Why did the state fail to win the Kurds by playing the religion card?

18.10.2011 Vatan
Translated by: Daily News / www.hurriyetdailynews.com/why-did-the-state-fail-to-win-the-kurds-by-playing-the-religion-card.aspx?pageID=438&n=why-did-the-state-fail-to-win-the-kurds-by-playing-the-religion-card-2011-10-18
Orjinal Metin (tr-10/18/2011)

I invite readers to analyze these three intertwined questions:

1. Given that Kurds are in general a religious society, how can an organization like the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which often advocated atheist materialism in its initial years, have existed in such a society for so many years?

2. We know that in the state’s struggle against the PKK, it has frequently used the “religion card.” Why did this strategy fail?

3. Why have Sufi orders such as the Naqshbandis and Kadiris, which have been influential among the Kurds for a long time, and Islamic sects such as the Nur movement, which emerged during the Republican period, not constituted an alternative to the PKK during this period?

In the debate on the relationship between the Kurdish movement and Islam, these three questions are all better than each other. I will start with the last one.
We have two very recent texts: The memoir named “Dil yaresi derin olur” (The wound in the tongue is always deep), of Cemal Uşşak which is included in the study called , the “Conscious of Anatolia” (Anadolu Vicdanı) from the Open Society Foundation, as well as an interview with him based on this memoir in daily Radikal.
One of the important names in the Nur movement, Uşşak, an insider, explains to us in a quite convincing way how the Islamic segment in Turkey has turned away from Kurdish rights even though they are completely acceptable from a religious point of view. This genuine self-criticism from Uşşak, unfortunately, only received weak criticism and replies from conservative segments.
As a matter of fact, I have personally witnessed that the Islamic movement, which I’ve monitored as journalist since 1985, did not hear, see or speak, in general, on the Kurdish issue.
No doubt, the most striking examples of this can be seen inside the Nur movement, an important, republican-era religious movement that sprouted out of a Naqshbandi milieu and was a forerunner to the Gülen movement. Bediuzzaman Said Nursi was a Kurd. He never hid this; moreover, he was proud of it – so much so that in several texts his name is cited as Said Kürdi. Consequently, the Nur movement has been highly widespread among the Kurds all along. However, while they have not necessarily hidden it, the leading figures of the Nur movement were not keen on emphasizing the Kurdish identity of Bediuzzaman for a long time.
The National View movement, which developed in the pre-1980 era and focused on developing Turkey via a “just,” Islamic-based order, provides another example of the Islamists’ shyness toward the Kurds. This movement, led by the late former Prime Minister and long-time Felicity Party (SP) leader Necmettin Erbakan, became very strong in the southeast starting from the beginning but failed to provide a systematic program on the Kurdish issue for a long time.
[HH] Making Kurds turn on each other
If we leave it at that and pass onto the second question, because the state believed that both the Kurdish movement and the Islamic movement were enemies of the state, it did not openly invest in the Islamists against the PKK. When it supported the Islamist Hizbullah in Southeast Anatolia, meanwhile, it was not necessarily creating a civilian alternative against the PKK, but was mostly just looking for a way to make Kurds turn on each other. The strategy to obstruct the PKK through the Directorate of Religious Affairs, in other words by using the mosques and religious staff, remained on paper alone. Even if there was a desire to use the directorate, any efforts failed within a short period of time.
As a result, the main reason why the state failed in using Islam against the PKK is that it sees Islam as a “card” that can be discarded after the mission is accomplished. Turkey had such a fatal experience in this sense that even the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, which does not, in the least, see Islam as a threat, was not quite able to use religion against the Kurds.
Both the Islamist movements and the state were quite late in accepting the existence of Kurds and the Kurdish issue and, consequently, the distance between the Kurds and them became greater. On the other hand, the Kurdish political movement moved away from raw materialism step by step, especially after the 1990s. As a result, we can observe that the Kurdish movement has integrated more and more religious Kurds with each passing day.
In fact, religious Kurds waited for both the state and the Islamist structures to adopt them throughout the 1980s and 1990s. But nothing more than “Muslims are brothers” was said or offered to them. At the end, we see that religious Kurds, who have been treated as a younger brother who has to do with what his bigger brother gives him, don’t have the patience to wait anymore.
Out of this situation, a brand-new Kurdish movement is emerging. This movement is bound to overtake the PKK (and of course the Peace and Democracy Party - BDP).

Destek olmak ister misiniz?
Doğru haber, özgün ve özgür yorum ihtiyacı
Bugün dünyada gazeteciler birer aktivist olmaya zorlanıyor. Bu durum, kutuplaşmanın alabildiğine keskin olduğu Türkiye'de daha fazla karşımıza çıkıyor. Halbuki gazeteci, elinden geldiğince, doğru haber ile özgün ve özgür yorumla toplumun tüm kesimlerine ulaşmaya çalışmalı ve bu yolla, kutuplaşmayı artırma değil azaltmayı kendine hedef edinmeli. Devamı için

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