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April 11, 2003
What's in a Name? For a Turkish Youth, Maybe Jail
By FRANK BRUNI
BISMIL, Turkey, April 7 — It was not drugs, brawls or the usual teenage recklessness that landed Bayram A. in
trouble, confronting him with the prospect of as many as five years in prison.
It was a word. But by uttering it, when and where he did, Bayram tapped directly into some of Turkey's darkest anxieties.
On a school day last November, his teachers in this remote, poor, densely Kurdish area of southeastern Turkey asked him
to lead his classmates in the customary Turkish pledge of allegiance, which includes the line, "Happy is the one who
calls himself a Turk."
Bayram, then 15, balked.
"I have a stomachache," he recalls telling the teachers. "I don't feel good."
They insisted that he press ahead. So he did, and what they heard him say was this: "Happy is the one who calls himself
a Kurd."
The teachers not only sent him home from school for the day, but also summoned the police.
Bayram now stands accused of "inciting hatred and enmity on the basis of religion, race, language or regional differences,"
according to the indictment filed against him in State Security Court in Diyarbakir, about 30 miles west of here.
Human rights advocates are not really surprised.
"This case is just one example of violations that have gone on for 15 years," said Muharrem Erbey, an executive
with the Human Rights Association in Diyarbakir.
Mr. Erbey, who is also Bayram's lawyer, requested that Bayram's last name be withheld. It has not been published in Turkey,
where the law protects minors from such exposure.
Bayram's case provides a glimpse into the extreme vigilance of Turkish government officials against any possible flicker
of Kurdish separatism, a watchfulness that continues to shape the country's response to the war in Iraq in potentially crucial
ways.
Whether Turkish troops defy American and European wishes and enter northern Iraq will be determined in part by the Turkish
assessment of what Iraqi Kurds are doing and how it might affect the Kurds next door in Turkey.
If Turkish government officials sense, for example, that the arrival of Iraqi Kurds in the Kirkuk, an Iraqi oil center,
has begun to pave a path toward an independent Kurdish state in the region, the Turkish troops would likely take action.
Already, in their own country, Turkish officials see ominous signs of separatism where human rights advocates see only
harmless expressions of ethnic pride.
The Turkish tendency to interpret tribal preening as treasonous plotting has put the country at odds with the European
Union and helped to prevent it from gaining membership.
The Turkish authorities put Bayram, a bashful, lanky teenager who spends much of his spare time tilling the family's grain
fields, on trial because of a single unsanctioned word.
Mr. Erbey said that Bayram merely slurred his words, due to illness, and was misheard.
Bayram was evasive on that point.
"I've been repeating that oath every day since I began going to school," he said in an interview here.
"But even when my mouth is saying that I'm happy to be a Turk, my heart is saying that I'm happy to be a Kurd,"
Bayram added.
For decades, Turkey's laws and its enforcers sought to stamp out expressions of Kurdish identity, outlawing Kurdish names,
Kurdish language, Kurdish holidays.
That effort, coupled with torture, reached its zenith during the 1990s, as Turkish troops fought violent Kurdish separatists.
Tens of thousands of people died.
Those battles are over, and Turkey, eager to improve its human rights record and enhance its bid for the European Union,
recently passed laws permitting a greater range of Kurdish expression.
But human rights advocates say that reality has lagged behind that legislation, and cite Bayram's case as proof.
"If a kid takes another kid's eraser, the teacher doesn't hand him over to the police and courts as a thief,"
said Selahattin Demirtas, director of the Human Rights Association in Diyarbakir. "But when it comes to the Kurdish issue,
the teacher accuses the kid of separatist propaganda. That's how adamant the state is."
Prosecutors and officials for the Justice Ministry declined to be interviewed for this article.
Bayram said that he had long ago come to see being Kurdish as different from being Turkish, because non-Kurdish Turks
sent that message.
When he was growing up, he said, he spoke Kurdish with his parents in the privacy of their home, but he never read from
one of the Kurdish-language books that could be purchased on the black market.
"We were afraid to buy them," he said.
When he was 10 and 11 and 12, he said, he sometimes watched military police round up the parents of young men who were
believed to be separatist guerrillas and beat them in public.
"I've seen a 50-year-old man punched, fall on the ground and then be lifted back up by the police so he could be
punched some more," Bayram said. His voice was flat and he shrugged his shoulders. This was not an exceptional memory
around Bismil.
Before last November, he said, he had never been picked from the roughly 300 students at his school, most of them Kurdish,
to walk to the top of the main outdoor staircase and lead the daily pledge.
But the words had always felt wrong and phony to him, and he said he realized on that day that he did not want to be the
one proclaiming them from center stage.
"It was a moment," he said, not elaborating on the thought.
Classmates gaped at what came out of his mouth, then giggled. A teacher loudly berated him, he recalled, saying that he
was a disgraceful ingrate, like so many Kurdish children in Turkey.
Word spread fast through the village. His father rushed to the school to ask the principal to be lenient. His mother wept.
Bayram, whose next court date is next month, said he did not think he would end up in prison, and that he was not scared.
In fact, the lingering emotion that he said he felt seemed in line with his age. He turned 16 last month.
"Mostly," he said, "I'm embarrassed."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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