Kurdish people watch a major policy speech by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on television in Diyarbakir yesterday.
ANKARA: Turkey yesterday announced reforms seen as designed to salvage a peace process with Kurdish insurgents, including changes to the electoral system, broadening of language rights and permission for villages to use their original Kurdish names.
The pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) said the proposals, presented by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, were not enough to satisfy Kurdish militants who this month halted their withdrawal from Turkish territory.
The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) insurgency has tarnished Turkey’s human rights record and crippled the economy in the mainly Kurdish southeast of the country. More than 40,000 people have been killed in fighting since 1984.
Other reforms include allowing election campaigns to be conducted in languages other than Turkish and decriminalising the use of Kurdish letters not found in the Turkish alphabet.
All primary school students in state schools will now also no longer have to recite a deeply nationalistic vow at the start of each week, which begins with the words: “I am a Turk”.
In a major policy speech, Erdogan said parliament would debate whether to reduce the threshold for a political party to enter parliament to five percent of the national vote, or even eliminate the barrier completely, and introduce a “narrowing” of the current constituency system.
The current 10 percent threshold, among the highest in the world, has kept pro-Kurdish groupings outside of parliament and has been one of the main grievances of Turkey’s Kurds who make up around a fifth of the country’s 76 million population.
Erdogan said his “democratisation package” would also allow for education in languages other than Turkish at non-state schools, another long-held demand by Kurdish politicians.
“Today our country, our nation, is experiencing an historic moment. It is passing through a very important stage. We are taking important steps to make Turkey even greater,” Erdogan told a specially convened news conference in Ankara.
“Our people’s greatest wish is to strengthen our domestic peace, further our social cohesion and solidarity, and fortify our tranquillity,” Erdogan said.
While Erdogan reiterated that the proposed reforms are not directly linked with efforts to end the 29-year conflict with the outlawed PKK, the changes are largely viewed as an effort to advance the flagging peace process.
But BDP co-chairwoman Gultan Kisanak said the measures still fell short. “The democratisation package does not meet our expectations,” she told reporters. “The package does not have the capacity to overcome blockages in the peace process.”
Kisanak criticised Erdogan’s proposed reform on mother tongue instruction in schools as this would only apply to private fee-paying institutions. She reiterated the BDP’s demand to eliminate the vote threshold, saying lowering of the barrier would not justly represent the votes.
Erdogan also proposed reforms to restrictions on the Islamic headscarf, saying women employees would be allowed to cover their heads at state institutions except in the military and security services, and for judges and prosecutors.
The regulation on headscarves dates back to the early days of the Turkish Republic and has kept many women from joining the public workforce. Relatively low female employment in Turkey is regarded as one of the country’s economic weaknesses.
The issue has also heightened tension between religious and secular elites, one of the major fault lines in Turkish public life. Erdogan has already eased the ban on headscarves at universities and religious schools, drawing criticism from secularists who see the government pushing an Islamic agenda.
Erdogan said the state would return land belonging to Mor Gabriel, the world’s oldest Syriac monastery in southeastern Turkey. Some 20,000 Syriac Christians live in Turkey, mostly in Istanbul, having fled their ancient homeland for economic and security reasons.
REUTERS
