Help end decades of conflict

After months of dialogue, the Turkish government announced a plan on Friday to help end the quarter-century-long conflict with a Kurdish separatist movement that has cost more than 40,000 lives.

The plan will be debated by Parliament, but the fact that it is being discussed at all is considered to be a landmark. For decades, Kurdish political parties were routinely banned, and the ethnic identity of the Kurds was not openly acknowledged, though they make up almost 15 percent of Turkey’s population.

The government’s plan would allow the Kurdish language to be used in all broadcast media and political campaigns, and restore Kurdish names to cities and towns that have been given Turkish ones. It would also establish a committee to fight discrimination.

This is the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is feared by some as a stealth Islamist.

Such measures, many of which have been required for entry to the European Union, were inconceivable in the early 1980s, when aggressive state policies prohibited use of the Kurdish language and other cultural and political rights for the Kurds. That helped empower the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party, known as the P.K.K., which presented itself as the defender of Kurdish rights.

The group, which has been fighting in the predominantly Kurdish southeast, has lost much of its popular support in recent years because of its violent methods. But it still has 12,000 militants hiding in northern Iraq along the Turkish border.

Turkey’s leading opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, denounces any direct or indirect contact with the P.K.K., though it agrees on cultural rights for Kurds as long as they agree to be identified as Turkish citizens and are educated in Turkish.

Is this a moderate party?

Gaza War Created Rift Between Israel and Turkey

A Palestinian raised a Turkish flag at Friday Prayer in Gaza last week. Many Gazans praised Turkey’s leader after he clashed publicly with Israel’s president.












Israel’s Arab allies stood behind it in the war, but Turkey, a NATO member whose mediating efforts last year brought Israel into indirect talks with Syria, protested every step of the way in a month of angry remarks capped when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stalked off the stage during a debate in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 29.

It seemed more a temper tantrum to me, but I wasn't there. As I remember reading about it, Shimon Peres was given the bulk of the time slot, and Erdogan wanted to rebut something Peres said; the time was up, and it was time for dinner, and the moderator would not give Erdogan more time. It was then that Erdogan stormed out, threatening to never return.

In the week since, both sides have taken pains to mend fences, with officials in Israel and Turkey making conciliatory statements.

While Israel said it went to war to end rocket fire by Hamas, Mr. Erdogan said he saw the war through the prism of democracy.

Depends how one looks at it. How would the PM respond if, say, Artvin was being hit by rockets fired from over the border?

Mr. Erdogan’s stance has won him praise in Arab societies, which opposed Israel’s military campaign and chafe at their leaders’ support of it.

“In one stroke, he became the moral patron saint of the Arab world,” said Mr. Candar, the columnist. But some Turkish columnists criticized Mr. Erdogan for what they said was an implicit hypocrisy — raising the issue of the Israeli killings of Palestinians while failing to mention his own country’s abuses in the mostly Kurdish southeast during years of war there.

Oops.

“One would naturally ask Erdogan, who stands up against violence imposed on people in Gaza, what he thinks about Kurds being killed in his own country,” wrote Ahmet Altan in the liberal Turkish daily Taraf.

Indeed.