Italy-Turkey: The other extradition
01 November 1998
The Italian government provoked the wrath of the Turkish government by refusing in November to extradite Abdullah +calan to Turkey. +calan is the founding leader of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been fighting in the south-east of Turkey for an independent Kurdistan since 1984. At the end of August 1998, +calan announced a unilateral ceasefire to take effect on 1 September, the 75th anniversary of the foundation of the Turkish state by Kemal Ataturk. The ceasefire declaration was rebuffed by the Turkish government, which instead put pressure on Syria to expel +calan, who has been living in exile there for many years. Syria duly obliged, and +calan made his way to Moscow and from there to Italy, where he was arrested on 12 November and claimed political asylum. The Turkish government immediately sought +calan's extradition, claiming that he is single-handedly responsible for all of the estimated 30,000 people who have died in the Kurdistan war of liberation. But the Italian court refused extradition on the basis that the Italian constitution forbids extradition to any country which has the death penalty. The Turkish government has threatened a total boycott of Italian goods in reprisal; Italy's hopes of winning a tender for 145 military helicopters receded as Mesut Yilmaz threatened Turkey's eternal enmity on his last day as prime minister. There were reports of mobs setting fire to Italian cars in the streets of western Turkey in the wake of the judicial decision, and even that Juventus had to cancel a fixture in Istanbul owing to fears for the team members' personal safety. European Commission head Jacques Santer has warned Turkey of counter-reprisals against Turkey for breaching the 1963 Ankara Association Agreement and the 1995 Customs Union with its boycott.
As +calan remains under house arrest in Italy while his asylum claim is processed and the authorities decide what to do with him, the Italian government now blames the German government for his arrest. +calan would never have been arrested, they say, if it were not for the international arrest warrant issued by a court in Karlsruhe in 1990 alleging conspiracy to murder Kurdish defectors. The warrant was recently updated to include arson attacks on Turkish businesses in Germany. But at the end of November the new German chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, refused to seek +calan's extradition, saying it would cause too much conflict between the Turkish and Kurdish communities in Germany. The Christian Democrats have accused him of succumbing to blackmail and demand that the PKK leader is put on trial in Germany; Schroder and Italian prime minister Massimo d'Alema prefer an ad hoc European court to try +calan.
Meanwhile, the ceasefire offer, like its two predecessors in 1993 and 1995, are ignored by the Turkish generals waging war against the Kurds. According to some official estimates, Turkey has over 300,000 troops in the south-east. All observers, including the US State department and the EU, agree that the army has committed and continues to commit large-scale atrocities including razing thousands of Kurdish villages to the ground and forcibly evacuating over a million people. Torture, extra-judicial execution and 'disappearances' remain commonplace: an EU report of 1996 described torture as endemic in Turkey. It is still illegal to speak Kurdish in public there, and verbal support for Kurdish self-determination is proscribed as an act of terrorism. The Kurdish parliamentary party, HADEP, is constantly under attack, with hundreds of members arrested in the past few months and its MPs in prison for public speeches supporting the Kurds.