Tem Espaço na Van?

Southeastern Turkey, from this site: http://www.pedology.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/tr-gap1.jpg
(by way of this article on water politics in SE Turkey: http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/kurd-water.htm)

Ok, let's not beat about the bush. The situation in southeastern Turkey has grown more worrisome. Let me make clear from the outset of this mildly informed post that here in Alanya we still see zero evidence of this. There continues to be no local manifestation of political conflict or even anxiety, much less violence. Any observations of my own are inevitably coming at a remove of several steps, via the same sources of international news available everywhere. 

Nonetheless, I am gathering as much news as possible about what is going on in the rest of Turkey. And that news is clearly not as pretty as the view from the villa balcony.

Kurdish protests against Turkey's refusal to send troops across the border to rescue Kurds in Kobane, Syria, intensified about ten days ago, and those intensified protests provoked aggressive responses from both the Turkish government and from private actors. 

One of the most disturbing incidents happened far from southeastern Turkey, in Istanbul. The coach of third-division soccer team Sarıyer was beaten by angry fans after his assistant coach tweeted pro-Kurdish sentiments. I can't say anything more about the tweets because I haven't seen them. But the violent reaction suggests a reservoir of hostility, available to be tapped in irrational ways.

After a decade of violence in the 1990s, the peace process between Kurds and the Turkish government has made slow, halting progress in recent years. That progress has faltered several times, and was renewed most recently in March, 2013. Everyone knew that peace was fragile. Nonetheless, it has been disheartening to see how quickly it seems to be unraveling.

I may be naïve—in fact, I am definitely naïve. After twenty years of traveling in Brazil and feeling the burden of having to know what in blazes is going on, it has come almost as a relief to arrive as a rookie to Turkey, where no one expects me to know anything. I will assert very little about Turkey, but will openly acknowledge my generally superficial grasp of complex problems.

So, call me naïve, but I still think there is a chance the Kurdish-Turkish peace process can be rescued. Of all the countries in the region, Turkey is the one that stands the best chance of incorporating Kurds into a representative polity, protecting the rights of ethnic minorities. That may be a low bar, given that the other countries with large Kurdish populations are Syria, Iraq and Iran, but that makes it all the more crucial for imaginative negotiation here, where there is a real chance of success.

Looked at another way, if you had asked someone in 1924 whether the new republic would have a more violent relationship with Greeks or Kurds, the answer most certainly would have been Greeks. And yet, against the odds, Turkey and Greece have made it through ninety years with strains, disagreements and grudges but minimal violence. Can Turkey achieve the same kind of coexistence with its Kurdish population?  

For a brief period, it seemed that facing the common enemy of the IS might lead to increasing cooperation between Kurds in Turkey and the Turkish government. Instead, the current flare-up suggests that the strains of the border war may be exacerbating old hostilities.

There are still signs of hope and possibility. My heart goes out to Adana, Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa and Dıyarbıkar—I hope the fragile peace they experienced in the past few years can be recovered.

In the meantime, sometimes the absurdist response seems to offer the brightest glimmer. Whenever I read about conflict in the southeastern city of Van, I am reminded of Ed Motta's soul-funk, "Tem Espaço na Van," and hope there is, in fact, room in the Van.

And I can't help but take some entirely misplaced solace when I google search for a map of southeastern Turkey and it comes up with this (an artifact from another history of violence):