DIYARBAKIR, Turkey – When Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan acknowledged the existence of a “Kurdish problem” to a rally in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, Mayor Osman Baydemir was among thousands who stood to applaud a momentous declaration. For decades, Turkey had refused even to recognize Kurds as a separate ethnic group. Seven years later, Baydemir, shaking with anger, blames Erdogan's government for the worst fighting between the army and Kurdish rebels in years. Raising the stakes in his confrontation with Ankara, he has joined a hunger strike by Kurdish prisoners. “When the prime minister said, ‘The Kurdish problem is my problem too,' I was among those who stood up and applauded him. But we were fooled, our hopes were falsely raised,” he says. “We are living through the Kurdish cause's most critical period ... Ours is perhaps the last generation willing to extend a hand and negotiate.” Baydemir says the prosecution of thousands of Kurdish politicians and activists since 2009 and more recently the government's slow response to the hunger strike have sapped hopes for a solution to a three-decade conflict with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) – deemed a terrorist group by the EU and Washington as well as Turkey. The Kurdish conflict has taken some 40,000 lives, mainly Kurds, and burns at the heart of Turkey. It brakes the southeastern economy, draws criticism from abroad on rights policies and stirs anger in the Turkish heartland with images of soldiers' coffins returning, draped in the red Turkish flag. Baydemir, 41, among the most prominent of Kurdish politicians, says his goal is to stop the violence. He is nothing if he is not dogged. The mayor faces hundreds of criminal cases – too many to count, he says – for things he has said or done, including attending the funerals of PKK militants that has brought him charges of “spreading propaganda for a terrorist organization.” “All of my life I have stayed away from violence and the instruments of violence, and have seen a legal, democratic struggle as the only means to achieve change,” Baydemir says, his hands shaking as he gesticulates with anger. “But I have had it up to here with the prosecutions, the government's attitude, the judiciary, the media's stance and the majority of Turks who view the Kurdish people's justified cause through a nationalist lens.” Where 37 fellow mayors languish in jail, Baydemir, outspoken as he is, has been spared arrest; perhaps because of his popularity or perhaps because of the symbolic importance of Diyarbakir, a city of 1.5 million people and the regional center of Turkey's heavily Kurdish southeast. “The government has shut all legal, democratic channels. This sends Kurds the message: ‘Head to the mountains,'” Baydemir says, referring to PKK camps in northern Iraq and the highlands of southeastern Turkey where it fights Turkish soldiers. Erdogan would see things quite differently. He has taken steps leaders before him would never have dared in a country that had outlawed even the use of the Kurdish language until 1991. As part of efforts to meet EU membership criteria, Erdogan allowed Kurdish television broadcasts and, most recently, elective Kurdish language courses at state schools. In 2010, he risked the wrath of a conservative establishment by endorsing secret talks with PKK representatives. The talks failed, and the PKK has abandoned a ceasefire. The last 18 months has seen the heaviest fighting in more than a decade between the PKK and the Turkish army. Since June 2011, when Erdogan was re-elected to a third term, more than 800 people have been killed, the deadliest fighting since PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured and jailed in 1999, according to estimates by the International Crisis Group. Does Baydemir, then, hold the hope of a mediated political solution, as his supporters argue? Or are he and his party tools of the PKK, as Erdogan has suggested? Critics say Baydemir and other officials of his Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) have failed to hold the PKK accountable for violence. The EU has urged the BDP to distance itself explicitly from the insurgents. The BDP, for its part, says it shares no overt links, just a common grassroots. “The BDP is failing those who voted for them to contribute to a political solution of the Kurdish problem,” said Hilal Kaplan, a columnist for the pro-government Yeni Safak newspaper. “Baydemir is different. He has always questioned the PKK's effectiveness. But he and others on hunger strike are thumbing their noses at the state just when it was ready to negotiate.” – Reuters
