Opinion

Turks aim to keep Kurds at precipice

 

By Maggy Zanger

Special to the Arizona Daily Star

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.09.2008

The international community breathed a collective sign of relief recently when Turkey withdrew its tanks and troops after an eight-day incursion to rout the guerrilla fighters of a Turkish Kurdish group from their snow packed bases in the rugged mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Turkish action was, after all, pregnant with the possibility of spinning out of control and into a larger regional conflict, possibly involving Iran and Syria in addition to Turkey and Iraq, all countries with large Kurdish minorities.

But it's early to breathe easy. For the Turks, this short-lived offensive may well have been a precedent-setting trial run for another go at the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) when the political climate and the weather are more advantageous.

The top Turkish general made this clear. "There are further lessons that we need to teach," said Ya_ar Büyükanıt, head of armed forces at a press briefing a few days after the withdrawal, according to the Associated Press. "There will be operations when needed. We will continue."

The point is that they need to continue. The Turks were not looking for final solutions in February. They need ongoing conflict with the PKK for two vital reasons. While the PKK is certainly a thorn in the side of the military — the real political power in Turkey — the Kurdish "terrorist threat" provides the Turkish military with its raison d'être; a compelling reason for its bloated budgets.

More significantly, PKK bases in Iraqi Kurdistan have provided and continue to provide the Turks with a pretext to interfere in Iraqi Kurdistan and encourage its destabilization.

In the long term, the Turks are far less concerned about a couple of thousand, at most, ragtag guerrilla fighters than they are about the successful "Iraqi model." The Kurdistan Region, a federally recognized political entity in Iraq, offers the long-oppressed Kurdish minority in Turkey a political arrangement to emulate.

The Kurdish problem

Turkey, like neighboring Iraq, Iran and Syria, has struggled with the "Kurdish Problem" since the end of World War I. When the European powers dismantled the Ottoman Empire and drew lines on a map forming new nation- states, the Kurds, who had been assured they would have their own country, found themselves divided among new countries dominated by ethnic Persians in Iran, Turks in Turkey, and Arabs in Iraq and Syria.

As large minorities in each of those countries, the fiercely independent Kurds were viewed by various weak and unstable governments as a threat to the consolidation of the nation-state. They were seen, at best, as an unruly ethnic group to be brought under control, and at worst, in Iraq for example, as a people so threatening as to be eradicated by genocide.

Accurate population statistics in these four countries are difficult to ascertain as censuses are rarely taken and numbers are often inflated or deflated for political reasons, but the Kurds constitute approximately 20 percent of the population in Turkey and Iraq, 10 to 15 percent in Iran, and perhaps 10 percent in Syria.

In all four countries, since the 1920s, there have been varying degrees of purposeful underdevelopment of Kurdish areas, suppression of Kurdish cultural expression, mass arrests and executions, population and land transfers, and extensive destruction of centuries-old Kurdish villages and towns.

In Turkey for example, even the existence of the Kurds was denied. They were called Mountain Turks by the virulent nationalists who forged the modern Turkish nation, led by Mustafa Kamel Ataturk. With the formation of the republic, the Kurdish language, publications and organizations were banned and cultural expression denied.

The Kurds had for centuries defended themselves in their mountain refuge from an endless stream of invaders, and continued to resist their cultural demise in the modern era. In all four countries, the 1900s were a time of cyclical state suppression of Kurdish rights, followed by Kurdish rebellion, followed by severe government repression.

Only recently has the Kurdish language been heard in broadcasts in Turkey — and then rarely and only because Turkey desperately wants to join the European Union and is under enormous pressure to clean up its human rights act in relation to the Kurds.

The Iraqi model

The Kurds today are the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of their own. The "Kurdish problem," the desire for self-determination, festers to this day in Turkey, Syria and Iran and has been fueled in the past few years by the success of the Iraqi Kurds in forging an autonomous region within their country.

In the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion, Iraqi Kurds have managed to make a representative place for themselves at the national table and have negotiated constitutional guarantees to form an autonomous regional government. They have their own flag, elect their own members of a regional parliament, have their own police, security and intelligence forces, and are experiencing an economic boom as the only safe place to do business in Iraq.

Kurds in neighboring countries are inspired by what they call the "Iraqi model." If the Iraqi Kurds can rise from the ashes of genocide in the late 1980s to legitimate self-rule some 15 years later, why can't they?

"It is considered a model," Abdullah Mohtadi, leader of an Iranian Kurdish group in exile in Iraqi Kurdistan, told me this summer. "Things can change."

It is this model that the Turks are most anxious about.

They surely understand by now that they cannot militarily defeat the PKK guerrillas, wherever they are. The Turkish military fought a brutal campaign against the group in the 1990s in southeast Turkey that left as many as 3,000 Kurdish villages destroyed, 2 million Kurds displaced, and perhaps 35,000 people, mostly Kurds, dead. Kurdish efforts to participate in the political process were generally viewed as subversive and elected Kurds were assassinated, jailed or forced to flee the country.

Although it is painfully obvious that a political solution with the PKK and the Kurds of Turkey in general is the only feasible option, the generals pursue the military one. PKK "terrorist" bases in Iraq give them a pretext to interfere with the success of the Iraqi model.

Turkey has tested the waters with the eight-day war and found them to be temperate. The generals now know the international community will easily tolerate a short offensive in neighboring Iraq in the name of national security. Expect more in the future with artillery shelling and aerial bombing in between.

This type of low-intensity warfare in "pursuit of terrorists" will keep the Americans and the Europeans at bay, and will keep the Iraqi Kurds on the edge of a chaotic precipice — right where the Turks want them.

E-mail Maggy Zanger at zanger@email.arizona.edu