Turkey's ruling party looks to a symbol of a bygone era as the country's Kurdish problem enters a new -- potentially explosive -- era, writes Gareth Jenkins from Istanbul Kemal Burkay, one of the last of a generation of left-wing political refugees who fled the country around the time of the 1980 military coup, returned to Turkey last week to a hero's welcome. An ethnic Kurd and founder of the Kurdistan Socialist Party (KSP), Burkay had spent most of the last 31 years in exile in Sweden. Like many other former members of the Turkish socialist movement, which was brutally crushed following the generals' seizure of power, Burkay retained a fierce hatred of the Turkish military and an instinctive willingness to embrace anyone who, for whatever reason, shared his feelings. In recent years, he has become an outspoken supporter of the ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP), which had long regarded the military as the main obstacle to its hopes of dismantling Turkey's traditional draconian interpretation of secularism. Despite growing concerns that the JDP has been using them to suppress dissent and persecute its critics, Burkay vigorously defended politically charged judicial investigations, such as the notorious Ergenekon case, on the grounds that members of the military were being thrown in jail. Perhaps more importantly for the JDP, Burkay had also criticised the modern Kurdish nationalist movement, including both the non-violent Peace and Democracy Party (PDP) and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been waging a violent insurgency for greater Kurdish rights since 1984. Burkay had frequently lambasted the PDP for refusing to support what he described as the JDP's attempts at greater democratisation and repeatedly called on the PKK to lay down its arms. In recent months, JDP ministers had sent several messages to Burkay urging him to return to Turkey. When he did so, he was greeted at Istanbul airport not only by his former colleagues but also by members of pro-JDP NGOs, feted in the pro-JDP media as a symbol of peace and ethnic reconciliation. Egemen Bagis, the JDP minister for European Union affairs, even joined Burkay for joint press conference, at which he presented the founder of the Marxist KSP with a Kurdish language copy of the Quran, which he described as a symbol of their "shared values". Not surprisingly, Burkay soon found himself facing accusations that he was a puppet of the government. "I am not the JDP's man," he protested in an interview on the CNNTurk television channel, before praising the JDP's Kurdish policies as important and courageous and calling on others to support them. But Burkay also acknowledged that, at 71 years-old and with virtually no political or personal following among today's Kurdish nationalists, his ability to exert any influence was likely to remain limited. The enthusiasm with which the JDP and the pro-government media hailed Burkay's return to Turkey has reinforced doubts about their understanding of the nature of the modern Kurdish nationalist movement and how grave the situation is now becoming. Although few have any sympathy for the Turkish military, over the last 18 months Kurdish nationalists have also seen hundreds of their colleagues arrested and imprisoned in judicial cases marred by blatant abuses of due process and plagued with persistent allegations that evidence has been fabricated. Last week, Aysel Tugluk, of the successful pro-PDP candidates in the 12 June 2011 Turkish general election, was sentenced to two years in jail for alleged pro-PKK propaganda. Another five successful PDP candidates in the June elections ran for parliament from their prison cells, where they are being held on charges of belonging to a PKK umbrella organisation. Even though they have yet to be convicted, the courts refused to release them to take their seats in parliament pending the completion of their trial. Flushed with his landslide victory on 12 June, when the JDP won 49.9 per cent of the popular vote, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has refused to acknowledge that Turkey's Kurds even have grievances that need to be addressed, arguing, in a reference to the PKK, that there is "no longer a Kurdish problem; just a problem of terrorism". Yet, on the ground in the predominantly Kurdish southeast of the country, there is a growing sense that the Kurdish problem not only exists but is nearing the point of no return; after which it will become a question of when and how, not if, the Kurds break away from the authority of the central government in Ankara to establish either autonomy or full-blown independence. More ominously, the JDP's continuing refusal to engage with the modern Kurdish nationalist movement, and the continuing harassment and imprisonment of its members, is playing into the hands of elements that maintain that political pressure and non-violent protest will never be enough to force concessions from the Turkish state. After years in which it has mixed short bursts of intense violence with sustained periods of low levels of activity in the hope that the Turkish government would enter into substantive peace negotiations, the PKK has finally announced that it had enough. On Friday, the organisation released a statement warning of an imminent escalation in violence. "An era has now come to close," it declared. "It has become clear that democratic methods will not bring a solution."
