Unlike Saddam who gassed the Kurds en masse at Halepce, the Turkish Army did not target civilians per se. Turkish counterinsurgency tactics were standard Vietnam issue: Destroy food and shelter that guerillas can use, deprive them of a recruitment base, and concentrate civilians in fortified villages. This not to say atrocities weren't committed or that the army tried to avoid civilian casualties. I've read about or heard reports from veterans of entire - inhabited - villages being napalmed or shelled (e.g. Lulan and Khazina in N. Iraq) because some fleeing ARGK guerillas took cover there, or some drunken officer telling his men to flatten a village just for the hell of it, or paramilitary special forces disguised as PKK killing civilians (e.g. Guclupinar). But these Vietnam-style atrocities were not the rule. There _was_ a Phoenix-type execution program which some say claimed over 2000 victims, although reports I've seen for 1997-2000 average less than 80 a year and many of these are now known to have been Hezbollah killings (albeit officially tolerated). Many of these were non-combatants, but there again, it wasn't a mass killing or genocide. Millions of people were displaced to clear the combat zone but they were not killed. The army treated all Kurds who didn't sign up for the government's village guards program as potential PKK collaborators, abused them, tortured them for information, and forced them to evacuate without compensation, but did not massacre them systematically. The army's indifference to civilian casualties had limits: Hakkari or Tunceli never became a Grozni or Hama.
I have to note that this indifference is egalitarian. When I was a student an officer opened up on a group that was occupying an auditorium with a submachine gun. You don't have to be a Kurd to become a casualty.
It can be argued that the Turkish army is guilty of significantly fewer human rights violations (all inexcusable) in its war against the PKK than the US army in Vietnam or the French in Algeria or any US-supported Latin American army against its own people. You also have to remember that the ARGK attacked undefended villages which refused to collaborate and when all remaining villages were armed by the government, these were also attacked. ARGK reports for 1995 and 1996, when their military campaign was at its peak, show 3-4 times as many killed by the PKK in attacks on these armed kurdish villages as civilian deaths attributed to the Turkish army. The ARGK claims that it took pains to avoid civilian casualties but I've never come across any evidence to support this. In fact, going by what I know about Ocalan from his pre-1980 days as overlord of several "liberated regions" in the southeast, which his men terrorized, I would expect more of the same happened after 1984.
Most Turkish Kurds don't live in "Kurdistan" (which others call "Armenia" or "Assyria", but that's another story) but in the rest of Turkey. A whole lot more of them live in Istanbul than any Kurdish town. And there has been virtually NO popular backlash against them (they _are_ harassed by the cops, though). No riots, no arson, no bombings, no drive-bys, nothing. And this is in a country where the fascists are senior coalition partners, fascist youth organizations are hugely popular, almost all non-Kurds hate the PKK and want to see Ocalan swing, and guns are plentiful. Kurds can still carry on their lives almost as if this 15-year war had never happened. This is not true for other ethnic minorities, like the Armenians, Greeks, or Alewites, who have been persecuted and forced into internal or external exile.
Anyway, when you look at the body count, it's obvious that the overwhelming majority of the 30.000 dead were combatants. The Turkish army alone was losing around 5000 a year in 1995-1997.
The Turkish army is a strange creature. It gave the country its most liberal constitution and later seized power twice to impose a highly repressive one. Nowadays it is making far less trouble than expected about the constitutional reforms necessary for EU membership. This ambiguity is not specific to the army, it's something the whole society shares. Turkey is an ambiguous place; no black-or-white statements can be made about it.
Hakki
Michael Pugliese:
|| And, yup, NATO ally Turkey has destroyed thousands of
|| Kurdish villages
|| too. See G. Chaliand book from U.C. Press or Zed Press on the Kurds. A
|| previous book of his, " Revolution in the Third World, " from
|| the late 70's
|| has a preface from Wallerstein and a blurb from Chomsky.