Transcript

HUTCHEON: In a city renowned for its history and breathtaking views, a lawyer and human rights activist Eren Keskin, is taking me on an unusual tour. It’s not the side of the city she grew up in but ever since she learned as a teenager she was Kurdish, these run-down neighbourhoods have become very familiar.

EREN KESKIN: In Turkey, if you don’t push your Kurdish identity and thoughts, you can live like anyone else. The minute you say that you’re Kurdish or put forward your Kurdish identity, the oppression starts.

HUTCHEON: For decades, Turkey’s Kurds say they’ve been victimised by the State and viewed as barbarians. They fled their rural villages hoping the city would provide shelter and stability. Mostly it just disappoints.

EREN KESKIN: Kurdish people have always faced discrimination in human rights and they have been jailed when they protected their Kurdish identity. They were forced to leave their homes. This was State policy.

HUTCHEON: Now it’s believed two million Kurds live here in a city of around fifteen million. Crammed into apartments on either side of the alleys, they struggle to make a living while trying to preserve their strong communal culture and traditions.

In December the European Union will decide whether to open discussions over Turkey’s long cherished goal to join the Union. In the past few years the Turkish State has implemented wide-ranging reforms aimed at improving human rights and freedoms for Kurds. The question the EU will be asking is whether Turkey has gone far enough.

Modern Turkey’s founder, Kemal Ataturk, believed Kurdish dreams of a homeland were a threat to Turkish unity. He wanted Kurds assimilated. The policy led to a bitter conflict between Kurdish militants and Turkish forces, which has claimed more than forty thousand lives.

Though Eren Keskin’s helped hundreds of Kurds seek redress through the courts, she herself is being pursued. Years ago she was jailed for six months for simply using the word “Kurdistan” because it suggested separatism. Now there’s a warrant for her arrest for challenging the military. She could face up to three more years in jail.

We’ve come to the southeastern province of Diyarbakir, the unofficial capital of Turkish Kurdistan. Until recently it was illegal to even mention the name. In the township of Idil, Ms Keskin and her colleagues start to gather intelligence on the latest abuses. News from these parts rarely makes headlines in Istanbul or Ankara. She’s told about the funeral the day before of a young local fighter, a member of the militant Kurdistan Worker’s Party – the PKK.

The outlawed PKK began a bloody twenty-year campaign against the Turkish State in the mid-Eighties. Five years ago it declared a unilateral ceasefire but in June the PKK, now known as “Kongra-gel” resumed the armed struggle.

The young militant Fatma Idem was buried the day before we arrived. Today is the women’s time to mourn. Selal Idem said her sister left the village to fight for the PKK when she was just a teenager.

SELAL IDEM: She joined because of the torture we have gone through. She joined for freedom - she joined for a free and independent state. She joined so we can be independent - because she had courage.

HUTCHEON: The mothers of other dead militants gather at Fatma Idem’s home. Eren is told the Turkish military returned Fatma’s body several days ago. The military said she committed suicide after being cornered in a shoot-out but women who prepared the body said it showed signs of torture.

EREN KESKIN: The backs of the legs were bruised?

WOMAN: Yes.

EREN KESKIN: And here in the arm sockets there were signs she’d been chained?

WOMAN: Yes.

HUTCHEON: Throughout the 1990’s Turkish security forces expelled a million Kurds from their homes in a bid to flush out militants. These abandoned villages are a legacy of nearly twenty years of repression. Human rights groups say thousands of Kurds were killed or simply disappeared. Others were paid and armed by the Turkish State to spy on neighbours and keep them out of the villages.

EREN KESKIN: In Kurdistan, we still don’t know who murdered ten thousand militant Kurds. Two thousand people disappeared under detention. Four thousand villages evacuated. These are really important issues. We can’t establish anything new by forgetting these things.

HUTCHEON: Eren has contested dozens of cases in Kurdish townships throughout the southeast. In pursuit of EU membership, Turkish legal reforms have brought new hope. In this case she’s fighting to reclaim village land that was confiscated from her clients more than ten years ago. Eren tried to take us to the village. The military had other ideas. There’s no law stopping us from entering the village, just the word and guns of the military.

The military police told us the evacuated village we planned to visit was off limits. They told us to move 5 km down the road and in fact that’s their car right behind me. Despite reforms attempting to grant greater freedoms to Kurds, it’s an example of the acute sensitivity that’s still attached to the Kurdish issue.

Yet in cities like Diyarbakir there’s no mistaking a more upbeat atmosphere since the PKK ceasefire and Turkey’s recent efforts aimed at EU membership. There are new freedoms - a weekly Kurdish TV broadcast and education in Kurdish. Several prominent activists have been freed from jail. These young children may be the first generation to lead normal lives.

The quest for normality can’t be underestimated. For middle-class Kurds trying to run businesses like Ahmet Cengiz, a life without fear is a welcome change from what he went through in his childhood.

AHMET CENGIZ: When we were young we had money problems, a very difficult life, but the worst thing was that someone who left his home in the morning didn’t know if he was coming back home again. Another example, you could learn that the friend you sat together with in the evening had been killed early the next morning.

HUTCHEON: It was during such times that many families fled Diyarbakir for cities like Istanbul. In a working class suburb we met Mariam Tirpan and her family. Mariam recounts how their problems started when they were living in the southeast of Turkey ten years ago. Her brother-in-law was killed in a mysterious bomb blast.

MARIAM TIRPAN: There was a lot of pressure on us. The military threatened my husband. They asked him to be a spy but he refused. He was under detention for twelve days.

EREN KESKIN: Tortured?

MARIAM TIRPAN: Yes, tortured.

HUTCHEON: To flee repression, the family came to Istanbul. Her husband is at work and while they both have jobs, paying bills and raising four children is a daily challenge on five hundred dollars a month. Mariam is constantly worn out.

MARIAM TIRPAN: People who haven’t experienced what I have can’t understand me. We’ve suffered a lot.

EREN KESKIN: One day all the suffering will be over. God willing.

MARIAM TIRPAN: God willing. We’re waiting with this hope. Without it, it would be difficult to live.

EREN KESKIN: I've seen this a lot. There are toomany people who have lived through these things. What upsets me the most is that the government and the Turkish people behave as if nothing has happened. This is what hurts and upsets me the most.

HUTCHEON: Years of Kurdish rebellion also took a huge toll on the rest of Turkish society. Sencan Bayramoglu was a staunch Turkish nationalist who heads the Istanbul branch of the Mothers’ of Martyrs’ Association. Thousands of young soldiers and civilians were killed over years of conflict with the Kurds. Sencan Bayramoglu’s son Cenk, was one of them.

SENCAN BAYRAMOGLU: Why is there a need to make reforms for Kurds? They are no different from anyone in Turkey. The ones from the east are not inferior to the ones from the west or vice versa. We are all part of the same people sharing the same fate.

HUTCHEON: But Turkey’s governing party believes that relaxing its attitude towards the Kurds is proof that Turkey is ready for European membership.

ILKER AYCI: Well we believe in that. We are a part of Europe. We have a common history and we have to bring our human rights issue and democratisation to the level of all developed countries, so European Union goal is a means to this end for us and that’s why European Union process is very important.

HUTCHEON: Nationalists like Sencan Bayramoglu feel betrayed by the Government. She says her son died for nothing.

SENCAN BAYRAMOGLU: Their blood remains on the floor while their murderers get rewarded by amnesties. They're being let out of prison with a pat on the shoulder and they are told they are human. Human beings don’t kill one another. Human beings don't kill humans. How can this be tolerated?
It’s very difficult. Looking at these photographs... it's very difficult.

HUTCHEON: In the Kurdish areas, Eren Keskin is treated as a heroine wherever she goes. She’s tried to show us the difference between reforms on paper and the reality on the ground and although the gap is big, even she holds out hope that the promise of EU membership will change attitudes.

EREN KESKIN: Militarised countries militarise their people too. That means Turkish people don’t demand, they don’t know how to demand. Still I think that the changes being done according to EU demands will be very important. At the end of it all, I want Turkey to be a part of the EU.

HUTCHEON: Unless there’s constant pressure from outside the country, Eren Keskin believes discrimination against Kurds will continue. The arrest threat hanging over her head is evidence enough of that.

This nation straddles two continents but most Turks want to be part of the rest. Kurds are hoping that by letting Turkey in, Europe may also be opening the door to a better way of life for Turkish Kurds.