Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1999, pages 37, 137

Talking Turkey

Banning of Mehmet’s Book of First-Hand Accounts of Kurdish War Highlights Turkey’s “Vietnam Syndrome”

By Jon P. Gorvett

After two months on the shelves, four editions and 11,000 copies sold, journalist Nadire Mater’s book, a collection of first-hand accounts by Turkish soldiers of the 15-year war against Kurdish rebels in southeast Turkey, has finally fallen afoul of the censors.

“Everybody is talking about the fighting in the southeast, only the soldiers themselves haven’t been talking,” Mater told the English-language Turkish Daily News after the Justice Ministry banned her Mehmet’s Book in early July. The title comes from the nickname for the ordinary, long-suffering Turkish soldier, “Mehmet.”

“Why can’t the viewpoints and feelings of the 2.5 million soldiers who have fought in the southeast be revealed?” she asked.

Part of the reason is that these personal accounts, which Mater transcribed largely unedited from 42 people who served in Turkey’s mainly conscript army in counter-guerrilla operations against the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) between 1984 and 1998, often do not sit easily with the official image.

Under official policy, the conscripts sent to the southeast are drawn from western Turkey, the most industrialized and urban of Turkey’s regions, and sent to the mountainous and rural provinces of the southeast where the insurgency is at its most intense.

With the idea that they will not be involved in local, often tribal, disputes, these city dwellers find themselves plunged into an alien environment, an alien culture and a brutal war—whether they want to be there or not.

After the soldiers have completed their military service the culture shock is then compounded upon their discharge. Returning to Istanbul, Izmir and Ankara, they find little knowledge of the conflict they were sent to fight and little official help in readjusting to civilian life or dealing with the often traumatic experiences of the fighting. Officially too, there is no “war,” only “anti-terrorist operations,” a police matter with no political or social dimensions.

The result is Turkey’s version of “Vietnam Syndrome.” As an example of it at its most dramatic, space is given in Mater’s book to accounts by friends of two soldiers who were so psychologically damaged that, on discharge, they hijacked a plane and then killed their immediate families.

This stands in marked contrast to the way in which the war has been portrayed by government and media organizations during the recent trial of the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

This reached the expected death sentence verdict on June 29. Subject to automatic appeal, the sentence will go to a higher court after the summer recess, where, if upheld, it will then go for parliamentary and finally presidential approval. If carried out, it will be the first judicial execution in Turkey in 15 years.

News of the verdict was greeted in the courtroom itself with scenes of rejoicing by the relatives of soldiers killed in the conflict who had been co-plaintiffs in the case and who had sat out the trial clutching photographs and mementos of their lost sons and husbands. Described as the “mothers of the martyrs” by newspapers, politicians and TV stations, they were a primary source of both genuine grief and patriotic messages throughout the Ocalan affair.

In this way, the war was presented as being primarily a question of justice for the bereaved, with Ocalan accused of all 30,000 of the killings that have taken place since the PKK began its campaign in 1984. That most of those killed were Kurds, and most of them had been killed by the army, was never mentioned, and the focus on murder also followed the official line that the violence that has engulfed the southeast is primarily due to the activities of “bandits” and “criminals,” not a more profound conflict between the Turkish state and a rebellious part of its Kurdish population.

This is not a unique description of this type of war, of course, but it is one that doesn’t lend itself to making progress toward resolving the conflict. So the war, if anything, has intensified.

July 3 saw the Turkish army once again cross the border in strength into northern Iraq in a one-week “hot pursuit” operation in which army spokesmen claimed 40 PKK militants were killed. Fighting has also continued in the southeast itself, with the PKK killing 18 soldiers in an ambush July 10. In addition, early July saw two bombs in Istanbul blamed on the PKK, one of which killed two, while the other was successfully defused.

European Ramifications

In Europe as well, the war in the southeast continues to make itself felt. The occupation of a Turkish trade delegation office in Italy by Kurdish protesters after the Ocalan verdict led to a souring of already strained Turkish-Italian relations. Turkish President Suleyman Demirel accused the Italians of treating the occupiers with “tolerance” after they were eventually released without interrogation and said that Rome was becoming “an accomplice to terrorism.”

In Germany, which is home to some two million Turks, a number of Turkish businesses were firebombed in the aftermath of the trial, though without causing any serious injuries. In response, the head of the Turkish community in Germany, Hakki Keskin, called for the death sentence to be commuted: “Turkey should be big-hearted,” he said.

Given the current political balance of forces in Ankara, there seems little chance of that. The coalition government, composed of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit’s Democratic Left Party (DSP), the hard-right National Action Party (MHP), and the conservative Motherland Party (ANAP), represents one of Turkey’s most nationalist administrations in years, partly elected on a wave of patriotic feeling whipped up by the Ocalan affair. Government supporters, and indeed almost all Turks, expect the death sentence to be carried out—and quickly.

Yet the coalition has its vulnerabilities. These were highlighted dramatically in early July by the attempted suicide of the economics minister, Hikmet Ulugbay. An ANAP party member, Ulugbay had been involved in talks with the IMF on securing badly needed loans to bolster the Turkish economy, which has been in recession since late last year.

Allegedly, Ulugbay passed on details of the largely unfavorable outcome of these negotiations to ANAP leader Mesut Yilmaz. The story continues that this information was then leaked to one of Yilmaz’s cousins, who promptly made a killing on the Istanbul stock market.

Inter-party relations have also been further strained by competition between coalition ministers over departmental budgets, with the MHP also blocking the one piece of legislation put forward to try and ease a solution in the southeast—the repentance law. Under this, surrendering PKK militants would be treated lightly in an effort to encourage the Kurdish guerrillas to end the struggle. That this relatively mild proposal looks unlikely even to reach parliament does not bode well for any bolder initiative.

Under these circumstances, the only surprise in the banning of Mater’s book was that it took the Justice Ministry so long to do it.

Jon P. Gorvett is a free-lance writer based in Istanbul.