Erdogan’s stance leaves Turkey’s Kurds with backs against the wall

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made it clear he is not interested in peace talks or compromise with the country's Kurdish separatists, or their many supporters and sympathisers.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech at the Presidential Complex in Ankara on April 5, 2016. Kayhan Ozer/Turkish Presidential Press Office/AFP

BEIRUT // Eight months into Turkey’s renewed war with Kurdish separatists, president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has left little doubt there will be few efforts toward reconciliation or compromise with millions of disenfranchised Kurds.

In a speech on Tuesday, just one day after publicly ruling out negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to end the conflict, Mr Erdogan suggested supporters of the group be stripped of their citizenship.

"We need to be decisive and take all necessary measures, including stripping citizenship to deactivate terrorist organisation supporters," he said, according to the pro-government Daily Sabah newspaper. "They are not even our citizens ... We are not obliged to carry anyone engaged in the betrayal of their state and their people."

Following Mr Erdogan’s remarks, Turkish justice minister Bekir Bozdag said on Wednesday the country would begin to work on new rules that would allow supporters of terrorism to have their citizenship taken away.

But although Ankara may view the PKK as a terrorist organisation, supporting the group – or supporting autonomy for Kurds in Turkey – are not outlier positions in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority south-east. Rather, they are common among a population that has long felt discriminated against and collectively punished based on its ethnicity and cultural identity.

Both passive and active support for the PKK is high in Turkey’s south-east. And even among those who do not outright admit their support for the PKK, there is often sympathy for the organisation and still a yearning for some level of independence for Kurds and a withdrawal of the state.

The feelings of being oppressed have only grown among many of Turkey’s Kurds over the past eight months as the war has displaced hundreds of thousands of people, killed hundreds of civilians and, according to the government, led to the deaths of “thousands” of militants. Cities have come under siege and been targeted with artillery. Many say the south-east has slipped back into the kind of violence experienced during the 1980s and 1990s, when tens of thousands were killed in fighting between separatists and the state.

If Mr Erdogan is talking about targeting people who ideologically support the PKK or efforts to bring autonomy to the country’s Kurds, he is faced with millions upon millions of Turkish nationals. Many in the region dream of giving up their Turkish citizenship one day to become a citizen of an independent Kurdish state. But being stripped of their nationality now would leave them stateless and outlaws, without the arguably watered-down protections and privileges they are currently afforded as citizens.

Going after the masses of “ordinary” PKK supporters with any new laws to revoke citizenship would be a difficult undertaking. But targeting specific, high-profile critics of Mr Erdogan’s government would be much more implementable.

The term “terrorism supporter” is loosely and broadly defined in Mr Erdogan’s Turkey.

As of late, Mr Erdogan has led a campaign to have immunity for parliament members lifted so that representatives from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) could be tried on terrorism charges. And when journalists, lawyers, academics and politicians have criticised Mr Erdogan’s war in the south-east or not towed the government line, the president and his party have said that they too are supporting terrorism.

Just last month, a British academic living in Istanbul was arrested on terrorism propaganda charges for possessing invitations to Nowruz, the Persian new year that is also celebrated by Kurds. And for outspoken local journalists, activists and politicians, arrests are an accepted risk that happen frequently.

When calling for supporters of terrorist organisations to lose their citizenship on Tuesday, Mr Erdogan also reaffirmed his belief that the definition of terrorism should be broad.

“Supporters [of terror] who pose as academics, spies who identify themselves as journalists, an activist disguised as a politician ... are no different than the terrorists who throw bombs,” he said. “Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, they serve the same purpose as members of the terror organisation.”

At the heart of the issue is the often repeated mantra of Mr Erdogan and his government that there is no Kurdish issue in Turkey, only a terrorism problem. The sentiment of millions of Kurds is ignored by the government and their most successful political party, the HDP, is publicly derided as a front for terrorists.

For the government, the key to solving Turkey’s crisis is to win the war by militarily crushing the PKK and its affiliated militias while smothering dissent with arrests, limitations on the press and, potentially, the revocation of citizenship among those who oppose the government.

But for many Kurds, the refusal of dialogue, the potential loss of citizenship and the continuing war will only serve to push their backs further against the wall, driving divisions and feelings that their grievances will never be addressed by the government without pressure.