These achievements have created new laws that must be implemented, and a momentum that should be sustained. For democracies cannot be static: they must move forward.

Freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state, which is why steps like reopening the Halki Seminary will send such an important signal inside Turkey and beyond. An enduring commitment to the rule of law is the only way to achieve the security that comes from justice for all people. Robust minority rights let societies benefit from the full measure of contributions from all citizens.

I say this as the President of a country that not too long ago made it hard for someone who looks like me to vote. But it is precisely that capacity to change that enriches our countries. Every challenge that we face is more easily met if we tend to our own democratic foundation.

Human endeavor is by its nature imperfect. History, unresolved, can be a heavy weight. Each country must work through its past. And reckoning with the past can help us seize a better future. I know there are strong views in this chamber about the terrible events of 1915. While there has been a good deal of commentary about my views, this is really about how the Turkish and Armenian people deal with the past. And the best way forward for the Turkish and Armenian people is a process that works through the past in a way that is honest, open and constructive.

KURDISH DEMONSTRATORS CLASH WITH TURKISH SECURITY FORCES DURING NEWROZ

By Gareth Jenkins

Tuesday, March 25, 2008


Over a period of four days from March 21-24, two people were killed and several hundred injured in clashes with Turkish security forces, as hundreds of thousands of Kurds took the streets to celebrate the Kurdish New Year of Newroz. No reliable figures are available for the number of demonstrators detained by the security forces, although Turkish media reports suggest that several hundred were taken into custody (Hurriyet, Radikal, Cumhuriyet, Milliyet, Yeni Safak, NTV, CNNTurk, March 22-24).

Newroz is not an exclusively Kurdish holiday. It is celebrated on March 21 each year from the Balkans through the Caucasus and Iran and across Asia into northern China. However, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Newroz celebrations were banned in Turkey on the grounds that they encouraged Kurdish separatism. Attempts to mark the holiday were broken up, usually violently, by the security forces. In 1992 over 60 people were believed to have died in clashes with the Turkish security forces during Newroz celebrations.

The situation changed in 1995 when the Turkish authorities decided to rediscover Newroz as “Nevruz,” an authentically Turkish spring holiday with its origins in Central Asia. Although Kurds continued to be prosecuted if they referred to it as Newroz rather than by its Turkish name, the authorities not only began to allow celebrations, but state officials joined in the traditional Newroz ritual of jumping over a fire to symbolize rebirth and renewal.

Initially, the strategy of appropriating Newroz appeared to have worked. During the late 1990s, most of the celebrations passed peacefully, and killings and arrests became relatively rare. However, the newly rediscovered festival of Nevruz failed to capture the imagination of most ethnic Turks, who still regarded it as essentially a Kurdish celebration. In recent years, violence at Newroz celebrations has begun to rise again. The main reason is that participants have increasingly begun to use the festival not just as a public demonstration of their Kurdishness but of their support for the PKK. There is also little doubt that the opportunity has been deliberately exploited by the PKK itself, for whom newspaper photographs and television footage of defenseless demonstrators being beaten and sometimes killed by the Turkish security forces are a propaganda gift.

Significantly, the worst of the recent clashes – and both of the deaths – occurred in southeast Turkey in cities such as Van, Yuksekova, and Hakkari, which have long been hotbeds of PKK support and where the authorities banned any Newroz celebrations this year for fear that they would be hijacked by the organization. But demonstrators gathered anyway, chanting pro-PKK slogans, waving PKK flags and holding posters of the organization’s imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan. The result was several days of rioting. In Hakkari, life virtually ground to a halt. Stores remained closed and shuttered for three days as the streets became a battleground between stone-throwing youths and members of the security forces (Radikal, Hurriyet, Milliyet, Zaman, March 22-24).

But there were also clashes at Newroz celebrations between PKK supporters and the security forces in the cities of western Turkey, which all now have their own substantial Kurdish populations as the result of migration from southeast Turkey. In Istanbul, which in terms of sheer numbers is now the largest Kurdish city in the world with perhaps up to 4 million ethnic Kurds among its total population of 14 million, more than 100,000 Kurds gathered in the Kazlicesme neighborhood, some of them chanting pro-PKK slogans and carrying banners with portraits of Ocalan (Milliyet, Hurriyet, Radikal, NTV, Dogan Haber Ajansi, March 24).

The Turkish authorities took the opportunity of the Newroz demonstrations to flex their ideological as well as their military muscle. Both in the southeast and in Istanbul, where 10,000 police were assigned to the Kazlicesme demonstration alone, members of the Turkish security forces marched through the streets chanting slogans such as: “Everything for the motherland”; “How happy is the one who says I am a Turk”; “Every Turk is born a soldier”; and, in a reference to Kurdish demands for education in their native language, “One state, one language.”

It is currently unclear whether such attempts at intimidation will do anything either to reduce support for the PKK or to defuse Kurdish demands for greater political and cultural rights. But Turkish television footage of young, male demonstrators clashing with the security forces at Newroz coincided with the publication of a study by the state-owned Turkish Statistical Institute (Turkstat) on the median age of the Turkish population by geographical region. The results suggested that the median age of the Turkish population rises steeply as one moves from the east to the west of the country. Turkstat reported that, in the predominantly Kurdish provinces of southeastern Turkey, the median age was in the range 17.4 to 21 years, rising to 31.8-35.4 years along the Turkish Aegean coast. The median age in Istanbul was in the range 28.3-31.8 (Radikal, March 23).

The southeast of Turkey has also long been the most underdeveloped region of the country. In some provinces, per capita income is less than 20% of the national average. In many of the cities of southeast Turkey the unemployment rate among young people often reaches 50-60% (see EDM, March 18). As has been once again demonstrated by the clashes during Newroz, the combination of ethnic unrest, poverty, a young population, and a high rate of unemployment is rarely a recipe for social stability.

The Tigris, now well on its way to being choked with hydroelectric dams, was then [1839] navigable from Diyarbakir south to the Persian Gulf using keleks, rafts constructed of fresh-cut poplar logs lashed to inflated goat skins. The rafts were made and operated by the kelekjis, a caste of men who specialized in the trade. The largest, says [American missionary] Thomas Laurie, used some three hundred skins, the smallest thirty-two. Before railroads and motor trucks, these rafts delivered the goods: grain, hides, wool, gall-nuts, dried fruits and nuts. Each was made to order and used one time only. At Baghdad (or Basra) the rafts were dismantled and the timber sold, and the deflated goatskins, heaped on the backs of camels, traveled north to be used again.

Eight years after [Dr. Asahel] Grant’s visit [1839], Austen Henry Layard, the pioneer Assyrian archaeologist, used massive versions of these same rafts to transport his finds, including the giant 20-ton limestone bulls now at the British Museum, to Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf. In Nineveh and its Remains (1849), Layard describes their construction.

The skins of full-grown sheep and goats are used. They are taken off with as few incisions as possible, and then dried and prepared. The air is forced in by the lungs through an aperture which is afterwards tied up with string. A square framework, formed of poplar beams, branches of trees, and reeds, having been constructed of the size of the intended raft, the inflated skins are tied to it by osier and other twigs, the whole being firmly bound together. Care is taken to place the skins with their mouths upwards, that, in case any should burst or require filling, they can be easily opened by the raftmen. Upon the framework of wood are piled bales of goods, and property belonging to merchants and travellers. When any person of rank, or wealth, descends the river in this fashion, small huts are constructed on the raft by covering a common wooden takht, or bedstead of the country, with a hood formed of reeds and lined with felt. In these huts the travellers live and sleep during the journey. The only real danger to be apprehended on the river is from the Arabs; who, when the country is in a disturbed state, invariably attack and pillage the rafts.

The Tigris flows through this lake after issuing from the mountainous country near the Niphates; and because of its swiftness it keeps its current unmixed with the lake; whence the name Tigris, since the Median word for arrow is "tigris." And while the river has fish of many kinds, the fish in the lake are of one kind only. Near the recess of the lake the river falls into a pit, and after flowing underground for a considerable distance rises near Chalonitis [a place now unknown--g.t.].