation for Turkish air strikes on PKK camps.

“We want peace, too. We don’t want war. But if there is peace, it will have to be sustainable, justand participatory. It cannot be a bloody peace again, in which only one side dictates the terms,” she argues.

Even as the sounds of missiles around Şemdinli abate, news of bloody clashes elsewhere in the region keeps locals on their toes. “All we want is peace,” says one female resident. “We have tasted peace now, and we will not give up on it easily. We will do anything to get it back and, if we have to, we will fight for it. After all these years, all this suffering, what do we have to lose?”

*Some names have been changed to protect identities.

