INTERVIEW: Critical period for Hizbullah in Turkey's tense southeast

Violence that erupted in Turkey?s southeast before and after the recent election has raised fears of a return to widespread clashes between affiliates of the Kurdistan Workers? Party (PKK) and Hizbullah, an outlawed Kurdish Islamist militant group. 

Back in the 1990s, along with its insurgency against the Turkish state, members of the PKK fought a bitter turf war against Hizbullah (no relation to the Lebanese Shiite group) in parts of southeastern Turkey. The militant Islamist group is also thought to have been used by the Turkish state as a convenient local pawn to counter PKK insurgents through the 1990s.

Hizbullah formally disbanded in a wave of violence, assassinations and retaliatory killings in the early 2000s. But the inheritors of its conservative Kurdish Islamist line have reemerged in the region in recent years in NGOs, charities, and through the Hüda Par political party, founded in 2012. Today, amid a spike in Kurdish nationalist sentiment and with Syria and Iraq in meltdown across the border, relations between secular and Islamist political groups in Turkey?s southeast are central to any future peace. 

Mustafa Gürbüz, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University and a scholar at the Rethink Institute in Washington DC, contributes an essay on the history of Hizbullah to a book on Turkey?s Kurdish question, (reviewed in the Hürriyet Daily News here). He spoke to HDN about his research on Kurdish Islamist activism, the ambiguous origins of Hizbullah, and the delicate present-day situation in southeastern Turkey.

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