Human rights reform in Turkey suffered a serious and disgraceful setback last week when the state security courts again delivered a guilty verdict against Kurdish political dissident Leyla Zana and three other Kurds, all of whom were once members of the Turkish parliament.
Winner of the Sakharov human rights prize in 1995, Zana, along with her colleagues, has been imprisoned since 1994 for nonviolent expressions of opinion against the Turkish state. Their retrial was widely seen as a litmus test of Turkey's resolve to reform its horrific human rights record. It was a test that Turkey failed miserably.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2001 that the original trial of Zana and her co-defendants was unfair; the four were accused of having links with the then-separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party. But in a country that had been torn apart by a violent Kurdish-Turkish civil war from 1984 to 1999, a retrial was unthinkable until last year, after Turkey's newly elected government courageously passed a series of democratization packages.
Turkey is hoping to begin talks in December to join the European Union, and the reform packages, if enforced, have the potential to bring true democracy to a republic that has historically been dominated by the military -- and to bring Turkey in line with EU standards. The Zana retrial, however, should give the EU pause.
From the beginning, the retrial was a mockery of justice. Denounced by human rights groups, it dragged out for over a year. The three-judge panel openly favored the prosecution and rejected many demands of the defense, including the right to thoroughly cross-examine witnesses. Zana and her colleagues -- referred to as "convicts" by the court from day one -- were denied bail and protested the proceedings by boycotting many of their own hearings. Welcome to the new trial, same as the old trial.
The Kurds of Turkey have suffered extraordinary repression at the hands of the state since shortly after the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The right to teach the Kurdish language or to speak it in public places, hold Kurdish cultural events, organize Kurdish political parties -- all have been largely denied as Turkey tried to force the assimilation of its largest minority group. As recently as 1991, the Kurds could not even call themselves Kurds without risking arrest and torture; they were said to be "mountain Turks who have forgotten their language." And in the wake of the civil war, tens of thousands of Kurds have been incarcerated and tortured, and hundreds of thousands burned out of their villages by the Turkish military.
