Kurds in Turkey: A bitter war
Since July’s failed coup against Erdogan, the war between the government and the PKK has grown more bitter 
Diyarbakir (The Economist).─ A century and a half of Kurdish history stares at Altan Tan from the photographs in his office on the outskirts of Diyarbakir, the heart of Turkey’s restive south-east. His great-grandfather, a merchant who shuttled between Aleppo and Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, inspects the room from one frame. His father, tortured to death in a state prison after an army coup in 1980, looks up from another. Just two years ago Mr Tan, an engineer and member of parliament, had reason to think Turkey’s Kurds were on the verge of a brighter future. He was a key player in the peace negotiations between Turkey’s government and Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which seemed about to bring the decades-long war between the government and the PKK to a close.
That was before the summer of 2015, when a ceasefire between the PKK and the Turkish army collapsed, unleashing the worst bloodletting in two decades. At least 2,100 people, many of them civilians, have died in the clashes since July 2015. Insurgent strongholds, including swathes of Diyarbakir’s historical centre, have been pummelled by artillery fire and razed to the ground. The south-east’s economy is on its knees. From his office balcony, Mr Tan looks out over rows of vacant apartment blocks and hotels, relics of a building frenzy interrupted by the fighting. “Construction, trade with Syria and Iraq, and tourism have all stopped,” he says. Meanwhile a new front in the conflict has opened across the border in Syria. On October 20th Turkish jets bombed areas claimed by the PKK’s local affiliate, the People’s Protection Units, and claimed to have killed up to 200 fighters.
The vast majority of Turkey’s estimated 15 million Kurds opposed July’s coup attempt against the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Yet having packed its prisons with thousands of followers of the Gulen movement, an Islamic sect held responsible for the coup, the government has turned the crackdown against its Kurdish opponents. Drawing on emergency powers, recently extended for another three months, it has removed 28 mayors from office and suspended over 11,000 teachers accused of PKK sympathies. It has sacked dozens of academics who called for an end to security operations in civilian areas. Earlier this month, it closed 20 mostly Kurdish media outlets. The government even shut down a children’s TV station that aired the Smurfs and other cartoons dubbed into Kurdish. Stripped of immunity earlier this year, at least 50 of 59 MPs from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), including Mr Tan, face terror-related charges.
The municipalities whose mayors were removed “had not been governed by elected officials, but by the PKK, and no democracy could have allowed that,” says Orhan Miroglu, a Kurdish deputy from the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party. Sabri Ozdemir, the evicted mayor of Batman, a city an hour’s drive from Diyarbakir, insists this is false ...
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