DIYARBAKIR, Turkey - In the grim years of the 1990s, when thousands were killed each year in Turkey’s bloody conflict between the powerful military and fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the army rarely dispatched its Kurdish recruits to the war-torn areas of the Kurdish southeast. This policy was gradually changed as the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) introduced its “Kurdish opening” in late 2000 by launching negotiations with the PKK and subsequently lifting the decades-long martial law in the country’s southeast-- also known as Turkey’s Kurdistan. Now the AKP with its new agenda attracted not only Turkey’s disfranchised middle class, but it also embraced an unprecedented number of Kurdish voters and members. And now even Kurdish soldiers were serving their duty in the Kurdish regions. “We found out just recently that Ali was in Diyarbakir,” said Abdulbasit Shahin, speaking about his young nephew who was serving with the military in the main Kurdish city where he was deployed as part of the army’s inspection team. “I don’t know why they sent him there but we asked him to be very careful,” said Shahin, who lives with his extended family in the township of Qereyazi in Turkey’s northeastern city of Erzurum. Many of the people in the Kurdish areas believe the government deliberately sends Kurdish soldiers there to fight the PKK. They say this is Ankara’s way to discredit PKK as a Kurdish resistance movement. The war is now fought in the Kurdish cities where months-long curfews have made life even more difficult than before. “People were happy and believed that finally peace would come and things would be resolved,” said Shahin, whose younger brother, Zahid, serves time in prison, convicted of collaboration with the PKK. “We thought our young people would come down from the mountains and a new period would begin for the entire country,” he said. But that did not happen. In fact, according to Human Rights Watch, the recent conflict has brought with it “the most serious deterioration of human rights” in Turkey, at least since 2003, when the AKP took power. “Over the past year in Turkey we witnessed the most serious deterioration of human rights that I have seen in the entire time I’ve worked on Turkey, which is throughout the entire AKP period,” said HRW’s senior Turkey researcher, Emma Sinclair Webb, at a press conference in Ankara last week. Shahin believed that what happened in the country now was even more dangerous than before. “We were afraid that what took place in Syria would happen here too, but it is actually happening currently,” he added. Shahin said his family was in despair for both his brother Zahid, who is in prison for PKK charges, and for his nephew Ali, who was serving with the army. “We spoke with Ali just recently and told him to be carful. He said we should not worry, because he was not taking part in any clashes.” But Ali was killed last week in a car-bombing, allegedly carried out by the PKK and targeting a military post in Diyarbakir.
