Title: Managing Turkey’s#PKK# Conflict: The Case of Nusaybin
Place of publication: Brussels, Belgium
Publisher: International Crisis Group
Release date: 2017
Nusaybin, a political stronghold of the Kurdish movement bordering Syria, is among Turkey’s urban south-eastern districts that saw unprecedented levels of violence in 2016. Particularly in the wake of the failed July coup attempt and in the run-up to the 2017 presidential system referendum, emergency rule conditions resulted in the arrest and/or removal from office of elected representatives of the legal Kurdish political movement. While conflict fatigue can be observed in this town where 30,000 lost their homes, so can a distinct sense that a political solution is not in sight. Ankara’s effort to meet residents’ basic needs and compensate their material losses is notable, but managing the conflict’s social/political fallout and addressing grievances of Kurdish movement supporters will be crucial if that marginalised constituency is not to be left more susceptible to mobilisation by the insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and drawn toward violence.
Since violence resumed in July 2015, the 33-year conflict with the PKK, which Turkey, the U.S. and European Union (EU) consider a terrorist organisation, has devastated neighbourhoods and livelihoods across urban districts of the majority-Kurdish south east. In twenty-one months, at least 2,748 died, around 100,000 lost their homes, and up to 400,000 were temporarily displaced. Turkish security forces conducted hundreds of operations in urban and rural areas of the south east, while the PKK – after a period of intense clashes in urban centres and attacks with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) also in western cities of Turkey – returned to fighting in rural areas in June 2016. With the rise to dominance of nationalist cadres and hardline policies in Ankara, the state’s approach is to weaken the PKK as much as possible; marginalise the main legal Kurdish political entity, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP); win over locals via better services and infrastructure,; and nurture other Kurdish political actors that might serve as an alternative to the HDP.[1]