By MASHALLAH DAKAK
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey – By openly debating the independence of Turkey’s Kurdish areas for the first time, a conference in Diyarbakir two weeks ago drew attention and reaction by the Turkish media and politicians.
The Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) and the Congress of Democratic Society (KCD) have held many conferences on Kurdish issues in the past, but this was the first where Kurdish leaders discussed a possible fragmentation of Turkey and an independent Kurdish state.
Leaders of the KCD and BDP reiterated the right of the Kurdish people to education in their mother tongue in Turkey, where Turkish is the only official language.
In the meantime, they praised the struggle of veteran Kurdish politicians have long advocated for Kurdish independence.
The conference, however, was not without disagreements among representatives of various political parties.
Organizers of the conference referred to the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) Abdullah Ocalan as “the president of the Kurdish nation,” and to the Kurdish struggle as a whole as “the 30-year struggle.”
The representatives of the Freedom and Socialism Party and some other Kurdish groups objected that the PKK was placed at the heart of the Kurdish struggle.
The smoke-filled venue turned into a place of heated debate, but BDP co-founder Ahmet Turk tried to ease the tension and keep everyone to the agenda of the gathering.
Ocalan himself sent a message from his prison cell to be read at the conference. The long message was received by the audience with enthusiasm.
A speech by İsmail Besikçi, a Turkish scholar who spent years in jail for defending the national rights of the Kurdish people, received yet a warmer welcome.
Unlike Ocalan’s message, which spoke of Kurdish cultural and political rights within a democratic Turkey, Besikçi encouraged the Kurds to work for an independent state, saying that true Kurdish freedom can be achieved only through an independent Kurdish state.
But Leyla Zana, an independent Kurdish MP who also spent more than 10 years in prison for speaking in Kurdish on the opening day of the Turkish parliament in 1994, said, “An independent Kurdistan is in my heart, but it is not realistic in the current world state and the situation in the Middle East.”
Osman Baydemir, the mayor of Diyarbakir -- the largest Kurdish city in Turkey -- said that unity was of paramount importance for the Kurds at this stage, and recited from classical Kurdish texts on solidarity.
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