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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19922
The Uncontainable Kurds
By Christopher de Bellaigue
1.
Since the Turkish Republic was set up in 1923, no Turkish statesman
has shown the necessary combination of courage and imagination to
resolve the question of how the country's ethnic Kurds, who are now
estimated to number fifteen million people, should be
treated. Turkey's leaders have tried variously to isolate the Kurds,
integrate them, and repress them, hoping that they might agree to live
unobtrusively in a state that was set up on the premise that all its
inhabitants, except for a small number of non-Muslim minorities, are
Turks.
During the past twenty years, several million Kurds have moved from
their homes in southeastern Turkey to towns and cities further west,
many to Istanbul-some to escape the state's pitiless treatment of
Kurds, others in the hope of becoming a bit less poor. Some of these
Kurds have done what the state wanted them to. They have married
Turks, or they have decided not to teach their children to speak
Kurmanji, the Kurdish language that is most widespread in Turkey. They
have taken their place in the mainstream Turkish economy and learned
to enjoy Turkish food, pop music, and soap operas. In short, they have
become the Turks that the state always insisted they were.
But there is another group, perhaps as large, who have remained in the
southeast and in the Kurdish neighborhoods of cities in western
Turkey. These people, recalling the humiliations to which they, as
Kurds, have for years been subject, or because members of their
families have fought against the Turkish state, retain a strong sense
of Kurdish identity that has not been weakened by the military defeat
that the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) sustained in the late 1990s, when
it was forced to scale down its long guerrilla war against the Turkish
army; and that has survived the capture, in 1999, of the PKK leader,
Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving a life sentence on a prison island
near Istanbul.
The pride of such Kurds in their identity has been sharpened by two
unexpected developments. First, since the American invasion of Iraq,
the Kurds of northern Iraq have established a federal region that
enjoys nearly complete autonomy. It runs its own armed forces,
decides how to spend its revenues, and maintains independent (if
unofficial) foreign relations. This nearly sovereign Kurdistan
-inhabited by more than five million people-is a source of pride to
Kurdish nationalists everywhere. Second, under pressure from the
European Union, a club that the Turkish government has long wanted to
join, Turkey passed a series of laws, mostly between 2002 and 2004,
which have increased freedom of expression and relaxed slightly the
monopoly held by the official Turkish culture. Under these laws,
Kurds now have the right to broadcast in Kurdish and to set up
private Kurdish-language schools. They are able to articulate their
grievances more bluntly and they are physically safer. Following the
passage of anti-torture legislation, reports of torture in police
stations and jails have dropped markedly.
In August 2005, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, whose mildly
Islamist Justice and Development Party has been in power since 2002,
acknowledged during a visit to Diyarbakir, the main city of the
largely Kurdish region in the southeast, that the state had made
mistakes in its dealings with the Kurds, and that the answer to the
problem was "more democracy." Coming at a time when the PKK was
stepping up its attacks, ostensibly in reaction to Turkey's refusal to
offer amnesties to PKK militants and to end Ocalan's solitary
confinement, the prime minister seemed to be making a brave effort to
soften the policies of repression that have contributed to the Kurds'
discontent for so long. But this rapprochement did not last long.
Three months after Erdogan's trip to Diyarbakir, the new mood was
changed by Turkish actions so cynical and deliberate that they
illustrated how hard it is to control military power once it has
become embedded in a civilian state. On November 9, 2005, a bookshop
owned by a Kurdish nationalist in Semdinli-a town in the extreme
southeastern corner of Turkey near the border with Iraq and Iran-was
bombed, killing one man and injuring others. The bombers, who were
caught soon after the act by local people, turned out to be two agents
of the Turkish gendarmerie and a PKK guerrilla-turned-informer. Their
identities seemed to confirm the long-held conviction of many in
Turkey that some members of the armed forces, afraid of losing the
prestige, political autonomy, and big budgets that they have enjoyed
since the PKK rebellion gained momentum in the late 1980s, do not want
peace at all.
The attack at Semdinli may have been the moment when Erdogan's
democratically elected, moderately pro-European government lost
ground to the chauvinist representatives- only partially visible-of
what Turks call the "deep state," and to their supporters in the
armed forces. The generals, many of them secular-minded in the
tradition of Kemal Ataturk, get on badly with Erdogan's Justice and
Development Party, which they believe is trying to introduce an
Islamic republic by stealth. Shortly after the bombing at Semdinli,
Yasar Buyukanit, then the commander of Turkey's army, who had been
tipped to become the next chief of the General Staff, the country's
highest-ranking military post, described one of the bombers as a
"good fellow," and this remark was mentioned in the charge sheet that
a prosecutor prepared in connection with the bombing. Put under
public pressure from the General Staff and its allies in the pliant
mainstream press, Turkey's judicial authorities fired the
prosecutor. The bombers received heavy prison sentences and Buyukanit
was duly appointed chief of the General Staff. And so the Semdinli
bombing, whose instigators Erdogan had promised to punish, "no matter
who they are," was swept out of sight.
After the explosion at Semdinli, the violence continued, not with the
intensity of the war that engulfed the region in the early 1990s, but
sharply enough to affect Turkey's internal politics and damage its
international standing. Between January and October of 2006, 299
people, the great majority of them militants, were killed in clashes
between the PKK and the armed forces- the highest such figure since
1999. In the spring of 2006, at least ten people died in riots that
broke out during a funeral in Diyarbakir for PKK guerrillas killed by
government forces. For three days, Diyarbakir was ungovernable, as
thousands of unemployed young men, many of whom live in the streets
and survive by begging and shining shoes, trashed banks, police
stations, and shops. In the summer, a group that is an offshoot of
the PKK claimed responsibility for planting a series of deadly bombs
in tourist resorts. In Septem-ber, a Turkish nationalist organization
set off a bomb in a crowded park in Diyarbakir, killing ten
civilians-all of them presumably Kurds.
To many officials of the European Union, the Semdinli bombing and its
aftermath showed that such principles as the subordination of the
armed forces to civilian authority and the independence of judges were
still being violated in Turkey. In June, the Turkish parliament added
what the European Commission described as "restrictions on freedom of
expression" to the country's anti-terror law. Anders Fogh Rasmussen,
Denmark's conservative prime minister, described as "shocking" a
trial, which is still going on, of more than fifty pro-PKK mayors who
had urged him to resist pressure from the Turkish government to close
the PKK's unofficial TV channel, Roj, which broadcasts from
Copenhagen.
General Buyukanit, as the new chief of staff, looks the part of head
of state, and the mainstream Turkish press, which covered in fawning
detail his recent official visit to Greece, treats him almost as if he
is one. In October, Buyukanit had a sharp exchange with a Turkish
party leader who suggested that PKK guerrillas should be encouraged to
come down from the mountains-whether in Turkey or Iraq-and take part
in politics. "This is a call for a general amnesty," Buyukanit said,
"and I strongly deplore it." When he publicly criticized the impunity
with which Turkey's main pro-PKK newspaper propagandizes for the
organization, a court then ordered the paper to close down
temporarily. As the European Commission's report lamented, Turkey's
armed forces continue to exercise "significant political influence."
In November, Finland, holder of the rotating presidency of the
European Union, announced that it had failed in its efforts to
persuade Turkey to accede to the EU's demands that it open its ports
to Greek Cypriot ships, a step that Turkey is prepared to take only if
the EU lifts its embargo on the Turkish-run northern third of the
divided island.[1] On December 11, European Union foreign ministers
punished Turkey by slowing down accession negotiations, pending a
settlement of the issue, which may still be possible through
diplomacy. But as the commission's November appraisal showed, Cyprus
is not the only big impediment to progress in the negotiations,
although it is the most urgent.
The European Commission's report also criticized Turkey for the
influence of its armed forces on "Cyprus, secularism, the Kurdish
issue, and the indictment concerning the Semdinli bombing." Reading
these criticisms, I thought of two servants of the Turkish state I met
during several visits to eastern Turkey over the past two years. One
was an army captain; the other was a policeman, or so he told me.
My visits have coincided with a hardening of European public opinion,
especially in Germany and France, against Turkish membership in the
union; a reaction has been felt in Turkey, where support for joining
has greatly diminished. (According to a recent poll conducted in
fifteen Turkish towns and cities, 32 percent of people now believe
that Turkey "must certainly enter the European Union"; in 2004, that
figure was 67 percent.)
Some European governments and parliaments, led by France, regard
Turkey's refusal to accept moral responsibility on behalf of the
Ottoman Empire for the massacre of a million or more Armenians during
World War I, or to accept that the massacres amount to genocide, as
another serious obstacle to membership, even if the European
Commission does not officially regard it as one. Turkish nationalist
lawyers have become notorious by bringing suits against dozens of
writers, journalists, and academics, Orhan Pamuk among them, on
charges of "insulting Turkishness." (Hrant Dink, the Armenian-Turkish
newspaper editor who was shot dead by a Turkish nationalist in
January, was one of the few Turkish citizens whose trial on these
charges led to a conviction and, in Dink's case, a suspended
sentence.)
In Istanbul and other places, visiting European politicians deplore
Turkey's reluctance to resolve legal ambiguities surrounding the
ownership of scores of Christian places of worship. And in the
southeast, where the EU has long supported enhanced Kurdish
rights-although not the PKK, which it considers a terrorist
organization-European officials have on occasion recommended
legislation that would make it easier for Kurdish parties that
renounce violence to gain admittance to parliament, and would oblige
state schools in Kurdish areas to offer instruction in the local
language.
As the top soldier in a district with an overwhelming Kurdish
majority, the captain I spoke to had more authority than any other
official, but he was little liked by local people. One day in 2005, as
we stood on a hill overlooking the shell of a police station that had
been bombed by the PKK some years ago, he told me that Turkey should
not take part in an admissions process whose aim was to emasculate the
country. In the guise of the EU process and its "civilizing" reforms,
he said, the ground was being laid for the creation of an independent
Kurdistan in eastern Anatolia. Mustafa Kemal's government had acted
decisively in 1920 when it persuaded the allies to abandon their
effort to set up a Kurdish state. In the face of the new threat, the
captain assured me, the armed forces and other patriotic Turks would
prevent such a state from coming into being.
The young provincial police officer I spoke to last autumn had a
surprisingly impressive grasp of Middle Eastern issues and
international politics. We met shortly after the lower house of the
French parliament had approved a bill that would make it a criminal
offense to "deny" the Armenian genocide,[2] and the Nobel committee
had announced that this year's prize for literature would go to Orhan
Pamuk, a decision that most Turks of my acquaintance connect with
Pamuk's earlier comments about the Armenian massacres. During a
two-hour conversation, the police officer dwelt on European
hypocrisy-the record of France in Algeria, for example-and on the
discrimination that many Muslim immigrants meet with in Europe. He,
like the army captain, felt much nostalgia for the heyday of the
Ottoman Empire, when Turks had run the Balkans, North Africa, and
much of the Middle East. He jovially said he couldn't trust me. "In
fact," he went on, "I feel no trust for any Westerner whatsoever. I'm
obliged to proceed according to the policies set by my government,
but personally I think we have no need for the EU."
Neither of these Turks, the products of academies with thousands of
graduates annually, was saying anything exceptional. Some in Turkey,
notably in the private sector and at some universities and among the
Westernized middle class, continue to believe fervently that Turkey
must be part of Europe, but most Turks no longer do so. This change of
heart, feeding off Europe's hostility and exacerbating it in turn,
lies behind the text of the European Commission's recent report, and
explains why the Turks, despite the reforms of the past few years,
once again seem a long way from joining the European Union.
2.
Seemingly anxious about its authority, the Turkish state has branded
the land. The words "Above all, the Homeland" have been written in
huge letters by conscripts on a chalky hillside between Mus and
Diyarbakir. Further along the same road, there is a large sign with a
Turkish star and crescent. Each time I visit Turkey, it seems that
the portraits of Ataturk, painted onto canvas and flapping down the
side of big public buildings, or digitally reproduced in the window
of a department store, have got bigger; they are now overwhelming
features on façades and walls. The portraits and the Turkish flags
that fly everywhere, the biggest flags that I have ever seen, make a
whipping, cracking sound on a windy day. From what I know of Ataturk,
a republican and a rationalist, he would have abhorred the cult that
has been posthumously built around him. The ideals he promoted were
those of Turkishness and modernism. Finding them hard to realize, or
perhaps even to define, his successors have filled the country with
his handsome face and his spiky, blood-red flag.
On the other side of Turkey's southern border, in the Kandil Mountains
of northern Iraq, the man prominently portrayed is Abdullah
Ocalan. After a drive into the mountains northeast of Erbil, the
capital of the Kurdish federal region, you round a bend and see his
face, painted black and blue on white concrete that has been poured
onto the flint-strewn hillside. It is an ordinary face, rough and
slightly startled-the face, we now know, of a survivor.
Eight years ago, when he was seized as a fugitive in Africa and
brought back to Turkey to stand trial for his life, Ocalan's future
looked bleak. In the words of Nizamettin Tas, a prominent PKK defector
who was then a high-ranking commander, "we expected him to resist and
then to be executed." Ocalan did not resist. After he surrendered, he
called the rebellion a "mistake" and renounced his former demands for
Kurdish independence and even autonomy. He ordered his men to observe
a cease-fire, which lasted until 2004, and all but a few PKK militants
withdrew from Turkish territory into northern Iraq. The Turkish
authorities may have calculated that a compromised, captive Ocalan
would serve their interests better than a martyr whose execution would
provoke more violence and strain relations with the European Union. In
the end, Ocalan's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment
after Turkey's parliament outlawed capital punishment in 2001.
Since then, the PKK and the polit-ical parties that have acted as PKK
fronts in Turkish politics before being closed down by court order-the
Democratic Society Party is the latest -have confounded many
predictions and survived. The relative freedom with which Ocalan's
lawyers have been able to pass on his messages has led some to suspect
that he is cooperating with his captors-that he has defected, in
effect, to the "deep state." Ocalan has praised Ataturk and criticized
the Erdogan government's undermining of secularism and also the
"feudal nature" of the two Kurdish parties that, between them, run the
Kurdish federal region of northern Iraq. On some subjects, his
positions do not seem far from those of the Turkish establishment; but
he remains the symbol of the Turkish cause.
Several books written by former PKK members portray the organization
as a personality cult whose members must subordinate their own
identities to the official ideology, and where two "crimes," in
particular criticism of Ocalan and romantic relationships between
male and female guerrillas, are punishable by death. The young
militants, many of them women, that I spoke to in Iraq's Kandil
Mountains described Ocalan as a visionary and a genius. (There are
few signs of brilliance in his many books and published speeches,
which contain a lot of vague philosophizing and hardly any
self-doubt.) Some of these young women seem to have joined the PKK,
where they are taught to fight and given the same duties as male
militants, because it offers them an escape from patriarchal Kurdish
society. One I spoke to said that she had arrived at Kandil from
southeastern Turkey as an illiterate and that the organization had
taught her to read. Now, in timber schoolrooms in camps scattered
across Kandil, she and her comrades study Ocalan's "Democratic,
Ecological Paradigm," the latest of his many treatises for ordering
the world; much of it could have come from the program of any Green
Party in Europe.
The unquestioning obedience of these militants to Ocalan, and their
conviction that he is a great historical figure, explain why they do
not seem bothered by the ambiguities that make it hard, from the
outside, to find out what the PKK now stands for. The PKK is a
guerrilla army estimated to be five thousand strong, but it says it
wants peace and it announced a new cease-fire, the fifth in its
history, on October 1. The militants who once aimed to set up an
independent, socialist Kurdistan in the southeast of Turkey now
disavow that aim; they would, they say, be content with guaranteed
rights to political activity and free expression.
One point that senior PKK men like to make is that the organization
acts as a brake on radical Islamist groups that are gaining influence
across the Kurdish southeast, alarming secularists in Turkey's
civilian and military establishment. "If we are eliminated," Murat
Karayilan, the PKK's acting leader, told me, "those religious
movements will develop."
After more than two decades of struggle, in which at least 30,000
guerrillas and sympathizers were killed and an unknown number were
imprisoned, tortured, and harassed, the PKK's emotional hold over
millions of Kurds remains strong. Even now, in Diyarbakir and other
places in the southeast, it is hard to find people who openly
criticize the PKK, apart from the "loyalist" Kurds who have been armed
and funded by the state. Many would-be critics have been silenced by
the PKK's vengeful attitude toward those it considers traitors. In
2005, a Kurdish politician opposed to the PKK was gunned down in
Diyarbakir. Of the seventeen commanders who quit the organization in
2003 and set up a rival group, no fewer than seven have been
assassinated, Nizamettin Tas told me in November. According to
Karayilan, "rogue" militants acting without PKK sanction may have
carried out some of these killings. He dismisses suggestions that it
might be in the PKK's interest to select a new leader. "It was
Abdullah Ocalan who gave the Kurds their spirit and their voice," he
told me. "To abandon Abdullah Ocalan is to abandon Kurdishness."
The PKK is the most widespread and resilient of the many Kurdish
groups that have fought against the Turkish Republic. This opposition,
and the sympathy that Kurdish nationalism now receives in Europe, have
forced the state to acknowledge the existence of its large Kurdish
population. In other ways, however, the rebellion has been a curse on
the Kurds. The state's tactic of destroying entire villages has made
much of the rural southeast uninhabitable.[3] By the mid-1990s,
according to Human Rights Watch, more than three thousand villages had
been "virtually wiped from the map." Moreover, as a consequence of
internal migration, the old dream of Turkey's Kurds, to set up an
independent or autonomous Kurdistan with its capital at Diyarbakir,
now seems unfeasible. It is hard to imagine such a territory emerging
without widespread ethnic cleansing by Turkish nationalists intent on
"purifying" Kurdish-inhabited parts of western Turkey, while the Kurds
fight back.
>From the point of view of the Turkish Republic, the decision not to
execute Ocalan now seems fortuitous. From his prison cell, he
exercises a generally restraining influence on an organization whose
fanatical members are capable of extreme violence. The latest
cease-fire has not held, amid assertions by Murat Karayilan that the
militants are obliged to defend themselves against Turkish attacks,
but few expect a return to the total war of the early 1990s, which
cost so many lives on both sides. From Ocalan's conciliatory messages
it is possible to infer that he wants the Turks to recognize him as
the leader of his people, and that he will cooperate more if they
do. With Buyukanit in charge of the armed forces, Turkish nationalist
feeling running high, and two elections-parliamentary and
presidential-due in 2007, Turkey is unlikely to give Ocalan his wish
soon.
3.
Turkey's longstanding fear, that the Kurdish federal region in Iraq
will declare independence, adding to nationalist passions among its
own Kurds, is shared by Iran and Syria, the other countries that have
divided up the ancient region of Kurdistan.[4] Shortly before the US
invaded Iraq, Iran started to change its former policy of helping PKK
militants as a means of exerting pressure on Turkey. Murat Karayilan
complains that the Iranians and the Syrians-who, under Turkish
pressure, had already reversed their own pro-PKK policy-frequently now
capture PKK militants and hand them over to Turkey. Last summer, Iran
and Turkey bombed camps in the Kandil Mountains belonging to the PKK
and the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK), a PKK affiliate
dominated by Kurds from Iran, which started launching attacks in 2004
on Iran's security forces. Turkey's army massed menacingly on the
Iraqi border. In fear of a land invasion of their territory, and
encouraged, perhaps, by the US, the northern Iraqi Kurds persuaded the
PKK to announce its current ceasefire, which is only partially
observed.
The Turkish government's decision not to enter Iraq shows how
constrained it feels in comparison with the final years of Saddam
Hussein's dictatorship, when it mounted large-scale annual operations
in the Kandil Mountains. Turkey is still feeling the effects of its
parliament's decision in 2003 to refuse a US request to use Turkey as
a launch pad for the Iraq invasion. This decision infuriated the Bush
administration and limited Turkey's ability to influence postwar
Iraq. America's occupation of Iraq has curtailed Turkey's freedom to
move forces in and out of Iraq when it likes; but the Americans have
not themselves taken action against the PKK in Iraq, as Turkey has
demanded.
It is not surprising that the US, engaged in a demoralizing struggle
against insurgents in Iraq's Arab regions, has balked at starting a
new offensive in Kurdistan, the calmest part of the country, against
an organization that has never attacked it and at the behest of a
country that refused its request for help three years ago. Turkey
suspects that Bush's appointment of Joseph Ralston, a retired general,
to come up with an anti-PKK policy acceptable to the Iraqi and Turkish
governments is a smokescreen. More than four months have passed since
Ralston was named to his post, but a specially formed contact group,
with Turkish and Iraqi representatives, has yet to meet.
If you visit the Kurdish federal region in Iraq, with its own
president, parliament, and flag, you may come away, as I did, with the
impression that it is on the way to independence. "At this stage,"
Massoud Barzani, the region's president, told The Wall Street Journal
recently, "the parliament of Kurdistan has decided to remain within a
federal, democratic Iraq."[5] How long will that decision last? Most
Iraqis, and many outsiders, are suspicious of the Kurds' determination
to gain ownership of the oil-rich governorate of Kirkuk-a territory
with a mixed population of Kurds, Turkmen, Arabs, and Christians-whose
status, according to the constitution, is to be decided by a
referendum before the end of 2007. In the words of a recent report by
the International Crisis Group, "Kirkuk's oil wealth would enable
Kurdish independence.... [The Kurds] know that without Kirkuk, they
would govern at most a rump state profoundly dependent on
neighbours."[6]
Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish president of Iraq, and a longtime sparring
partner of Barzani, is regarded as a restraining influence on the
Kurds' irredentist ambitions. In a recent profile of him in The New
Yorker, he described the suggestion of Peter Galbraith, a former State
Department official, that Iraq should be partitioned, as "wishful
thinking.... There is not, I think, a realistic Kurdish leader who
would say, 'We want independence.' Why? Because it is impossible."[7]
Some Turkish officials believe that the American government might be
protecting the PKK, in order to give its Iranian affiliate, the PJAK,
a better chance of destabilizing the Iranian government in the
Kurd-dominated areas of northwest Iran. Since the election last year
of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad it has become harder to discern what
is happening in Iranian Kurdistan. According to Murat Karayilan, the
PJAK has slowed its attacks on Iran since the Iranian bombardments
this summer, but he says that the attacks are still taking place. It
is harder still to gauge the support that the PJAK has, though, in the
words of one recent visitor to the region, Iran's Kurds are
"transfixed by what is happening in northern Iraq, and the local
newspapers report on Barzani as much as they do on Ahmadinejad."
Several towns in Iraqi Kurdistan have growing populations of migrants
from the Kurd-ish regions of Iran.
An independent Kurdistan, even if it includes Kirkuk, would still need
the goodwill of its neighbors. The Kurds of northern Iraq are already
economically dependent on Turkey and, to a lesser extent, Iran. The
head of Diyarbakir's chamber of commerce predicts that by the end of
this year, Turkey's exports to the Kurdish federal region in Iraq,
particularly of food and building supplies, may total as much as $5
billion. Kirkuk's oil flows to the Mediterranean via Turkey-when the
pipeline, which has been repeatedly sabotaged, is able to carry
it. Once the US starts withdrawing from Iraq, the Iraqi Kurds will
once again feel vulnerable to pressures from Turkey and Iran. Barzani
told The Wall Street Journal that he would welcome a deployment of
American troops to Iraqi Kurdistan-there are none at present. "It
would," he said, "be a "deterrent to intervention by the neighbouring
countries."
The US remains officially committed to Iraq's unity, but that could
change even before George Bush leaves office. From an American
perspective, a new Kurdish state would have much to recommend it. It
would be friendly to the US, and as much of a democracy as you are
likely to find in the Middle East. But an independent Kurdistan would
probably cause Turkey to be even more repressive of its own Kurds, and
as a result its chances of entering Europe, which the US has
encouraged, will become dimmer. Iran would feel more threatened if
there is an independent Kurdistan and would be more likely to
intervene secretly and openly in Kurdish affairs. Even if they get
hold of Kirkuk, the Iraqi Kurds may find that they have much to gain
by putting off their dream of statehood for more than a few years to
come.
-January 31, 2007
Notes
[1] Cyprus was partitioned in 1974, when Turkey invaded in response to
a Greek Cypriot coup that threatened the security of the island's
Turkish minority. In 2004, the year that Cyprus was accepted into the
European Union, Turkish Cypriots voted for reunification of the island
under a federal system; reunification was rejected by the Greek
Cypriot majority, who favor a unitary system with Turkish Cypriots
enjoying minority rights. According to Belgium's foreign minister, the
issue of Turkey's refusal to open its ports and airports "is being
used by countries which are actually against the accession of Turkey,
but don't want to be caught saying that."
[2] The bill outlawing genocide denial is unlikely to be passed into
law by the French Senate, where supporters of the government, which
opposed it, are in a majority.
[3] See "Still Critical": Prospects in 2005 for Internally Displaced
Kurds in Turkey, Human Rights Watch, March 2005.
[4] There are generally reckoned to be about 27 million Kurds in this
region, of which some 15 million are in Turkey, 5 million in Iraq,
another 5 million in Iran, and 1.7 million in Syria.
[5] See Judith Miller's interview with Barzani in The Wall Street
Journal, October 28, 2006.
[6] The Kurds have worked hard to reverse the policy of Arabization
that was murderously carried out there by Saddam Hussein. The leaders
of some of the other communities have accused them of encouraging more
Kurds to settle there than were expelled by Hussein, with the result
that Kurds are now thought to make up a clear majority in the
governorate. See Iraq and the Kurds: The Brewing Battle over Kirkuk,
International Crisis Group, July 18, 2006.
[7] Jon Lee Anderson, "Mr. Big," The New Yorker, February 5, 2007.
NYR Books Copyright © 1963-2007 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Uncontainable Kurds
By Christopher de Bellaigue
1.
Since the Turkish Republic was set up in 1923, no Turkish statesman
has shown the necessary combination of courage and imagination to
resolve the question of how the country's ethnic Kurds, who are now
estimated to number fifteen million people, should be
treated. Turkey's leaders have tried variously to isolate the Kurds,
integrate them, and repress them, hoping that they might agree to live
unobtrusively in a state that was set up on the premise that all its
inhabitants, except for a small number of non-Muslim minorities, are
Turks.
During the past twenty years, several million Kurds have moved from
their homes in southeastern Turkey to towns and cities further west,
many to Istanbul-some to escape the state's pitiless treatment of
Kurds, others in the hope of becoming a bit less poor. Some of these
Kurds have done what the state wanted them to. They have married
Turks, or they have decided not to teach their children to speak
Kurmanji, the Kurdish language that is most widespread in Turkey. They
have taken their place in the mainstream Turkish economy and learned
to enjoy Turkish food, pop music, and soap operas. In short, they have
become the Turks that the state always insisted they were.
But there is another group, perhaps as large, who have remained in the
southeast and in the Kurdish neighborhoods of cities in western
Turkey. These people, recalling the humiliations to which they, as
Kurds, have for years been subject, or because members of their
families have fought against the Turkish state, retain a strong sense
of Kurdish identity that has not been weakened by the military defeat
that the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) sustained in the late 1990s, when
it was forced to scale down its long guerrilla war against the Turkish
army; and that has survived the capture, in 1999, of the PKK leader,
Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving a life sentence on a prison island
near Istanbul.
The pride of such Kurds in their identity has been sharpened by two
unexpected developments. First, since the American invasion of Iraq,
the Kurds of northern Iraq have established a federal region that
enjoys nearly complete autonomy. It runs its own armed forces,
decides how to spend its revenues, and maintains independent (if
unofficial) foreign relations. This nearly sovereign Kurdistan
-inhabited by more than five million people-is a source of pride to
Kurdish nationalists everywhere. Second, under pressure from the
European Union, a club that the Turkish government has long wanted to
join, Turkey passed a series of laws, mostly between 2002 and 2004,
which have increased freedom of expression and relaxed slightly the
monopoly held by the official Turkish culture. Under these laws,
Kurds now have the right to broadcast in Kurdish and to set up
private Kurdish-language schools. They are able to articulate their
grievances more bluntly and they are physically safer. Following the
passage of anti-torture legislation, reports of torture in police
stations and jails have dropped markedly.
In August 2005, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, whose mildly
Islamist Justice and Development Party has been in power since 2002,
acknowledged during a visit to Diyarbakir, the main city of the
largely Kurdish region in the southeast, that the state had made
mistakes in its dealings with the Kurds, and that the answer to the
problem was "more democracy." Coming at a time when the PKK was
stepping up its attacks, ostensibly in reaction to Turkey's refusal to
offer amnesties to PKK militants and to end Ocalan's solitary
confinement, the prime minister seemed to be making a brave effort to
soften the policies of repression that have contributed to the Kurds'
discontent for so long. But this rapprochement did not last long.
Three months after Erdogan's trip to Diyarbakir, the new mood was
changed by Turkish actions so cynical and deliberate that they
illustrated how hard it is to control military power once it has
become embedded in a civilian state. On November 9, 2005, a bookshop
owned by a Kurdish nationalist in Semdinli-a town in the extreme
southeastern corner of Turkey near the border with Iraq and Iran-was
bombed, killing one man and injuring others. The bombers, who were
caught soon after the act by local people, turned out to be two agents
of the Turkish gendarmerie and a PKK guerrilla-turned-informer. Their
identities seemed to confirm the long-held conviction of many in
Turkey that some members of the armed forces, afraid of losing the
prestige, political autonomy, and big budgets that they have enjoyed
since the PKK rebellion gained momentum in the late 1980s, do not want
peace at all.
The attack at Semdinli may have been the moment when Erdogan's
democratically elected, moderately pro-European government lost
ground to the chauvinist representatives- only partially visible-of
what Turks call the "deep state," and to their supporters in the
armed forces. The generals, many of them secular-minded in the
tradition of Kemal Ataturk, get on badly with Erdogan's Justice and
Development Party, which they believe is trying to introduce an
Islamic republic by stealth. Shortly after the bombing at Semdinli,
Yasar Buyukanit, then the commander of Turkey's army, who had been
tipped to become the next chief of the General Staff, the country's
highest-ranking military post, described one of the bombers as a
"good fellow," and this remark was mentioned in the charge sheet that
a prosecutor prepared in connection with the bombing. Put under
public pressure from the General Staff and its allies in the pliant
mainstream press, Turkey's judicial authorities fired the
prosecutor. The bombers received heavy prison sentences and Buyukanit
was duly appointed chief of the General Staff. And so the Semdinli
bombing, whose instigators Erdogan had promised to punish, "no matter
who they are," was swept out of sight.
After the explosion at Semdinli, the violence continued, not with the
intensity of the war that engulfed the region in the early 1990s, but
sharply enough to affect Turkey's internal politics and damage its
international standing. Between January and October of 2006, 299
people, the great majority of them militants, were killed in clashes
between the PKK and the armed forces- the highest such figure since
1999. In the spring of 2006, at least ten people died in riots that
broke out during a funeral in Diyarbakir for PKK guerrillas killed by
government forces. For three days, Diyarbakir was ungovernable, as
thousands of unemployed young men, many of whom live in the streets
and survive by begging and shining shoes, trashed banks, police
stations, and shops. In the summer, a group that is an offshoot of
the PKK claimed responsibility for planting a series of deadly bombs
in tourist resorts. In Septem-ber, a Turkish nationalist organization
set off a bomb in a crowded park in Diyarbakir, killing ten
civilians-all of them presumably Kurds.
To many officials of the European Union, the Semdinli bombing and its
aftermath showed that such principles as the subordination of the
armed forces to civilian authority and the independence of judges were
still being violated in Turkey. In June, the Turkish parliament added
what the European Commission described as "restrictions on freedom of
expression" to the country's anti-terror law. Anders Fogh Rasmussen,
Denmark's conservative prime minister, described as "shocking" a
trial, which is still going on, of more than fifty pro-PKK mayors who
had urged him to resist pressure from the Turkish government to close
the PKK's unofficial TV channel, Roj, which broadcasts from
Copenhagen.
General Buyukanit, as the new chief of staff, looks the part of head
of state, and the mainstream Turkish press, which covered in fawning
detail his recent official visit to Greece, treats him almost as if he
is one. In October, Buyukanit had a sharp exchange with a Turkish
party leader who suggested that PKK guerrillas should be encouraged to
come down from the mountains-whether in Turkey or Iraq-and take part
in politics. "This is a call for a general amnesty," Buyukanit said,
"and I strongly deplore it." When he publicly criticized the impunity
with which Turkey's main pro-PKK newspaper propagandizes for the
organization, a court then ordered the paper to close down
temporarily. As the European Commission's report lamented, Turkey's
armed forces continue to exercise "significant political influence."
In November, Finland, holder of the rotating presidency of the
European Union, announced that it had failed in its efforts to
persuade Turkey to accede to the EU's demands that it open its ports
to Greek Cypriot ships, a step that Turkey is prepared to take only if
the EU lifts its embargo on the Turkish-run northern third of the
divided island.[1] On December 11, European Union foreign ministers
punished Turkey by slowing down accession negotiations, pending a
settlement of the issue, which may still be possible through
diplomacy. But as the commission's November appraisal showed, Cyprus
is not the only big impediment to progress in the negotiations,
although it is the most urgent.
The European Commission's report also criticized Turkey for the
influence of its armed forces on "Cyprus, secularism, the Kurdish
issue, and the indictment concerning the Semdinli bombing." Reading
these criticisms, I thought of two servants of the Turkish state I met
during several visits to eastern Turkey over the past two years. One
was an army captain; the other was a policeman, or so he told me.
My visits have coincided with a hardening of European public opinion,
especially in Germany and France, against Turkish membership in the
union; a reaction has been felt in Turkey, where support for joining
has greatly diminished. (According to a recent poll conducted in
fifteen Turkish towns and cities, 32 percent of people now believe
that Turkey "must certainly enter the European Union"; in 2004, that
figure was 67 percent.)
Some European governments and parliaments, led by France, regard
Turkey's refusal to accept moral responsibility on behalf of the
Ottoman Empire for the massacre of a million or more Armenians during
World War I, or to accept that the massacres amount to genocide, as
another serious obstacle to membership, even if the European
Commission does not officially regard it as one. Turkish nationalist
lawyers have become notorious by bringing suits against dozens of
writers, journalists, and academics, Orhan Pamuk among them, on
charges of "insulting Turkishness." (Hrant Dink, the Armenian-Turkish
newspaper editor who was shot dead by a Turkish nationalist in
January, was one of the few Turkish citizens whose trial on these
charges led to a conviction and, in Dink's case, a suspended
sentence.)
In Istanbul and other places, visiting European politicians deplore
Turkey's reluctance to resolve legal ambiguities surrounding the
ownership of scores of Christian places of worship. And in the
southeast, where the EU has long supported enhanced Kurdish
rights-although not the PKK, which it considers a terrorist
organization-European officials have on occasion recommended
legislation that would make it easier for Kurdish parties that
renounce violence to gain admittance to parliament, and would oblige
state schools in Kurdish areas to offer instruction in the local
language.
As the top soldier in a district with an overwhelming Kurdish
majority, the captain I spoke to had more authority than any other
official, but he was little liked by local people. One day in 2005, as
we stood on a hill overlooking the shell of a police station that had
been bombed by the PKK some years ago, he told me that Turkey should
not take part in an admissions process whose aim was to emasculate the
country. In the guise of the EU process and its "civilizing" reforms,
he said, the ground was being laid for the creation of an independent
Kurdistan in eastern Anatolia. Mustafa Kemal's government had acted
decisively in 1920 when it persuaded the allies to abandon their
effort to set up a Kurdish state. In the face of the new threat, the
captain assured me, the armed forces and other patriotic Turks would
prevent such a state from coming into being.
The young provincial police officer I spoke to last autumn had a
surprisingly impressive grasp of Middle Eastern issues and
international politics. We met shortly after the lower house of the
French parliament had approved a bill that would make it a criminal
offense to "deny" the Armenian genocide,[2] and the Nobel committee
had announced that this year's prize for literature would go to Orhan
Pamuk, a decision that most Turks of my acquaintance connect with
Pamuk's earlier comments about the Armenian massacres. During a
two-hour conversation, the police officer dwelt on European
hypocrisy-the record of France in Algeria, for example-and on the
discrimination that many Muslim immigrants meet with in Europe. He,
like the army captain, felt much nostalgia for the heyday of the
Ottoman Empire, when Turks had run the Balkans, North Africa, and
much of the Middle East. He jovially said he couldn't trust me. "In
fact," he went on, "I feel no trust for any Westerner whatsoever. I'm
obliged to proceed according to the policies set by my government,
but personally I think we have no need for the EU."
Neither of these Turks, the products of academies with thousands of
graduates annually, was saying anything exceptional. Some in Turkey,
notably in the private sector and at some universities and among the
Westernized middle class, continue to believe fervently that Turkey
must be part of Europe, but most Turks no longer do so. This change of
heart, feeding off Europe's hostility and exacerbating it in turn,
lies behind the text of the European Commission's recent report, and
explains why the Turks, despite the reforms of the past few years,
once again seem a long way from joining the European Union.
2.
Seemingly anxious about its authority, the Turkish state has branded
the land. The words "Above all, the Homeland" have been written in
huge letters by conscripts on a chalky hillside between Mus and
Diyarbakir. Further along the same road, there is a large sign with a
Turkish star and crescent. Each time I visit Turkey, it seems that
the portraits of Ataturk, painted onto canvas and flapping down the
side of big public buildings, or digitally reproduced in the window
of a department store, have got bigger; they are now overwhelming
features on façades and walls. The portraits and the Turkish flags
that fly everywhere, the biggest flags that I have ever seen, make a
whipping, cracking sound on a windy day. From what I know of Ataturk,
a republican and a rationalist, he would have abhorred the cult that
has been posthumously built around him. The ideals he promoted were
those of Turkishness and modernism. Finding them hard to realize, or
perhaps even to define, his successors have filled the country with
his handsome face and his spiky, blood-red flag.
On the other side of Turkey's southern border, in the Kandil Mountains
of northern Iraq, the man prominently portrayed is Abdullah
Ocalan. After a drive into the mountains northeast of Erbil, the
capital of the Kurdish federal region, you round a bend and see his
face, painted black and blue on white concrete that has been poured
onto the flint-strewn hillside. It is an ordinary face, rough and
slightly startled-the face, we now know, of a survivor.
Eight years ago, when he was seized as a fugitive in Africa and
brought back to Turkey to stand trial for his life, Ocalan's future
looked bleak. In the words of Nizamettin Tas, a prominent PKK defector
who was then a high-ranking commander, "we expected him to resist and
then to be executed." Ocalan did not resist. After he surrendered, he
called the rebellion a "mistake" and renounced his former demands for
Kurdish independence and even autonomy. He ordered his men to observe
a cease-fire, which lasted until 2004, and all but a few PKK militants
withdrew from Turkish territory into northern Iraq. The Turkish
authorities may have calculated that a compromised, captive Ocalan
would serve their interests better than a martyr whose execution would
provoke more violence and strain relations with the European Union. In
the end, Ocalan's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment
after Turkey's parliament outlawed capital punishment in 2001.
Since then, the PKK and the polit-ical parties that have acted as PKK
fronts in Turkish politics before being closed down by court order-the
Democratic Society Party is the latest -have confounded many
predictions and survived. The relative freedom with which Ocalan's
lawyers have been able to pass on his messages has led some to suspect
that he is cooperating with his captors-that he has defected, in
effect, to the "deep state." Ocalan has praised Ataturk and criticized
the Erdogan government's undermining of secularism and also the
"feudal nature" of the two Kurdish parties that, between them, run the
Kurdish federal region of northern Iraq. On some subjects, his
positions do not seem far from those of the Turkish establishment; but
he remains the symbol of the Turkish cause.
Several books written by former PKK members portray the organization
as a personality cult whose members must subordinate their own
identities to the official ideology, and where two "crimes," in
particular criticism of Ocalan and romantic relationships between
male and female guerrillas, are punishable by death. The young
militants, many of them women, that I spoke to in Iraq's Kandil
Mountains described Ocalan as a visionary and a genius. (There are
few signs of brilliance in his many books and published speeches,
which contain a lot of vague philosophizing and hardly any
self-doubt.) Some of these young women seem to have joined the PKK,
where they are taught to fight and given the same duties as male
militants, because it offers them an escape from patriarchal Kurdish
society. One I spoke to said that she had arrived at Kandil from
southeastern Turkey as an illiterate and that the organization had
taught her to read. Now, in timber schoolrooms in camps scattered
across Kandil, she and her comrades study Ocalan's "Democratic,
Ecological Paradigm," the latest of his many treatises for ordering
the world; much of it could have come from the program of any Green
Party in Europe.
The unquestioning obedience of these militants to Ocalan, and their
conviction that he is a great historical figure, explain why they do
not seem bothered by the ambiguities that make it hard, from the
outside, to find out what the PKK now stands for. The PKK is a
guerrilla army estimated to be five thousand strong, but it says it
wants peace and it announced a new cease-fire, the fifth in its
history, on October 1. The militants who once aimed to set up an
independent, socialist Kurdistan in the southeast of Turkey now
disavow that aim; they would, they say, be content with guaranteed
rights to political activity and free expression.
One point that senior PKK men like to make is that the organization
acts as a brake on radical Islamist groups that are gaining influence
across the Kurdish southeast, alarming secularists in Turkey's
civilian and military establishment. "If we are eliminated," Murat
Karayilan, the PKK's acting leader, told me, "those religious
movements will develop."
After more than two decades of struggle, in which at least 30,000
guerrillas and sympathizers were killed and an unknown number were
imprisoned, tortured, and harassed, the PKK's emotional hold over
millions of Kurds remains strong. Even now, in Diyarbakir and other
places in the southeast, it is hard to find people who openly
criticize the PKK, apart from the "loyalist" Kurds who have been armed
and funded by the state. Many would-be critics have been silenced by
the PKK's vengeful attitude toward those it considers traitors. In
2005, a Kurdish politician opposed to the PKK was gunned down in
Diyarbakir. Of the seventeen commanders who quit the organization in
2003 and set up a rival group, no fewer than seven have been
assassinated, Nizamettin Tas told me in November. According to
Karayilan, "rogue" militants acting without PKK sanction may have
carried out some of these killings. He dismisses suggestions that it
might be in the PKK's interest to select a new leader. "It was
Abdullah Ocalan who gave the Kurds their spirit and their voice," he
told me. "To abandon Abdullah Ocalan is to abandon Kurdishness."
The PKK is the most widespread and resilient of the many Kurdish
groups that have fought against the Turkish Republic. This opposition,
and the sympathy that Kurdish nationalism now receives in Europe, have
forced the state to acknowledge the existence of its large Kurdish
population. In other ways, however, the rebellion has been a curse on
the Kurds. The state's tactic of destroying entire villages has made
much of the rural southeast uninhabitable.[3] By the mid-1990s,
according to Human Rights Watch, more than three thousand villages had
been "virtually wiped from the map." Moreover, as a consequence of
internal migration, the old dream of Turkey's Kurds, to set up an
independent or autonomous Kurdistan with its capital at Diyarbakir,
now seems unfeasible. It is hard to imagine such a territory emerging
without widespread ethnic cleansing by Turkish nationalists intent on
"purifying" Kurdish-inhabited parts of western Turkey, while the Kurds
fight back.
>From the point of view of the Turkish Republic, the decision not to
execute Ocalan now seems fortuitous. From his prison cell, he
exercises a generally restraining influence on an organization whose
fanatical members are capable of extreme violence. The latest
cease-fire has not held, amid assertions by Murat Karayilan that the
militants are obliged to defend themselves against Turkish attacks,
but few expect a return to the total war of the early 1990s, which
cost so many lives on both sides. From Ocalan's conciliatory messages
it is possible to infer that he wants the Turks to recognize him as
the leader of his people, and that he will cooperate more if they
do. With Buyukanit in charge of the armed forces, Turkish nationalist
feeling running high, and two elections-parliamentary and
presidential-due in 2007, Turkey is unlikely to give Ocalan his wish
soon.
3.
Turkey's longstanding fear, that the Kurdish federal region in Iraq
will declare independence, adding to nationalist passions among its
own Kurds, is shared by Iran and Syria, the other countries that have
divided up the ancient region of Kurdistan.[4] Shortly before the US
invaded Iraq, Iran started to change its former policy of helping PKK
militants as a means of exerting pressure on Turkey. Murat Karayilan
complains that the Iranians and the Syrians-who, under Turkish
pressure, had already reversed their own pro-PKK policy-frequently now
capture PKK militants and hand them over to Turkey. Last summer, Iran
and Turkey bombed camps in the Kandil Mountains belonging to the PKK
and the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK), a PKK affiliate
dominated by Kurds from Iran, which started launching attacks in 2004
on Iran's security forces. Turkey's army massed menacingly on the
Iraqi border. In fear of a land invasion of their territory, and
encouraged, perhaps, by the US, the northern Iraqi Kurds persuaded the
PKK to announce its current ceasefire, which is only partially
observed.
The Turkish government's decision not to enter Iraq shows how
constrained it feels in comparison with the final years of Saddam
Hussein's dictatorship, when it mounted large-scale annual operations
in the Kandil Mountains. Turkey is still feeling the effects of its
parliament's decision in 2003 to refuse a US request to use Turkey as
a launch pad for the Iraq invasion. This decision infuriated the Bush
administration and limited Turkey's ability to influence postwar
Iraq. America's occupation of Iraq has curtailed Turkey's freedom to
move forces in and out of Iraq when it likes; but the Americans have
not themselves taken action against the PKK in Iraq, as Turkey has
demanded.
It is not surprising that the US, engaged in a demoralizing struggle
against insurgents in Iraq's Arab regions, has balked at starting a
new offensive in Kurdistan, the calmest part of the country, against
an organization that has never attacked it and at the behest of a
country that refused its request for help three years ago. Turkey
suspects that Bush's appointment of Joseph Ralston, a retired general,
to come up with an anti-PKK policy acceptable to the Iraqi and Turkish
governments is a smokescreen. More than four months have passed since
Ralston was named to his post, but a specially formed contact group,
with Turkish and Iraqi representatives, has yet to meet.
If you visit the Kurdish federal region in Iraq, with its own
president, parliament, and flag, you may come away, as I did, with the
impression that it is on the way to independence. "At this stage,"
Massoud Barzani, the region's president, told The Wall Street Journal
recently, "the parliament of Kurdistan has decided to remain within a
federal, democratic Iraq."[5] How long will that decision last? Most
Iraqis, and many outsiders, are suspicious of the Kurds' determination
to gain ownership of the oil-rich governorate of Kirkuk-a territory
with a mixed population of Kurds, Turkmen, Arabs, and Christians-whose
status, according to the constitution, is to be decided by a
referendum before the end of 2007. In the words of a recent report by
the International Crisis Group, "Kirkuk's oil wealth would enable
Kurdish independence.... [The Kurds] know that without Kirkuk, they
would govern at most a rump state profoundly dependent on
neighbours."[6]
Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish president of Iraq, and a longtime sparring
partner of Barzani, is regarded as a restraining influence on the
Kurds' irredentist ambitions. In a recent profile of him in The New
Yorker, he described the suggestion of Peter Galbraith, a former State
Department official, that Iraq should be partitioned, as "wishful
thinking.... There is not, I think, a realistic Kurdish leader who
would say, 'We want independence.' Why? Because it is impossible."[7]
Some Turkish officials believe that the American government might be
protecting the PKK, in order to give its Iranian affiliate, the PJAK,
a better chance of destabilizing the Iranian government in the
Kurd-dominated areas of northwest Iran. Since the election last year
of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad it has become harder to discern what
is happening in Iranian Kurdistan. According to Murat Karayilan, the
PJAK has slowed its attacks on Iran since the Iranian bombardments
this summer, but he says that the attacks are still taking place. It
is harder still to gauge the support that the PJAK has, though, in the
words of one recent visitor to the region, Iran's Kurds are
"transfixed by what is happening in northern Iraq, and the local
newspapers report on Barzani as much as they do on Ahmadinejad."
Several towns in Iraqi Kurdistan have growing populations of migrants
from the Kurd-ish regions of Iran.
An independent Kurdistan, even if it includes Kirkuk, would still need
the goodwill of its neighbors. The Kurds of northern Iraq are already
economically dependent on Turkey and, to a lesser extent, Iran. The
head of Diyarbakir's chamber of commerce predicts that by the end of
this year, Turkey's exports to the Kurdish federal region in Iraq,
particularly of food and building supplies, may total as much as $5
billion. Kirkuk's oil flows to the Mediterranean via Turkey-when the
pipeline, which has been repeatedly sabotaged, is able to carry
it. Once the US starts withdrawing from Iraq, the Iraqi Kurds will
once again feel vulnerable to pressures from Turkey and Iran. Barzani
told The Wall Street Journal that he would welcome a deployment of
American troops to Iraqi Kurdistan-there are none at present. "It
would," he said, "be a "deterrent to intervention by the neighbouring
countries."
The US remains officially committed to Iraq's unity, but that could
change even before George Bush leaves office. From an American
perspective, a new Kurdish state would have much to recommend it. It
would be friendly to the US, and as much of a democracy as you are
likely to find in the Middle East. But an independent Kurdistan would
probably cause Turkey to be even more repressive of its own Kurds, and
as a result its chances of entering Europe, which the US has
encouraged, will become dimmer. Iran would feel more threatened if
there is an independent Kurdistan and would be more likely to
intervene secretly and openly in Kurdish affairs. Even if they get
hold of Kirkuk, the Iraqi Kurds may find that they have much to gain
by putting off their dream of statehood for more than a few years to
come.
-January 31, 2007
Notes
[1] Cyprus was partitioned in 1974, when Turkey invaded in response to
a Greek Cypriot coup that threatened the security of the island's
Turkish minority. In 2004, the year that Cyprus was accepted into the
European Union, Turkish Cypriots voted for reunification of the island
under a federal system; reunification was rejected by the Greek
Cypriot majority, who favor a unitary system with Turkish Cypriots
enjoying minority rights. According to Belgium's foreign minister, the
issue of Turkey's refusal to open its ports and airports "is being
used by countries which are actually against the accession of Turkey,
but don't want to be caught saying that."
[2] The bill outlawing genocide denial is unlikely to be passed into
law by the French Senate, where supporters of the government, which
opposed it, are in a majority.
[3] See "Still Critical": Prospects in 2005 for Internally Displaced
Kurds in Turkey, Human Rights Watch, March 2005.
[4] There are generally reckoned to be about 27 million Kurds in this
region, of which some 15 million are in Turkey, 5 million in Iraq,
another 5 million in Iran, and 1.7 million in Syria.
[5] See Judith Miller's interview with Barzani in The Wall Street
Journal, October 28, 2006.
[6] The Kurds have worked hard to reverse the policy of Arabization
that was murderously carried out there by Saddam Hussein. The leaders
of some of the other communities have accused them of encouraging more
Kurds to settle there than were expelled by Hussein, with the result
that Kurds are now thought to make up a clear majority in the
governorate. See Iraq and the Kurds: The Brewing Battle over Kirkuk,
International Crisis Group, July 18, 2006.
[7] Jon Lee Anderson, "Mr. Big," The New Yorker, February 5, 2007.
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