The NYT recently reviewed the Turkish/Kurdish conflict and said,
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Turkey and its Kurdish citizens have a long and acrimonious history. For decades, the central government, bent on a strict assimilation policy, cracked down on Kurds for expressions of their cultural identity, such as reading publications in Kurdish or listening to Kurdish music. That set the stage for an armed uprising that began in 1984, when the P.K.K. effectively declared war on the state.
Since then, more than 40,000 people have been killed in a series of militant attacks and government reprisals that drove hundreds of thousands of Kurds from rural villages. Turkey, the United States and the European Union designated the P.K.K. a terrorist group.
In recent years, the government — in an attempt to join the European Union — has made some concessions to the Kurds, but promised constitutional changes have yet to be made, and many people remain wary.
Now that Turkey under Erdogan has abandoned attempts to unify all Turks under the secularist banner, perhaps ethnicity is back in favour rather than replacing secularism with Islamism. In fact in the last election in which Erdogan received a majority he had the support of various Kurdish Parties who believed that their demands for greater autonomy would be granted. It wasn’t to be.
Last summer the Economist reported despite the turn to more attacks on the Kurds,
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But life has since got better for Turkey’s 14m Kurds, particularly under Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s conservative Justice and Development (AK) party, which has ruled the country since 2002.
Mr Erdogan is the first Turkish leader to acknowledge the state’s “mistakes” in its handling of the Kurds. In a slew of groundbreaking reforms, AK has eased restrictions on the Kurds’ long-banned mother tongue, poured money into their impoverished region and launched secret talks with the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan. In 2009 a deal to disarm the rebels seemed within reach.
The turn to war
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This collapsed after a string of deadly PKK attacks. Yet the government continued to talk to Mr Ocalan, who, despite having spent the last 12 years behind bars, has largely retained his grip on the PKK. But everything changed last month when the rebels escalated the violence, killing more than 40 Turkish soldiers and policemen.
Matters came to a head when the PKK set off a landmine in the township of Cukurca near the Iraqi border, killing nine soldiers. Declaring that his patience had run out, Mr Erdogan ordered a wave of air strikes against PKK targets in northern Iraq. The army claims that at least 100 rebels have been killed since the operation started on August 17th. The PKK says it has lost only three men.
Where does the US stand?
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America, which has backed Turkey in its battle against the PKK (it shares satellite intelligence on the rebels), is getting nervous. The fitful entente between the Turks and the Iraqi Kurds is crucial to America’s quest to keep Iraq stable. But Turkey insists its attacks will continue.
America also provides drones and cobra attack helicoptors so it is hardly neutral. Where are America calls for Kurdish independence or human rights. Not only is the US silent on this, in fact it opposes independence for Kurds.
Prospects
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What can Turkey hope to achieve? Not a lot, probably. Previous incursions into Iraq have damaged PKK bases and killed many rebels. But the fighters keep coming back, and in greater numbers. Lack of co-ordination, and mutual mistrust, between the army and the police do not help. Mr Erdogan has often admitted that the Kurdish problem cannot be solved by military means alone, and he has vowed to continue his reforms. Yet officials close to the prime minister say he is fed up with the Kurds’ unrelenting demands.
The Kurds reply that the impasse is entirely Turkey’s fault. “We are treated like pariahs,” insists Ayla Akat Ata, one of 35 deputies from the pro-Kurdish BDP party elected to parliament in a general election in June. Six of her fellow deputies remain in prison, mostly on terrorism charges. The BDP is boycotting parliament until the government agrees to legal changes that would set them free. At least 3,500 other pro-Kurdish figures, including several elected mayors, have been imprisoned on AK’s watch. Evidence “proving” their links to the PKK includes their sporting chequered Palestinian-style scarves and attending rebel funerals.
The BDP’s wishlist includes regional autonomy, Kurdish-language education, an amnesty for PKK fighters and an end to laws that land not only Kurds but dissidents of all stripes in jail. When Mr Erdogan begins to draft the new constitution he has promised, he will have to accommodate some of these demands. But even if he meets all of them it is not clear that the violence will cease, says a senior Turkish security official in a border province.
The PKK began as a home-grown movement fed by genuine grievances. But it has since evolved into a complex network spanning Europe and the Middle East, with connections to organised crime and rogue elements in the Turkish security forces, who have profited from the war and want it to continue. (Both the United States and the European Union brand the PKK a terrorist organisation.)
Equally unhelpfully, Syria and Iran have long used the PKK as leverage against Turkey. Turkish intelligence sources claim that the Cukurca attack was ordered by Fehman Hussein, a Syrian PKK commander. In a further twist, Murat Karayilan, the senior PKK commander in northern Iraq, who is seen as a moderate and who was involved in brokering the now-defunct deal with Turkey, has gone missing. Rumour is rife that he is in Iranian hands. Amid the speculation, one truth stands out: the Kurds and their problems will be around for a long time to come.
Finally just today WaPo reports Turkey feels the need to solve Kurdish conflict to boost aspirations for regional leadership
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For a quarter century, defeating the Kurdish insurgency has been a pillar of Turkish state policy. Now, that’s being called into question as the government takes stock of the fight’s cost and its role in hampering Turkey’s ambitions for regional leadership.
The struggle against the Kurdish guerrilla organization, marking the 33rd anniversary of its foundation Sunday, has claimed tens of thousands of lives and cost Turkey hundreds of billions of dollars.
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Meanwhile, Turkey, a U.S. ally and the largest Muslim member of NATO, is basking in growing popularity in an Arab world being transformed by revolution, even as the nation’s aspirations to join the European Union stagnate.
Turkey’s Islam-based government, praised for economic stability since coming to power 2002, believes a solution to the Kurdish conflict would enable the country to transfer its energy and resources to development, and eventually make it a more powerful actor in the Middle East.
“God willing, Turkey will fly when we solve this terrorism problem and traitors’ actions that we see as the biggest obstacle that blocks Turkey path are ended,” Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said Friday.
The government has recently admitted to holding secret talks with the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK last year but it was not clear whether the sides were again conferring amid an intensified fight that has killed dozens of rebels, Turkish soldiers and since this summer.
Th solution is easy because their demands are reasonable, Give them what they want and look to the future.
Ed K.
Thanks for the boost. I view all these Middle East matters solely in terms of what’s in the interest of the Jewish nation.
BO,
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Even if my new friend may have despoiled and even butchered half the Assyrian and Armenian populations of Anatolia during World War I. In any case, those actions paled in comparison to the European Jewish experiences of World War II.
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Let me make my point with an illustrative story.
My wife having been born in Zagreb, Croatia, we have been involved on and off in the endless chinoiseries of the Balkans and their contending nations. Back in the early 1990s, we were at a dinner and were seated next a man from Makedonija. This Makedonac (pronounced “Makedonatz”) told us his nation was surrounded by and always on guard against what he and they call the “four wolves”; these referred to the Serbs, Bulgars, Greeks, and Albanians. Any help others could provide them against the four wolves was welcome. Anybody who couldn’t was of no interest to them.
The Kurds also have their four wolves: Turks, Iranians, Syrians and Arab Iraqis. In greater or lesser degree, these are the same wolves who want to devour the Jewish nation. Israel and the Jewish nation have no permanent friends. Only permanent interests. Need I say more?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The Ayyubids were Kurds. They overran Israel and Egypt. They are not “natural” friends of the Jews. Besides this, the PKK represents only half of the Kurds, who are historically divided against one another along family lines. Add to this the fact that they are land-locked, and you can see why neither Israel nor anyone else has been very interested over the years in effectively championing their cause. By the way, the Kurds also committed genocide against Christians in WWI.
Hi, Arnold. You said,
“My anthropological understanding includes that Kurds are not one of the numerous Turanian nations as are most of the population of Turkey, but instead have their own unique Indo-European language.”
The Kurds and Turks are racially indistinguishable from each other, as well as from Iraqis, Lebanese and Jews. Religiously, their Sunni majorities are closely akin to those of the Baluchis, Turkmens, Uzbeks, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Upper Mesopotamian Arabs. They also have a Shia minority in the central plateau, which about equally comprises Kurds and Turks.
The only cultural difference worth noting, between Turks and Kurds, is their native language. The difference is the same as that between the Russians and the Chuvash (Lenin’s father was Chuvash), who are likewise racially and religiously indistinguishable from each other and who have gotten along fine since Tsarist days.
There is no reason to believe that the Turks cannot reconcile with the Kurds in an Anatolian “Austria-Hungary”-style empire — or, more appropriately, an Ottoman-style empire. The Turks also have a large Arab minority around the former Antioch, which they could likewise grant autonomy. This would pave the way for an autonomous Syrian province in the not-too-distant future.
Meanwhile, the Kurds are not good guys. They massacred the Assyrian Christians during World War I.
Arnold, once again I might note that you and I agree. The Kurds and Israelis should be natural allies. Without a doubt a new Kusrdistan should come into existance, uniting them in Turkey, Iraq and Iran. They are the Jews of the Middleast when compared to the Jews of Europe. Both wanted and need their independence. Israel should support these hardy people in spite of their crude standard of living as instituted by their masters, the Turks, Iraqis and Iranians.
The Economist is an apologist for Turkey and its treatment of the Kurds.
I do not see the PKK as terrorists but as freedom fighters against the brutal Turkish occupation of its homeland.
My anthropological understanding includes that Kurds are not one of the numerous Turanian nations as are most of the population of Turkey, but instead have their own unique Indo-European language. Like any mountain-bred people, the Kurds steadfastly fight to maintain their independence. Does the PKK use terrorism in their struggle? No more or less so than our own Jewish Lehi fighters against the British and Arabs in the pre-independence Yishuv days of Israel.
I could not care less about maintaining the unity of Iraq. And I am comfortably secure in the certitude that in the coming wars of the Middle East, that country will break up into separate Sun’a and Shi’a Arab and Kurdish territories. Now that Israel itself is a key player in the ‘Great Game’, she should and must pick sides strictly in terms of the interests of the Jewish state and the Jewish nation. If that includes helping arm terrorists, I truly do not give a damn and neither should any other Zionist.
The USA is pulling out of Iraq and shortly, our American armed forces will be gone from Afghanistan as well. Both wars, which we plainly started for purposes of what we thought were serving our own national interests by democratizing a large mostly Arab Moslem state (Iraq) and a crazy quilt collection of ununifiable and non-democratizable Moslem tribesmen in the landlocked territory of Afghanistan, will be seen as merely the latest in the growing string of failed overseas adventures that have beset the United States since the end of World War II. Fools apparently never learn, and are doomed to repeat the beatings they take, generation after generation.
In any case, as the USA and our NATO running dogs leave those places in yet another two national defeats, the Kurds will coalesce into a national government, irrespective of what the USA, NATO or the Turks think or even insist upon.
Israel should be in league with any power or national group whose own interests include confrontation with various enemy Moslem states, and especially the Arabs. Primarily, these national groups should include the majority Hindus of India, and especially the right-wing Hindutva-oriented forces of that country. Closer to home, the Kurds are enemies simultaneously of the Turks, Iranians and Syrians. What in hell more could we ask for?
And in the long term, the superpowers of the eastern hemisphere largely will be Russia, China, India and Japan. The first three of those countries have large and dangerous Moslem population elements, and Japan, which has no foreign population whatsoever, has no reason to go against the interests of their giant neighbors in Russia and China.
As for my own beloved USA, our country will be busy for a long time overcoming our all but insane trade policies since the Nixon years, and our failure to confront the flood of illegal Hispanic immigration into our country across our southern borders, as much as dealing with the liberalism that has all but destroyed our Anglo-Saxon and northern European national cultural heritage and dominance in this land. I think big changes are coming.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI