29 years after Yaşar Kemal's Frankfurt speech, Kurds are still offered democracy in pieces

Rastinews —

Speaking in Germany in 1997, Yaşar Kemal said Turkey's insistence on a unitary state had impoverished both Kurds and Turks. Ankara now speaks of a new process, but the question he raised remains unanswered.

Speaking in Germany in 1997, Yaşar Kemal said democracy cannot be divided. Today's path for Kurds proposes the opposite: winning one right, then starting over for the next, generation after generation.

In October 1997, Europe's literary world filled Frankfurt's Paulskirche to watch Yaşar Kemal accept the German Publishers' Peace Prize. But his real audience wasn't in the hall. It was the Turkish state, which had put him on trial before the State Security Court two years earlier over an interview he gave to Der Spiegel.

Reading part of that speech again today, what unsettles isn't how old the words are. It's how little they've aged.

A mindset, not just a ban list

Yaşar Kemal doesn't open with the Kurds. He starts with Anatolia, drawing a line from the philosophers of Miletus to Homer, and reminding his audience that this land was never built on one language or one culture, but on dozens that fed each other.

Then he makes his core argument: the Republic's insistence on a unitary state, in trying to make Turkish the sole dominant language, ended up impoverishing Turkish itself. Had Kurdish, Laz, Circassian, Arabic and Assyrian been left free, they would have enriched each other — and Turkish along with them.

Yaşar Kemal doesn't defend Kurdish rights as a favor or a minority demand. He treats the banning of languages as a waste of the whole country's cultural wealth.

The logic of fear

The speech's sharpest point concerns why the state resists Kurdish. Its logic, as Yaşar Kemal describes it, is simple: grant freedom to a language and a culture, and separatism follows.

That fear justified a war already in its twelfth year in 1997. Today the same fear sits at the table in a different shape. Every time the demand for education in the mother tongue comes up, the answer stays the same: security first, rights maybe later.

Crumbs instead of the whole

Perhaps the shortest, heaviest line in Yaşar Kemal's speech was this: "Democracy is a whole."

That line offers a yardstick for reading what's on the table for Kurds today. On one side: a constitutional process, the laying down of arms, the surrender of militants, the release of sick prisoners. On the other: the demand for education in the mother tongue, reduced to an elective class.

Say all of it goes through. Say the guns fall silent, prison doors open a little, and Kurdish keeps its place in schools as a few hours a week. What comes next?

The future on offer for Kurds is plain enough at that point: fighting again for the next right. In unions, in parties, in the streets, at the ballot box. Kurdish mothers, young people and children would be mobilized once more, this time for Turkey's "further democratization." A decade for one language right, a decade for one local-government power, a decade for one constitutional clause.

Even without an armed struggle, the picture doesn't change: a war for democracy fought in fragments, thirty, forty, maybe fifty years long, won crumb by crumb.

Same cycle, different tools

The state isn't the only one responsible for this picture. A large part of Kurdish politics — the PKK and its political cadres chief among them — worked the same way for years, chasing partial gains offered at the table rather than demanding a comprehensive status and full rights. Each gain became the starting point for the next fight, never anchored in a lasting guarantee.

The process now called "Terror-Free Turkey" is pulling Kurds toward the same place. Laying down arms is on the table, but which rights Kurds will gain with constitutional guarantees once the arms are gone is not. The timetable is built around security; there is no timetable for rights.

Nor is this pattern unique to Turkey. A similar cycle runs through every part of the region where Kurds live: gains depend on the will of central governments, and no one addresses what happens when the political wind changes.

Yaşar Kemal's question

In Frankfurt that day, Yaşar Kemal closed by saying he believed Turkey would sooner or later arrive at real democracy. But by "real," he didn't mean rights handed out piece by piece. He meant a complete order in which languages, cultures and peoples stand equal.

Twenty-nine years have passed. The question worth asking today isn't when the process will end. It's this: will Kurds emerge from it with a guarantee that spares them generations of further struggle, or will they simply be standing at the starting line of another forty years?

Until that question is answered, every step taken splits the democracy Yaşar Kemal described as a whole into installments for Kurds once again.