Children of the repression

Turkish Kurd teenagers turn to the PKK after enduring years of brutality

Ian Traynor in Diyarbakir, Turkey
Monday June 5, 2006
The Guardian

Sevder is seething. Growing up in poverty and squalor, he has seen schoolmates shot dead by Turkish security forces and had to put up with the vulgar taunts of Turkish policemen towards his mother and sisters. His grudges have been nourished by endless tales of family and friends burnt out of their villages in the hills and decanted into the slums of Diyarbakir.
"We've had enough," says the 17-year-old Kurd, wearing a Ronaldinho Brazil T-shirt and crouching in the heat and dirt of the teeming city, a couple of hours from the Iraqi and Syrian borders.

Sevder and his friends are part of a new wave of militancy among young Turkish Kurds. "There is a different generation now in Diyarbakir," says Sezgin Tanrikulu, a lawyer. "These youths are aged 14 to 20. They've grown up in this place feeling they don't belong. We can't communicate with them."

Hisyar Ozsoy, an anthropologist and expert on Kurdish politics, says: "There is something new here. These are the children of serhildan [the Kurdish word for intifada or uprising]."

Turkey's long war with its repressed minority of Kurds, who comprise up to 20% of the population of 73 million, runs in cycles. After dying down seven years ago, it is now spiralling into a new and threatening phase.

Subversive nationalist elements within the Turkish security apparatus appear to be exploiting the conflict to try to destabilise the country and at the same time Kurdish warlords, clan leaders and political elites are also stirring up trouble in internal power struggles. >>>cont

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