Turkey`s Kurdish Southeast Is Key Election Battle

Erdogan, who plans to campaign in some 60 cities, will visit Diyarbakir on Saturday.

Mehmet Ali owns a small cheese and olive shop in the old city of Diyarbakir. He has 11 grown-up children, all of them unemployed.

A stocky Kurd in his late 50s, Ali said he had not made up his mind who to vote for when Turkey holds municipal elections on March 29, but he was clear about his priorities.

"We need jobs and more investments, especially for the young," he said, gesturing toward a cafe filled with youths playing cards and dominoes. Mehmet Ali declined to give his full name for fear of reprisals.

Diyarbakir, the biggest city of Turkey's impoverished Kurdish southeast, is a battleground in local elections seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party.

The AK Party is seeking to gain fresh legitimacy after it narrowly escaped a legal attempt by its secularist opponents to ban it for Islamist activities in 2008.

A decisive win in the local polls would consolidate the AK Party's grip on power and give it momentum to pursue its policies, including a pledge to reform the military-inspired constitution, key for Ankara's hopes to join the European Union.

But fears the country is slipping into recession due to the global economic crisis, soaring unemployment and graft allegations pose new challenges to the Islamist-rooted AK Party.

The AK Party, which emerged at 2002 polls as a coalition of religious, centre-right and nationalists, is expected to easily come out first at the national level. The opposition is largely discredited and lacks the AK Party's geographical reach.

Failure to at least match the 47 percent of votes the party won in the 2007 parliamentary election or to win cities such as Izmir, a bastion of the staunchly secularist CHP opposition, could paralyse the government in an a polarised country.

In Diyarbakir, the AK Party is locked in a fight for votes with the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP).

Erdogan, who plans to campaign in some 60 cities, will visit Diyarbakir on Saturday.

"We must win Diyarbakir as solving the Kurdish issue is key for the stability of Turkey," said an adviser to Erdogan.

Once regarded as an outsider in Kurdish fiefdom-style politics, the AK Party was the top vote-getter in the Kurdish provinces during the 2007 election, drawing on promises to expand rights for minority Kurds and bring economic prosperity.

The AK Party believes that if it dislodges the DTP from Diyarbakir, a DTP stronghold, it would give the government the upper hand in solving the decades-old Kurdish conflict.

PKK VIOLENCE

About 40,000 people have been killed since 1984, when the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrilla group took up arms with a view to establishing an ethnic homeland for Kurds.

"For the AK Party winning Diyarbakir would mean the end of the Kurdish rebellion. The AK Party believes the way to normalise the southeast is through investment and improving living standards," said Kurdish expert Dogu Ergil.

The government has boosted social spending and aid to the poor, which critics say explain Ankara's foot-dragging over a loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund that normally come with spending limits.

In Diyarbakir, the AK Party has campaigned on the need to build infrastructure and fight high unemployment that has fed PKK ranks for decades.

The DTP, which faces a court ban for alleged ties to the PKK, says the AK Party is playing politics and does not want to solve the Kurdish issue.

"The AK Party does not offer solutions to the problems of Kurdish people," said Selahattin Demirtas, the DTP's parliament group vice chairman, adding the root of the violence lies in lack of social, cultural and political rights for Kurds.

"It has pursued a policy of war by launching military operations inside and outside the border," Demirtas said, referring to a miliary campaign of air strikes against PKK bases in Turkey and in neighbouring northern Iraq.

Even Turkey's military commander, General Ilker Basbug, admits military might alone will not fix the Kurdish problem.

For decades Turkey denied that Kurds as an ethnic group existed and the Kurdish language was banned. But as a result of EU pressure, restrictions on the Kurdish language were eased.

In 2005, Erdogan broke taboos when he acknowledged that Turkey had a "Kurdish problem".

The launch of a Kurdish language channel on state television last month -- in which Erdogan uttered "good luck" in Kurdish -- helped him score points among the many millions of Kurds.

But critics say Erdogan has recently alienated Kurdish voters by using a nationalistic tone and adopting a more hawkish stance toward the PKK and the Kurdish issue in general.

Opinion polls suggest the AK Party and the DTP are running neck and neck in Diyarbakir and other cities in the southeast.

As the election nears, tensions have risen in Diyarbakir.

Thousands of Kurdish protesters clashed with police last weekend as they marked the 10th anniversary of the capture of separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan. Many demonstrators pelted rocks at the AK Party's headquarters in Diyarbakir.

Turkey's domestic politics have contributed to a growing sense the government has become erratic in tackling a weak economy, and investors hope Erdogan will take up urgent matters such as EU reforms once polls are behind him.

"After the local elections the AKP will have no more excuses to postpone the conclusion of a new loan arrangement with the IMF and the re-start of the reform process," Wolfango Piccoli, an analyst from Eurasia wrote in a note this week.