Abstract

Turkey's Kurds Fight on Alone

In southeast Turkey, where a war is raging between separatist Kurdish guerrillas and the Turkish Army, the village of Caglayan is struggling to stay alive. In 1993, Turkish soldiers, apparently angered by the villagers' refusal to join the Kurdish militia, which the government has organized to fight against the guerrillas, burned down a third of the stately two-story homes and told Caglayan's some 600 residents to move out. Most people fled, selling their animals and cramming in with relatives and friends in the nearby tumbledown city of Cizre. The Turkish Human Rights Association says that at least 729 villages have been forcibly emptied by soldiers since late 1991. These evacuations have been stepped up over the past few months, the military having grown increasingly frustrated with its inability to stem attacks by guerrillas from the Kurdish Workers Party. In this whole mater, the U.S.-backed government claims that Turkey has no Kurdish problem but has only a terrorism problem.