The Gulen movement is trying to win over Kurds in Diyarbakir, writes NICHOLAS BIRCHin Istanbul
TURKEY’S MOST powerful Muslim movement has increased activities in the Kurdish southeast, as the country’s Islamic-rooted AK Party government struggles to sideline secular Kurdish nationalists who have dominated the region for two decades.
Prime minister Tayyip Erdogan has made clear that his prime aim at local elections on March 29th is to win Diyarbakir, Turkey’s biggest majority Kurdish city.
AK Party has gained ground in the region since 2002, thanks to a mixture of political reformism and economic policies aimed at alleviating widespread local poverty.
Last summer, the government announced a new regional development plan worth €8 billion. This January, state television launched a 24-hour Kurdish channel, a remarkable step in a country that denied Kurds existed until 1991.
But AK Party has a secret weapon too – the three million to five million followers of Turkey’s most influential religious leader, Fethullah Gulen.
Openly supportive of the government, the Gulen movement is best known for the schools it has founded in Turkey and abroad.
In the past two years it has turned its attention to Kurds in Turkey and Iraq. The movement’s first major moves in the region were in 2007, when affiliated charity organisations began distributing meat and clothes during Islamic holidays in Kurdish areas.
Almost every town in southeastern Turkey now has a fee-paying Gulen school. In Iraqi Kurdistan, there are 15, and a university opened last November.
“It is simply the best education you can get,” says Mazhar Bagli, an academic in Diyarbakir. “People are falling over each other to get their kids into these schools.”
Offering free afterschool classes for children studying for exams, the 25 “reading rooms” that opened in Diyarbakir in the past two years are even more popular.
Teachers in a poor central Diyarbakir neighbourhood say 5,000 families applied for 250 places. “Seven-hundred thousand people in Diyarbakir are younger than 18, and most are very poor,” says Aziz Nart, head of a Gulen-linked business group that sponsored the reading rooms. “This is something the state should be dealing with. We are just trying to fill the gaps.”
Secularists have long worried the schools are a tool to educate a new generation of religious-minded Turks. The schools teach Turkey’s secular curriculum. But critics point out that many are boarding schools and it is in the dormitories, they say, that the group tries to impose its ideology.
“The AKP and Gulen share a common vision of how to solve the Kurdish problem,” says Hakan Tahmaz, the left-leaning author of a recent book on the Kurds. “Both use the rhetoric of a golden age when Turks and Kurds were united by their Muslim faith.”
Conservative, though opposed to political Islam, the movement should thrive among traditionally devout Kurds. Yet it has to overcome one major obstacle: its roots in Turkish nationalism. Until 2005, the movement's newspaper, Zaman, rarely used the word Kurd. One Turkey, a hugely popular series on Samanyolu TV, a private channel close to the movement, shows the same conservatism. The hero of the series is a Turkish teacher in a Kurdish village. He tries to modernise it, but it's tough: locals are ignorant traditionalists in the thrall of godless Kurdish separatist militants who kidnap the village imam and force-feed him pork.
“The series doesn’t ask why the villagers are sceptical of the newcomer, or why they support the PKK,” says Serdar Yilmaz, a liberal Islamic intellectual in Diyarbakir, referring to the separatist group that has been fighting Turkey since 1984. “It presents them as imbeciles who can only be saved by enlightened westerners.”
The movement’s main aim, Yilmaz adds, is to create “moral, obedient citizens”. It sees the Kurds as “naughty children who need to be taught good manners”.
Altan Tan, an Islamic-minded Kurdish intellectual who was one of 100 Turkish intellectuals to attend a Gulen-sponsored conference on “living together in peace” in Iraqi Kurdistan last month, warns against seeing the movement as homogeneous.
“Think of AKP: 367 deputies with views all the way from liberal to nationalist,” he says. “The movement is the same. Like all sections of Turkish society, its members are realising that the old mindset is unsuited to the realities of the country.”
Businessman Aziz Nart sees himself as an agent of change. He describes one Istanbul factory owner his association hosted in Diyarbakir confessing that he had always avoided hiring Kurds.
“From now on, I’ll go out of my way to employ them,” the factory owner told him.