Edition: U.S. / Global

Turkey Jails A Dissident Who Praised Rebel Kurds

Published: January 28, 1998

In a sign of Turkey's determination to limit public praise for Kurdish guerrillas, an outspoken essayist and political scientist has been jailed to begin serving a 10-month sentence.

The dissident, Haluk Gerger, 50, who is not Kurdish, was jailed on Monday. He was convicted last year in connection with an article he wrote in 1993 praising the rebels and accusing the army of bombing villages and burning farms in the Kurdish region.

Soon after the article appeared in the newspaper Ozgur Dundem, the paper was declared a guerrilla organ and closed.

Speaking in Ankara before he complied with a police order to surrender, Mr. Gerger said he was moving ''from the open-air prison of Turkey to a closed penitentiary.''

''We began our struggle even though we realized that there is a high cost for remaining human,'' Mr. Gerger told journalists and supporters at the Human Rights Association headquarters. ''Standing against the impositions of this system is the only way to keep alive the individual within us. We will continue to tell the truth and shelter the innocent. We cannot stay indifferent to the fanatic terror of this dirty war.''

The 14-year-old war between the Turkish Army and separatist Kurds is estimated to to have killed 27,000 people and cost billions of dollars. The Government describes the guerrillas as terrorists, and cannot tolerate hearing its own soldiers described that way.

Officials say those who condemn the war are in effect supporting efforts to divide the country. To suppress them, courts have sent scores of writers and other intellectuals to prison.

One of the most prominent among them, the blind lawyer and playwright Esber Yagmurdereli, 52, was released on health grounds shortly before Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz visited Washington last month. He protested that he was not ill, and last week prosecutors informed him that he is likely to be send back to jail for refusing to submit to medical examinations.

In a telephone interview today from a location he would not identify, Mr. Yagmurdereli suggested that he was in hiding. ''As soon as the police see me,'' he said, ''they will take me.''

Mr. Yagmurdereli and Mr. Gerger are leftist critics of the Turkish political system and of the military's role in it. They have called for an end to the Kurdish war and unrestricted freedom to speak, broadcast and teach in the Kurdish language.

The Government says it will grant such freedoms when the war ends, but cannot do so now because they would be misused by those who want to fan the flames of Kurdish nationalism with the aim of dismembering the country.

Restrictions on freedom of speech, especially those enforced against Kurds and their supporters, are often cited by foreign leaders and others who question the fullness of democracy in Turkey.

In Bonn today, human rights advocates demanding the release of Hamdi Turanli, a Kurdish leader who is said to be seriously ill, picketed meetings between German officials and Turkey's Foreign Minister, Ismail Cem. Mr. Turanli, who has lived in Germany for more than 30 years and holds German and Turkish citizenship, was arrested on Jan. 12 in Ankara and has not yet been charged.

In speeches and articles, Mr. Gerger has based his opposition to the war on what he says is its corrosive effect on Turkish society. The article that led to his sentencing violated a strict taboo by urging that the Turkish Government negotiate with the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party, known as the P.K.K.

The Government describes the party as a gang of cut-throat terrorists, but Mr. Gerger said they represent the Kurdish people. He also asserted that ''Kurdish villages are being bombed and homes, fields and forests are being burned.''

''This bleeding wound which we call the Kurdish problem has its roots in the objective realities of history, culture, politics and social relations,'' he wrote. ''The Kurds and the P.K.K. are so closely tied that whoever tries to extinguish the fire inside the Kurdish soul finds his hands burned by the P.K.K.''

Mr. Gerger was dismissed from his university professorship after the 1980 military coup and later served two years in prison for making what was deemed a statement of support for Kurdish rebels. At a news conference in Ankara on Monday, the president of the Human Rights Association, Akin Birdal, who was himself recently acquitted of charges that he supported terrorism, hailed him as a martyr to free expression. ''In civilized countries writers wait at the doors of theaters and opera houses with tickets in their hands,'' Mr. Birdal said. ''In Turkey they wait at prison gates with verdicts in their hands.''