On the streets of Istanbul Saturday, there was little sympathy for the few pro-Kurd protesters who turned out to demonstrate against Ankara’s reluctance to help the besieged Kurdish-Syrian city of Kobane.

In downtown Istanbul, the bars are full and the shopping district is teeming with young people. Meanwhile in front of the imposing gates of the Galatassaray High School, a riot-control tank engine idles noisily, surrounded by riot police carrying sticks and shields.

Every night for the last five days, scores of pro-Kurd demonstrators have answered the call of the Popular Democratic Party (HDP), the main (legally-recognised) Kurdish party, to demand greater support for the Syrian town of Kobane, whose Kurdish population is under siege by fighters belonging to the Islamic State (IS) group.

Looking on, 32-year-old Can is not impressed. “It’s absurd that they are protesting here,” he tells FRANCE 24. “What happens in the east should stay in the east.”

In other words: what happens to the Kurds – the ethnic group that dominates the east of the country – should stay with the Kurds.

“We are innocent here,” says Can. “These protests are paralysing the city.”

Shadow of the past

Looking at the thousands of shoppers going about their business here, it is difficult to believe that the city is in any way paralysed.

All the shops remained open during Saturday’s brief demonstration and there was little in the way of damage.

But Istanbul’s shopkeepers are wary of the situation. “Our customers are staying away, they are scared,” says one. Another, who sells pretzels, tells FRANCE 24: “They broke two of my windows and a parasol. They are violent.”

By “they”, he means the Kurds belonging to the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), public enemy number one.

Turkey has been consumed with violent demonstrations since October 6. Shops have been vandalised, cars burned, police officers and porters killed.

For the first time in 20 years, the army has taken to the streets and a state of emergency has been declared in six cities. Some 40 people have died, including two police officers machine-gunned on Thursday in the city of Bingöl by unknown assailants.

The violence has pitted protesters against Turkey's police and army, but also members of the PKK against Islamists of Huda-Par, the small extremist party which is the legal relative of Turkey’s Hizbollah (a radical Sunni movement that is separate from Lebanon’s eponymous Shiite group) that has been a banned organisation in Turkey since the mid 1990s.

The violence has brought to the surface the nightmare of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1984, the PKK launched an armed struggle against the Turkish government in a bid to create an independent Kurdish state.

Turkey responded brutally with a scorched earth policy that forced an estimated two million from their homes and left 37,000 dead.

The violence subsided after the arrest in 1999 of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, and finished definitively in 2013 in a peace deal between the PKK and Turkey’s ruling APK party. The violence may have stopped, but the fear remains.

“There has been 35 years of negative propaganda,” explained Ozan Tekin of the Turkish Revolutionary Socialist Workers' Party. “Turkey’s secular leadership as well as conservative Muslims have only one intent, which is to crush the PKK.”

A terrorised generation

Sibel Akbas, 25, is an architecture student who joined last year’s demonstrations against Turkey’s government, seen by protesters as authoritarian and hell-bent on creating an Islamist society.

But she doesn’t support the pro-Kurds demonstrating in Istanbul.

“They [the Kurds] are demanding that Öcalan be set free and are supporters of the PKK,” she says. “This is not my cause.”

Born at the end of the 1980s, Sibel grew up, along with her entire generation, amid a barrage of negative propaganda about the PKK and its leader, referred to in households as “the monster” and “the baby killer”.

When the PKK said it would take up arms again if Turkey did nothing to help their brethren in Kobane, Sibel saw the announcement as a declaration of a coup d’état in the making – and as definitive proof that her country should not interfere in Syria.

“If there wasn’t a terrorist threat in Turkey I would have no problem supporting arming the Peshmerga (Kurdish fighters in Syria who are closely linked to the PKK),” she says. “But if we arm them, they will eventually turn their guns on us.”

A threat to Turkish unity

No one FRANCE 24 spoke to in Istanbul supported the IS massacre of Kurds in Kobane, and the Turks showed great concern for the unfolding humanitarian disaster.

But most said that Turkey should not bow to pressure to send its army across the border and face the IS group directly.

“Kurds are dying and we don’t like that – but the people responsible for that are the United States and the PKK,” said Ugur Aytaç, who heads the Youth Union of Turkey, a leftist group whose ideology is based on that of Ataturk, the founder of modern, secular Turkey. “The [ruling] APK is also responsible, because it supports the IS group both ideologically and logistically.”

“There is no way that Turkey can fight shoulder to shoulder with the PKK, a movement that wants to establish a state on ethnic lines,” he added. Helping the Kurds in Syria, he believes, a direct threat to Turkey’s territorial integrity, a risk no one in Istanbul can contemplate.

Erdin Ersoy, who makes and sells jewellery from his shop in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, is typical of many in the city. Turkey, he says, has done enough in its humanitarian role.

“We have welcomed three million Syrians [the UN’s Human Rights Council puts the figure at one million],” he said. “We feed them, give them shelter and that’s enough. Turkey is not the policeman of the world.”

He adds: “The most important thing is not to take possession of territory, but to know how to protect what you’ve got. Turkey has always defended itself, and the Kurds will always need us. So why should we do something so divisive?”

France24