Kurdish Political Representation and the AKP in Turkey

According to official figures, the conflict between the Turkish state and pro-Kurdish insurgents killed more than 5,000 soldiers and injured another 11,000 between 1984 and 2002. Civilian causalities were similar – 5,000 dead and 10,000 hurt – while more than 23,000 rebels lost their lives and over 3,000 their liberty at an overall economic cost of almost $15 billion (Mango, 2005: 46). During a lull in fighting from 1999 to 2004, Ankara introduced a series of nine constitutional reforms packages seeking harmonization with EU accession criteria. In the years that followed, these had a considerable impact on a wide range of civil liberties and in May 2010, a tenth reform package was brought to parliament. Proposed by the incumbent Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) government that had been responsible for the previous six harmonization programs, it included (as one of 27 articles) provisions to make the banning of political parties more difficult. The largest Kurdish-majority political party, the Peace and Democracy Party (Baris ve Demokrasi Partisi, BDP), abstained, despite the fact that such parties had been closed on numerous occasions in the past. As a result, the relevant article failed to obtain the 330 votes (out of 550 seats) necessary for inclusion in the bill and so was withdrawn. The lack of support from the BDP’s 20 deputies also helped to ensure that the reform package as a whole failed to receive the 367 votes needed for immediate adoption, thereby forcing a referendum which (despite a boycott) was passed with 58 per cent of the vote. To understand such an ostensibly strange approach from the BDP, it is necessary to place its relationship with the AKP in a broader political context. It is argued here that, contrary to much of the current literature, the constitutional amendment program of the last ten years has not succeded in its reform objectives and thus does not form such a basis for joint action. Based on more than 50 interviews with party officials and human rights monitors, held in the Kurdish majority cities of Van, Bitlis, Mus, Bingöl, and Elazig (as well as two large centers of Kurdish migration – Mersin and Malatya), this paper offers a reconsideration of the so-called “Kurdish opening” by exploring the limitations of the government’s reforms, the problems it has had in putting these into practice and the ongoing ambiguity with which the AKP has approached issues of Kurdish identity. Taken together, this paper concludes, these offer a more profound explanation of the inability of the two parties to act in concert than simply the expediencies of electoral competition or the success of the harmonization reforms.