By Canberk Yüksel
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey
Leading Kurdish figures gathered in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir over the weekend in a bid to resolve the decades-old problems facing the Kurds in Turkey and across the wider Middle East.
Billed as one of the biggest civil society events in recent years, more than 700 academics, politicians, civil activists and officials gathered from across Turkey, the Kurdish region of northern Iraq and further afield to find a solution to the Kurdish issue.
High on the agenda was topics such as the Kurds as an ethnic group and Turkey's ongoing solution process to advance the Kurdish community in Turkey.
"The whole world is watching what kind of a dimension the issue between Turks and Kurds will take," Bulent Yildirim, president of event organizer the Humanitarian Relief Organization, said on Saturday.
"Because they know full well that once this issue has been resolved, all other issues and disputes in the Middle East will, step by step, approach resolution."
The government, academics and Kurds state different figures on the population of Kurds in Turkey. Consensus is that they are not less than 10 million and some claim their population reaches up to 17 or 18 million as the total population in the country is 78 million.
Yildirim said resolving the conflict between the Turkish government and Kurdish militants that saw around 44,000 killed between 1984 and 2008 would pave the way for peace in Syria, ease Iraq's instability, smooth communal tension in Lebanon and calm the Sunni-Shiite conflict that besets the Middle East.
Praising the solution process led by the Turkish government, Yildirim said it was important to bring it to fruition.
The Turkish government launched the "solution process" initiative in 2013 with the aim of bringing an end to the decades-long conflict with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the PKK, which resulted in a call for disarmament from jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.
Drawing from the IHH's experiences in areas of conflict around the world, including Kashmir, the Philippines, Somalia and China’s Xinjiang region, Yildirim warned that barriers to a solution should not break the political will to find an answer.
As Turkey heads for a June 7 general election, he called on all sides in the process to refrain from inflammatory rhetoric.
He also reiterated the IHH’s condemnation of riots in October last year that saw around 40 people killed, mostly in Turkey’s southeast, after street protests over Turkey’s perceived inaction to help Kurds fighting Daesh militants in the Syrian border town of Kobani.
Shared faith can unite Kurds and Turks
Pointing to their shared Islamic faith, Yildirim said those engaged in negotiations should remember their bonds of fraternity.
Ali Mohiuddin Qara Daghi, secretary general of International Union of Muslim Scholars, said Kurds and Turks had historical ties, adding that a solution lay in a rapprochement that maintained each community’s integrity.
Thanking President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu for their contributions to the solution process, he called on the government and Kurdish leaders to advance peace efforts.
He highlighted the role of Kurdish madrasas, or Islamic schools, during the Ottoman Empire period while other speakers, such as Abdulilah Firat, whose grandfather led a rebellion against the government in 1925, called for legal recognition for Kurdish madrasas.
Diversity of opinion among Kurds
Political scientist Gunes Murat Tezcur, an associate professor at Loyola University in Chicago, argued that Kurds should be given constitutional assurances regarding their ethnic identity in exchange for disarmament.
Tezcur, who has studied the recruitment of 8,000 deceased PKK members, or nearly a fifth of the group's membership over the four decades according to his estimates, said: “If they want to drop this instrument -- the weapon -- then we need to discuss seriously what the movement demands in return."
Mehmet Yavuz, secretary general of Huda-Par, a Kurdish Islamist party that opposed the PKK and the Turkish state militarily until the early 2000s, said the PKK did not represent all Kurds in Turkey.
He recalled PKK leader Ocalan's remark that he formed the group "not because I'm a Kurd but because I'm a socialist."
Referring to Ocalan’s nickname and ideology, he said: "Apoism is a Kurdish movement only as much as Kemalism is a Turkish movement."
Another speaker, Nevzat Cicek, a journalist, said the demand among Kurds in Turkey for an independent government represented less than 10 percent, which showed their will for coexistence with Turks.
Cicek added that the Kurdish people instead asked the government as well as the outlawed PKK to face their past injustices against them and lead the way for peace.
Diyarbakir was the scene of a landmark 2013 meeting between Turkey’s then Prime Minister Erdogan and Iraq’s Kurdish administration leader Masoud Barzani.
It was at this meeting that Erdogan first used the word "Kurdistan" to describe the Kurdish-ruled parts of northern Iraq.
Kurds are mostly spread across four Middle Eastern countries -- Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran.
Turkey’s Kurds claim subsequent governments neglected their needs, and implemented a policy of denial and suppression. In the last decade Turkish government have freed learning Kurdish in state schools and established university departments to study the language. Turkey's state tv has a Kurdish channel and Anadolu Agency has been running news in Kurdish.
The IHH plans to publish a book on the conference in five languages containing more than 70 articles on the Kurdish question.
