Political Movements and Leverage Points: Kurdish Activism in the European Diaspora

The 1980 military coup in Turkey proved to be a pivotal event for Kurdish radicalization in Western Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Turkish citizens entered Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium to escape political, religious, and ethnic persecution. Reversing the country’s more liberal constitution of 1961, the Turkish military limited civil liberties, curtailed freedom of the press, and reduced the in uence of trade unions. The regime focused on breaking Kurdish resistance by banning written and spoken Kurdish, and prohibited cultural activities that were interpreted as undermining the territorial integrity of the state.2 All expressions of religious, ethnic, and cultural differences became classiŽ ed as terrorist activities dangerous to the Turkish state. While the military institutionalized its power in Turkey, the levels of violence in the southeastern provinces intensiŽ ed in battles between military units and Kurdish combatants. Criticizing the deterioration of democratic values in Turkey, Europeans accepted Kurdish refugees who claimed cultural and political discrimination in their homeland. Germany in particular noticed a dramatic increase in asylum applications from Turkish citizens. While it is unknown how many ethnic Kurds entered Germany, some 350,000 Turkish citizens Ž led asylum papers in Germany in the decade following the coup in Turkey.3 Both Turkish and Kurdish asylum applicants transferred clandestine political resistance networks to Europe, and thereby changed the composition of the respective Diasporas from predominantly apolitical guest worker communities to networked and homeland-oriented political activist organizations. Since 1984, Kurdish guerrilla warfare against Turkey and increasing levels of Kurdish activism abroad has prompted the Turkish state to attempt to monitor political networks of Kurds in Western Europe. Occasionally, Turkish ofŽ cials have received support from governments of EU member states that feared a spillover effect from the Turkish–Kurdish con ict. In 1993, Germany and France, which remain the countries with the strongest contingencies of Kurdish immigrants, enacted a ban on Kurdish political and cultural organizations. While law enforcement agencies ranging from the German Federal Criminal Police to Interpol have collected and analyzed information about the most radical and violent segments of the Kurdish Diaspora, few state ofŽ cials and scholars have studied changes within the Kurdish Diaspora communities. With the arrest of Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) leader Öcalan in February 1999, Kurdish activists in exile modiŽ ed their structural, organizational, and strategic operations to adjust to a new political reality. Abandoning the original goal of an independent Kurdistan, activists instead pursued national minority rights in Turkey.