Turkey Abdullah Demirbas European Union Kurds

Correction Appended

Walking through the Sur district of Diyarbakir with Abdullah Demirbas was like taking an old-fashioned mayoral stroll. As the day got under way in one of the largest cities in southeastern Turkey, Demirbas passed through the narrow stone alleys, and one by one, shopkeepers stepped outside and waved. In return, Demirbas patted his chest and called out loud greetings. He stopped to compliment a cafe owner’s new door frames, asked a trio of women if they were satisfied with the trash collection and teased some kids about getting to school on time. Demirbas addressed most of the locals in Kurdish, his native language, but every now and then he switched to Turkish. When I asked him why, he said he has known all his constituents long enough to remember which language each speaks.

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Left: Kurds rallying at an annual celebration in Diyarbakir.

Neither my question nor his answer was idle. Demirbas was in a legal ordeal when we spoke last summer because he had been using Kurdish in his capacity as the mayor of Sur, Diyarbakir’s central district, an ancient neighborhood ringed by several miles of high basalt walls. For printing a children’s book and tourist brochures in Kurdish, according to a report by the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party, Demirbas was accused of misusing municipal resources. For giving a blessing in Kurdish while officiating at a wedding ceremony, he was accused of misusing his position. And for proposing that his district should employ Kurdish-speaking phone operators and print public-health pamphlets in Kurdish, he was accused (and later acquitted) of aiding a terrorist organization — the Kurdistan Workers Party, or P.K.K.

The fact that a reference to terrorism should find its way into the reported accusations against Demirbas, a 41-year-old schoolteacher-turned-politician, might seem bizarrely beside the point, given the scale of the conflict between Turks and Kurds. The fighting between P.K.K. guerrillas and Turkish soldiers has raged in various forms for nearly 30 years and since 2004 has alternated between short-lived cease-fires and sporadic attacks. After 12 Turkish soldiers were killed in a devastating assault in October last year, the military began a series of airstrikes against P.K.K. camps in northern Iraq. These came after months of diplomatic wrangling in which Turkey criticized American and Iraqi leaders for not supporting its fight against the P.K.K., and the Bush administration begged Turkey not to destabilize the one part of Iraq that was fairly functional. This would seem to be far more serious than a dispute over the language of a children’s book.

But the battle that Demirbas entered, waged entirely on paper and in courtrooms, is closely related to the violence. For the past two years, politicians all over southeastern Turkey, along with human rights advocates, journalists and other public figures, have been sued for instances of Kurdish-language usage so minor that they are often a matter of a few words: sending a greeting card with the words “happy new year” in Kurdish, for example, or saying “my dear sisters” in a speech at a political rally. Such lawsuits have become so common that in some cases the accused is simply fined for using the letters W, X or Q — present in the Kurdish but not the Turkish alphabet — in an official capacity. In cases involving elected politicians, like Demirbas, the language usage is sometimes considered disloyalty and can carry a prison sentence.

This miniaturist culture war and the fighting in the mountains are related because they both reflect the inability of Turkish society to integrate Kurds — about 20 percent of the country’s total population and the majority in the southeast — in a way that doesn’t insist on assimilation down to the last W, X or Q. For decades, Turkish law has not allowed acknowledgment of Kurds as a distinct ethnic group; from 1983 to 1991 it was even illegal to speak Kurdish in public. Until 2002, broadcasting in Kurdish was essentially banned, and only in 2003 could parents give their children Kurdish names (except, again, for names using W, X or Q). But even these small advances suggest that while the military fight has been a stalemate, the deeper cultural conflict can, with relative ease, be resolved. Such at least is the vision of Abdullah Demirbas. His may not be the effort that makes headlines, but it is probably the one that matters most.

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Meline Toumani has written about Turkey for n+1, The Boston Globe and other publications. A 2007 journalism fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, she is writing a book on national identity.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 2, 2008 An article on Feb. 17 about multiculturalism in Turkey referred imprecisely to a European delegation that visited the country to monitor the trial of a Turkish mayor who spoke Kurdish in public, and misstated the number of its visits. It represented the Council of Europe Congress, not the European Union, and it made a single visit to Turkey, not frequent visits.