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In a widely reported speech last month, Recep Tayyip Erdogan spokeabout Turkey's seemingly perpetual problem with its largest ethnicminority, the Kurds. He insisted on the indivisibility of thecountry, describing it as "one nation, one state, one flag and onereligion." Erdogan, whose Islamic-leaning Justice and DevelopmentParty (AKP) has ruled Turkey since 2002, would later insist thatthe religion reference was a slip of the tongue, that he did notmean to bring up religion. Many Kurdish activists drew a differentconclusion. To them, the misstatement spoke clearly to the AKP'sunspoken policy of using Islam to lure the Kurds into abandoningtheir struggle for additional rights and a measure of politicalautonomy. (Like most Turks, including Erdogan himself, the majorityof Kurds are Sunni Muslims.) Recently, the lightning rod for such suspicions has been the Gulenmovement, the controversial religious group suspected of wieldingconsiderable sway over the Turkish government, business community,and the media. (The movement takes its name from Fethullah Gulen, aPennsylvania-based Islamic preacher.) The group, many Kurdishnationalists suspect, has been part and parcel of a new governmentstrategy to pacify and assimilate the Kurds. "Someone comes hereand tries to teach our people religion," Ahmet Turk, a prominentKurdish politician, said back in 2010. "And they say in the name ofIslam, 'Yes, let us help you improve your belief but forget aboutyour identity.'" Says Vahap Coskun, an assistant professor atDiyarbakir's Dicle University, "Together, the [Gulenists] and thegovernment have been using religion to attain the objective theyhave in mind — to build the unity of the state." (PHOTOS: Portraits of the Kurdish Rebels) The Gulen movement publicly eschews politics. Its main objective inTurkey's Kurdish-majority southeast, key Gulenists insist, is tofocus on a long-neglected issue: education. For the region's Kurds,access to quality schooling has always been scarce. A raging30-year conflict between Kurdish militants and the Turkish army hasmade things even worse. The Gulenists — who run some of thebest university preparatory schools in the country — have gonea considerable way to address governmental neglect. As a Kurdishcolumnist at one of Turkey's largest papers — himself agraduate of a Gulen school — told me in Istanbul, "Most of thepeople from the southeast, if they're here [in Istanbul] and ifthey're successful, chances are that at some point they wentthrough the Gulen system." In Diyarbakir, the biggest city in the Kurdish-majority southeast,I visited with Ali Pehlivan, the principal of Nil Elementary, oneof 57 private schools operated by the Gulen movement in the region.Pehlivan was beaming with pride. His school, he told me, hadrecently placed 73rd nationwide out of 18,000 primary schools— the first time that a school from Diyarbakir had cracked thecountry's top 100. For all their success, schools like Pehlivan's appear to haveoutworn their welcome among some Kurds. On May 14, the day Iarrived in Diyarbakir, a homemade bomb exploded at a Gulendormitory. At one of the Gulen prep schools I visited the followingday, the headmaster, Bulent Ince, reported about 15 attacks againsthis school — ranging from Molotov cocktails to broken windows— over the past three years, the most recent having occurredin early May. In late April, another prep school in Cizre, a townnear the Iraqi border, was sprayed with gunfire. Though nocasualties were reported in any of these attacks — most tookplace at night — there have been allegations of targetedkillings. Two years ago, an imam close to the Gulen movement waskilled in Hakkari, about 250 miles east of Diyarbakir. (MORE: Istanbul: Big Trouble in Little Kurdistan) Most observers are certain the attacks are the work of theKurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a militant group, or of itssympathizers. The PKK sees itself as a champion of Kurdish rightsand has waged war against the Turkish army since 1984. To date, theconflict has claimed 40,000 lives. The U.S. and the E.U. havelabeled the PKK a terrorist organization. Contacted by phone, PKK spokesperson Roj Welat denied his group'sresponsibility for the attacks. He did insinuate, however, that theGulen movement and its institutions were legitimate targets. "Aslong as there is a denial and annihilation policy against theKurdish people," he said, "every human being has a right to defendthemself whenever they are under attack." Fethullah Gulen's statements on the PKK have done little to allaytensions between his group and the Kurdish militants. In a speechlast October, Gulen lambasted the Turkish army for being "unable tofinish off a group of bandits in the mountains over the last 30years." The timing was less than fortunate. Two months later, themilitary killed 34 Kurdish smugglers in a botched airstrike againstwhat it believed was a column of PKK fighters. The biggest charge leveled against the Gulenists, however, haslittle to do with their leader's rhetoric. Since 2009, a series ofpolice operations against the so-called Union of Communities inKurdistan (KCK), alleged to be the PKK's urban arm, has led to thearrest of several thousand Kurds. Many in the Kurdish movementallege that Gulenists inside the police and judiciary have been adriving force behind the crackdown. The movement's aim, VahapCoskun suspects, is to imprison and intimidate as many Kurdishactivists and politicians as possible — to the extent thateven those opposed to the PKK have landed behind bars. TheGulenists, he says, "want to criminalize and marginalize theKurdish political movement as a whole." (MORE: In Turkey's Kurdish Southeast, an Incendiary Celebration) To Emre Uslu, a columnist and terrorism expert, the recent attacksare directly related the Gulen movement's unprecedented expansionin the southeast. Aside from schools, Gulenists now run popularprep courses, business associations, and okuma saloni (reading halls), which cater to underprivileged students. Thesealone, says Uslu, attract approximately 30,000 children each year.The PKK, he says, "feels threatened by these numbers." The Gulenmovement, he adds, has become the PKK's "number one enemy." Ironically, individual Gulenists appear to have a moreaccommodating approach toward the Kurdish issue than successiveTurkish governments. Cemal Usak, a longtime associate of Gulen andthe Vice President of the Journalists and Writers Foundation, toldme in Istanbul that Turkish public opinion has failed todistinguish between PKK violence and the Kurds' legitimate strugglefor social and cultural rights. "Even if the terror comes to anend, the Kurdish problem will remain because 80-90% of it has to dowith language and identity." In remarks that would place him closerto the Kurdish movement than to the Turkish political mainstream,Usak argued in favor of introducing Kurdish courses at schoolsacross all of Turkey (the majority of the country's 12 million to15 million Kurds, having escaped poverty and war, now live outsidethe southeast), restoring orginal names of Kurdish towns andvillages, and even, if necessary, negotiating with the PKK. At an informal meeting of local Gulenists in Diyarbakir, Celal, aphysiotherapist, struck an apologetic tone when asked about therecent attacks against the schools. "The attacks are not theirfault but ours," he said, referring to the perpetrators. "Becausewe haven't explained ourselves in the right way." MORE: Provoked by a New Attack, Turkey Takes the Fight to KurdishSeparatists VIDEO: Turkey's Unconventional Muslim Minority. The e-commerce company in China offers quality products such as Wind Tower Production Line , China Welding Manipulator, and more. For more , please visit Roll Forming Machinery today!
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