Tribal Turkey versus EU aspirant

Brussels bigwigs should visit the eastern provinces before deciding how ‘European’ the country is

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pushed through reforms to bring his country closer to European Union standards but less progress has been achieved in poorer provinces where ‘tribes’ still rule.

By Burak Bekdil - Kathimerini English Edition

“If Turkey is not European, what other country can be?” exclaimed a lady bigwig from Brussels, sipping her wine at a fancy restaurant by the Bosporus about a month ago. The trouble is, Turkey is not what exactly the enthusiastic visitor sees by the beautiful Bosporus.

Admitting Turkey into the EU will mean admitting a perfectly European country together with several other countries ranging from “less European” to “much less European,” and even to “tribally Middle Eastern.” Turkey is like a special offer: Buy one, get five others free!

A recent incident in eastern Turkey and its aftermath were in sharp contrast to what Turkey’s leaders claim Turkey is.

Mustafa Bayram is leader of a 100,000-strong Kurdish tribe in Van, an impoverished province bordering Iran. The man is a former lawmaker with quite an impressive crime record: murder and drug-trafficking being among them. On July 7, Mr Bayram’s son, Hamit, was arrested by the police while he was trying to sell to drug squad officers disguised as dealers 40 kilograms of pure heroin. What happened afterward has, once again, unveiled another face of Turkey, a face quite different than what one sees by the Bosporus.

While the younger Mr Bayram was being held in temporary custody at a traffic police station, some 30 heavily armed men from the “tribe” showed up and, according to the official account, after a fight but no shooting, managed to make off with their leader’s son. The son has been on the wanted list since then.

But according to an anonymous e-mail message, presumably from one of the police officers on duty that night, the armed group fired on the police officers and wounded eight of them, who are now secretly undergoing treatment at a hospital in Van. The wounded officers have been offered money to keep silent. “Instead of investigating how such an incident could have taken place, our police chiefs have launched a probe to find out who leaked this story,” the letter says. “This is the horrible face of a triangle of money, drugs and politics.”

According to this account, after the arrest, the elder Mr Bayram storms into the office of the police chief and curses him, using unmentionable language. How dare anyone arrest his son? He also rings up the interior minister and the education minister, both of them Kurds (the latter an MP from Van), and threatens them. Both ministers have admitted to having talked to Mr Bayram over the phone, but say they refused his request for assistance.

After wide media coverage of the incident, the “state” had to arrest Mr Bayram, the father — whom it released shortly afterward on a small bail of $20,000. But there is more.

The Social Democrats in the opposition sent a delegation to Van to investigate the “Bayram affair” and subsequently filed a parliamentary motion for a wider probe. That angered one of the tribal leaders.

“Take your hands off Mr Bayram, or you’ll regret it,” Mikail Ilcin told a press conference in Van, in a manner reminiscent of a “capo di tutti i capi.” Mr Ilcin, a member of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, warned Deniz Baykal, leader of the Social Democrats, never to humiliate Mr Bayram. “Or you’ll suffer the consequences. This is a warning,” Mr Ilcin said.

Mr Ilcin is an eccentric Kurd. Before the Iraq war, he sent letters to Mr Erdogan, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer and to General Hilmi Ozkok, Turkey’s top general, asking for support for a Kurdish state in Iraq. He argued that if Turkey was to fight the Iraqi Kurds, it should not send land forces but should rather bomb the Kurds with its fighter jets.

“That way, at least, the Kurds in Iraq and the Kurds in the Turkish army would not have to fight each other,” he reasoned. “I think something like Halabja [site of a chemical weapons attack by Saddam Hussein in 1988] would be much nicer.”

Well, it’s hard to believe Mr Ilcin has perfectly balanced thinking. You don’t always come across a Kurdish patriot who advocates a massacre of Kurds with chemical weapons to avoid fighting between Turkish Kurds and Iraqi Kurds.

No matter what weird ideas Mr Ilcin may have, the way he got into the picture in Van tells much about “the other Turkey.”

The Van incident is no surprise to anyone with a knowledge of Turkish affairs. What is surprising is that it somehow surfaced. Most tribal affairs are open secrets in eastern and southeastern Turkey. One knows they happen without actually seeing them happen.

Perhaps next time the lady bigwig from Brussels comes over she should visit Van or any one of the provinces in Turkey’s eastern half to see whether her exclamation checks out or not.