One hundred Kurds have gone on hunger strike in protest at Britain's jailing of Kurdish Workers Party leader Kani Yilmaz. A further 89 non-Kurdish inmates at Rochester, where he is being held, have gone on hunger strike in solidarity and appointed Yilmaz as their spokesperson.
The Home Office has given in to pressure from Turkey and jailed him on the grounds of "national security". This deprives detainees of rights of appeal and protest.
The reasons behind this are not hard to see as well as being a big buyer of western arms Turkey is a key strategic asset in the middle east. The west wants to integrate it into its plans for the region. Stopping dissidents speaking in Britain is part of the deal.
This comes in the same week that Turkey is investigated for human rights violations.
Human rights
The European Commission of Human Rights has agreed to investigate how 17 year old Devrin Berktay was thrown by police off a fourth floor balcony. In another case trade union activist Nebatahat Akkoc claims her husband was killed by security forces and that she was subiected to severe torture at Diyarbakar police station.
The Commission is to investigate six cases of indiscriminate killings, murder, disappearances and torture.
These are just the tip of the iceberg.
The Turkish government is pursuing a brutal policy of death and destruction directed at Kurdish areas which includes the burning of villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants. The army has killed 300,000 people in its drive to eliminate opposition in the southeast of the country.
This barbaric war has a particularly ghastly reality for Kurdish women. The destruction of villages and forced displacement effects their lives most painfully and enduringly. During military operations women are stripped naked and raped in front of family members and men. Arrested women and injured women guerrillas are tortured, raped and often murdered.
Kurdish refugees have to live in insanitary internment camps with minimal or absent medical provision. Dozens of children die every day from preventable diseases.
The war is part of the government's final solution to the Kurdish question — the elimination of all linguistic and cultural diversity for the sake of a spurious "national" Turkish homogeneity.
This necessitates crushing all opposition. Hence the forced closure of the pro-Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündemand the imprisonment and murder of its staff.
The recent treason charges against eight Kurdish members of parliament is further example of the repressive nature of the regime. The eight are threatened with the death penalty for the crime of using the Kurdish language in a public meeting and suggesting that there is such a thing as a Kurdish people.
Elections
As was revealed in the March 27 municipal elections, the main parties have nothing to offer the Kurds but further repression. A poster of one of the big bourgeois parties declared each vote for the DYP is a bullet against the PKK".
The rise of Turkish nationalism in reaction to the Kurdish resistance has allowed the richt to maintain its rule despite the extreme fragmentation of bourgeois politics following the 1980 coup. This explains why the semi-fascist National Action Party was able to double its vote to eight per cent. Ail the rightwing groupings empioy chauvinist anti-Kurd propaganda.
Just when the austerity programme of radical restructuring needs a strong leadership the rule of the bourgeoisie shows increasing signs of weakness. The adopted austerity proaramme means mass privatisa. tion, the closure offirms deemed unprofitable, tax reform, price rises of up to 100% and a semifreeze on salaries. These may well provoke mass social revolt. When first mooted Türk-is, the main trade union federation, threatened to cali a general How long this brutal regime can hold out depends a great deal on how much longer the west is prepared to keep pouring in the weaponry of repression.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.71, 3 November 1994, Page 14