The decision by a Turkish MP to speak Kurdish in his country’s Parliament has provoked uproar and boosted demands that his Kurdish-based DTP party be closed down. It is against the law to use the language now spoken by around a fifth of all Turks in any official business. However, in 2002 blanket bans on the use of the language were lifted by the present government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Three years ago the first Kurdish language TV and radio stations were permitted.
When the DTP legislator Ahmed Turk chose to break the law Tuesday and midway through a speech switch from Turkish to Kurdish, the TV broadcast of Parliament’s proceedings was cut immediately. DTP members in the chamber applauded Turk’s behavior, but powerful nationalist elements, already upset by the growing profile of Kurdish culture, were incensed. The MP’s actions were the more infuriating since Tuesday was the UN “Mother Tongue” Day on which everyone was encouraged to celebrate their language. Turk asked ingenuously why he too could not celebrate his own mother tongue? A less blatant challenge to Parliament came when a Kurdish MP sought to have its printing office produce Eid cards for him in Kurdish. The speaker’s office has ruled that this latest act is an open violation of the constitution. However, it must be hoped that those pressing for the prosecution of Turk as well as for the closing down of his party on the dubious grounds that it supports the PKK terrorist movement will not have their way.
Even though millions of Turks speak Kurdish, millions more do not. It is, therefore, absurd that any other language be spoken in Parliament than Turkish. Out of respect for their fellow parliamentarians, those from Kurdish parties should use the dominant language. Whether it is right for Kurdish to be banned from any government business is a matter for constitutional debate. Basque and Catalan are used without problem alongside Spanish in Spain, Welsh in the UK and Breton in France.
The major question, however, is whether nationalists in Turkey should see the DTP banned because it threatens their vision of the unified Kemalist state, in the same way that the predecessor to Erdogan’s AK Party, the Welfare Party was banned in 1998 because its Islamist principles were deemed to threaten the secular basis of the constitution. The harsh truth is that the political process, however difficult, is the only way in which lasting solutions can be found to any seemingly intransigent problem such as the bloody PKK insurrection in the east. Even if the Turkish military were as successful as their Sri Lankan counterparts in crushing the insurgents, without a political solution, the violence would only go on hold. Thus Turks of Kurdish origin must have their political voice and indeed their own language. Erdogan himself has recognized this — he recently spoke in Kurdish at a political rally in Diyarbakir. But there remain powerful Kemalist forces, not least in the military, dead set against both the moderate Islamist AK Party and any manifestation of Kurdish culture, who threaten Turkey’s emerging pluralism.
