Kurds and Turks: Will they or Won't They?
Joshua Partlow has a good article in WaPo on the military friction at the Turkish-Iraqi border. It is based on interviews in Iraqi Kurdistan and with US military officials, however, and oddly lacks the perspective from Ankara.
I was just at an International Relations conference at Middle East Technical University in Ankara. I didn't seek out any serving Turkish politicians or diplomats for comment, but did talk informally to academics and retired ambassadors and officials of wide experience. I didn't advertise these conversations as interviews for a public article, however, so I won't name them. Anyway, they can't speak officially.
But here is what I heard them to say. First of all, the atmosphere in Ankara (Turkey's capital) is of extreme anger about the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government giving safe haven to guerrillas of the Kurdish Worker's Party (PKK). I mean livid.
It should be remembered that leftist PKK guerrillas kicked off a low intensity war that left 35,000 persons dead in Turkey since 1984. In other words, PKK's campaign and the reaction to it have done 10 times more damage to Turkey than al-Qaeda has done to the United States. And, that is not even taking into account that Turkey is a fourth the size of the US, so you could say 40 times more. In the piece just linked, F. Stephen Larrabee estimates that "Since January 2006, PKK cross-border raids from safe havens in northern Iraq have led to roughly 600 deaths, many of them members of the Turkish security forces."
In other words, the Kurdistan Regional Government is playing the Taliban to the PKK's al-Qaeda, from the point of view of the Turkish government. It is harboring 5,000 PKK fighters. Turkey has a strong and impressive military tradition and does not take casualties in its security forces lightly. What is going on is clearly a casus belli.
It is quite amazing that the Bush administration has so far winked at this situation! Such a 'war on terror.'
Turkey has a new chief of military staff, Yasar Buyukanit, who is a Kemalist hardliner. He has warned against creeping fundamentalism in Turkey and has minced no words about the PKK threat.
The alleged recent border incursion by several hundred Turkish troops 2 miles into Iraq in hot pursuit of PKK fighters probably did occur, virtually everyone I talked to said. One observer suggested that Turkey might thereby be attempting to 'change the rules of engagement' with the PKK over the border. Such incursions are also opportunities for intelligence gathering. Turkish special ops teams have penetrated deep into Iraqi Kurdistan on occasion.
One reason the border incursion was a surprise is that Prime Minister Rejep Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party gets some support from Turkish Kurds. So why would he risk alienating them on the eve of an important election?
The order for the border incursion probably did not come from that high up. The Turkish commanders at the border have enough authority, I was told, to do a little hot pursuit like that without prior clearance if they feel it is important for military reasons.
So Erdogan probably wishes it hadn't happened. Kurds in Turkey are disproportionately rural or of recent rural origins and are typically more religious than urban Turks. Since the AK Party has a mild religious coloration, it holds some attraction for them.
Erdogan's rush to say that Turkey should deal with PKK guerrillas based in Turkish territory before it worries about those in Iraq was for the benefit of his Kurdish constituency. That sentiment clearly is not shared by Buyukanit and the Turkish military, which has a say in such matters under Turkey's system of dual sovereignty, where the military is the ultimate guardian of the values of the republic and doesn't care for the AK Party anyway. I think Partlow put too much emphasis on Erdogan's statement, which was clearly a piece of electioneering and isn't definitive in the Turkish system.
There was a recent bombing in Ankara that killed 14 persons, and in which PKK is suspected. It has denied responsibility. One retired Turkish diplomat said he accepted the recently advanced thesis that it was the work of a Turkish Maoist who is sympathetic to the PKK. Another observer found this charge hard to believe. Blaming a far-left Turk, however, would have the effect of reducing tensions with the Kurds, and would therefore serve Erdogan's purposes. I have no way of knowing the reality.
I brought up with several observers my nightmare, that the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq will certainly annex Kirkuk later this year, and that there may be as a result clashes between the Kurds and the Turkmen minority. Iraqi Turkmen, some 800,000 strong, have been adopted by the Turks of Turkey as sort of little brothers. I can't imagine the Turkish public standing for a massacre of Turkmen, and hundreds of thousands of people in the street could force Buyukanit to act decisively.
My colleagues universally agreed that the potential was there for an escalation of the crisis under such conditions. No one said I was exaggerating the risks. One former official who is an expatriate said that before he arrived in Ankara last week, he did not know just how angry people there were over this issue. He is now convinced that the situation is serious.
Partlow points out that if Turkey did take on the Iraqi Kurds over the haven they have given the PKK, the US would likely be forced to support Turkey, a NATO ally acting against a terrorist threat.
Partlow quotes Massoud Barzani as saying that Turkey has a problem with the existence of Kurds. This is a vast exaggeration. The status of Kurds in Turkey has substantially improved over the past two decades. Barzani neglected to mention the 35,000 dead in PKK's dirty war, or that he is actively harboring 5,000 PKK guerrillas. He recently went so far as to imply that if Turkey intervened on the Kirkuk issue, it would result in terrorism in Diyarbakir (a city in Turkey's eastern Anatolia). It was a shameful performance.
So I don't think Partlow's sanguine conclusions are justified. I think the situation in the north has entered a phase of continual crisis in which things could spiral out of control at any moment.
I continue to be just amazed that no one in authority in Iraq is taking any steps to try to avert such a crisis. I earlier suggested a partion of Kirkuk province before the referendum as a way of defusing the tensions. But it seems like that the referendum will be held in the whole province and that the whole of it will go to Kurdistan. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has said that this development would be a cause for war in and of itself.
The train wreck continues to unfold.
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 6/17/2007 07:31:00 AM
13 Comments:
The strange US attitude towards Turkey is the result of great confusion in the USA itself.
Turkey was a great ally of Israel until the early 1990's when it was hit by the loss of trade with Iraq due to the sanctions, and the de facto independent Kurdistan under the guise of the no-fly zone.
The Kurdish area became an Israeli playground, and Chalabi promised that the whole of Iraq will be like that. Syria was also going to be "liberated" soon after Iraq giving the giant military bases in both Iraq and Syria access to the Medeteranian. Turkey would then be punished by reducing the US prsence there.
There was no plan B. Many of the neocons still think that plan A will work, so Turkey will not be the important US ally it once was. But others want to hang on, at least until the dust clears, and hence the erratic attitude.
"It should be remembered that leftist PKK guerrillas are thought to be responsible for the deaths of 35,000 persons in Turkey since 1984."
That is the version of the Turkish State, which should not be taken at face value. The thousands upun thousands of deaths are victims of BOTH PKK violence AND the vicious counterinsurgency that the Turkish state unleashed upon the Kurds (both the guerrillas and the polulation). And the PKK insurgency was a reaction against lang-standing ferosiuos denial of Kurdish rights.
"It should be remembered that leftist PKK guerrillas are thought to be responsible for the deaths of 35,000 persons in Turkey..."
"Barzani neglected to mention the 35,000 dead in PKK's dirty war."
Prof. Cole,
You forget to mention Turkey' dirty war against the Kurds. Reading reports on Turkey by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other human rights organizations over the years (e.g., HRW, Forced Disaplecement of Ethic Kurds from Southeastern Turkey, 1994) I have gotten the impression that 35,000 people were killed in that war, which included the extensive use of scorched earth tactics, destroying hundreds of villages, and the internal displacement of perhaps 2 million people, in addition to the largely civilian death toll I just cited--mostly in the 1990s, apparently making this the worst case of ethnic cleansing in that decade. Assuming that both my and your sources are right, the death toll must then be 70,000.
An alternative explanation--more plausible, to my mind--is that you are blaming all of the deaths caused by the PKK and the Turkish government (a far greater number) on the PKK. This would be rather like blaming all of the deaths in Kosovo in 1999 on the KLA, to take a roughly comparable situation. Only roughly, though, since the ethnic repression to which the Kurdish insurgency was launched in response was far more extreme than anything seen in Kosovo--you may know that the use of the Kurdish language was outlawed by Turkey the year before the conflict began. Another difference is that the KLA had air support from the US for its attacks on Serbian forces--while in the case of Turkey and the Kurds the situation was reversed, with Turkey enjoying a different kind of US air support: supply of Black Hawk helicopters and F-16s for use against Kurdish civilians. This story is competently told in John Tirman’s book Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America’s Arms Trade (New York: Free Press, 1997).
Given all of that, the American press obviously has its own reasons for telling the story from Turkey’s perspective, but I am very surprised to hear the “35,000 dead in the PKK’s dirty war” canard being promulgated by a professional Middle East historian. I am even more surprised at your comparison of the PKK--a secular national liberation movement, which has of course committed atrocities, just like every other national liberation movement I can think of, and which began its armed campaign in response to government suppression of an ethnic minority--with al-Qaeda, which is (if you must find a comparison on the left) political Islam’s Baader-Meinhof Gang, not a national liberation movement. It seems to me a more balanced view is expressed in the reports of mainstream human rights organizations. For example, in a 2003 paper published right at the beginning of the Iraq war, titled “Turkey and War in Iraq: Avoiding Past Patterns of Violation”, HRW anticipated Turkish intervention in northern Iraq, giving the following background:
"During a two-decade campaign against separatism inside Turkey's borders, state forces committed grave and widespread human rights violations. They detained thousands of citizens for interrogation under torture. Between 1980 and 2000, more than 400 prisoners died, apparently as a result of torture, in the hands of Turkish police or gendarmes (i.e. soldiers who carry out police duties in the countryside complementary to the police within city and town boundaries). Security forces emptied large areas of the countryside in the southeast by bombing and burning unarmed peasant settlements. Hundreds of thousands are still displaced. In the early 1990s, the Turkish security forces are believed to have sponsored networks of killers to eliminate hundreds of suspected enemies of the state by gunning them down in the street or making them "disappear."
"In the course of the conflict, the PKK also massacred hundreds of civilians and executed prisoners, abuses that Human Rights Watch publicly condemned."
HRW ends its report with the following “recommendations” in the event of a Turkish intervention in Iraq:
"No security force units with a history of committing grave human rights violations, and no individual members of security forces implicated in human rights violations should be sent to Northern Iraq."
"Turkish armed forces entering Northern Iraq should not employ the "scorched earth" methods of controlling mountainous territory that they used in southeastern Turkey. That is, they should not drive out the local population with violence and the threat of violence in order to create a free-fire zone."
This seems a reasonable recommendation.
Thank you for this analysis, Professor Cole. I will be referencing it heavily when I post later. (I guess it wasn't about the Turkish elections after all?)
I lived in Turkey and I have seen the PPK's handiwork first hand. I have no trouble at all accepting 35,000 as an accurate number.
I also have some familiarity with the Turkish military. They are a highly trained, professional force and if "go time" comes to be, they will roll over the Pershmerga with little or no difficulty - most likely the latter.
This is not a situation that can be understated in importance. It can still be defused if wiser, cooler heads prevail. But has anyone seen wiser, cooler heads anywhere about lately?
Let's face facts - in the Middle East, it is a chess match...and the United States sent a checkers man to the board.
I'm surprised about this comment.
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But it seems like that the referendum will be held in the whole province and that the whole of it will go to Kurdistan. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has said that this development would be a cause for war in and of itself.
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It looks like Turkey doesn't mind a minority Kurd population - but doesn't want a Turk minority population in Kurdistan. How fair is that ?
Infact this would be a good thing. Both Kurds and Tukey would have some restraining reasons ....
Please do a little bit of research and review the 35,000 dead figure that was supposed caused by the PKK
The majority of those deaths were *Kurds* killed by the Turkish military as it pursued a scorched earth policy against the PKK.
While I am definitely not supporting the PKK, using that 35,000 dead figure against the PKK is like blaming AQ for civilian deaths in Iraq caused by the US military.
PKK + Al Qeda seems like a stretch to me. That they're defined as terrorists by the powers that be surely doesn't make this an apt comparison. I understand the part about one country harboring insurgents but surely there are better examples in history.
A friend of mine who is serving in Iraq has said the cross border action has been far more intense then reported. While it's difficult to judge the accuracies of various claims, I think most of us realize a Turkish invasion of Kurdish Iraq would be utterly devastating.
So, anyone have any ideas whether Turkey will start looking towards Russia as a more genuine ally? I mean, the Turkish Army and Putin are both hardline nationalists, and if Turkey joins the EU the Army must necessarily be broken as a political actor. The US made Turkey the hub of all its anti-Russian energy schemes. So now if Putin can offer Turkey a better deal that makes it worth it for Edrogan to give up an EU bid blocked by Sarkozy, we will lose everything. Russia will have access to the Mediterranean, which generations of Britons and Americans have been taught was a mortal threat. The anti-Russian pipelines will become pro-Russian pipelines. Turkey, Russia and Iran will control the flow of energy to the EU. Only Bush could screw up this badly.
This is pathetic! It's exactly what we antiwar activists were saying was going to happen before the Iraq war started... the only thing Juan left out was the part about the growing tension between Turkey and Israel due to the Israeli funding of the Kurdish separatists.
The rhetoric on both sides of this issue is regretably extreme.
The PKK may indeed have little support among Kurds in Turkey's larger cities, at least if measured in terms of voting patterns. And you are right that most Kurds prefer Erdogan, a mild Islamist, to the hardline Turkish nationalists running the military. The PKK gains support when Turkish nationalists and military are ascendent, and loses support when more reasonable civilian politicians have more power. Turkgut Ozal did the most of any Turkish politician to undermine the PKK, and he did that by legalizing the Kurdish language.
However, anger in SE Turkey remains very high. I have spent more than a decade traveling back and forth to Iraq by land through Turkey and know many, many Kurds on the Turkish side of the border in Silope, Cizre, Diyarbakir.
Most oppose PKK terrorism, but sympathize with political parties seeking greater Kurdish rights in Turkey, the very political parties which the Turkish state shuts down and persecutes on a regular basis. Nearly all of them have relatives who have served time or been arrested and/or tortured by Turkish security forces. This is not hyperbole - very few adult Kurdish men in Cizre, Sirnak or Silope who are not directly linked to the security services have avoided arrest and at least a short beating at one time or another. The taxi driver I usually use in Silope has responsibility for 14 family members because his brother is serving 20 years in Mardin jail. This taxi driver is a devout Muslim, supports Erdogan and not PKK, and he opposes violence in general. However, he claims that his brother is not guilty and it's hard to adequately convey how angry he is at the Turkish government. He shares an intense dislike of Turkish nationalism and hardliners in the military, a dislike that is shared with nearly everyone in SE Turkey. He listens to Kurdish radio from Zakho and Dohuk.
The 35,000 dead in this war are certainly not only victims of the PKK; the Turkish military has engaged and continues to engage in exceptionally violent actions against rural Kurdish communities. This is widely reported by neutral human rights organizations, and is not mere Kurdish propaganda. Much of SE Turkey has the dinstinct feel of an occupied territory.
Let me be clear that Barzani should not be threatening Turkey or supporting the PKK. I agree with you in support a division of Kirkuk province that falls short of handing over the city itself to the Kurdish authorities, but which guarantees a share of oil revenue distribution to the KRG. Furthermore, I personally oppose Kurdish separatism in Turkey and favor greater civil rights for Kurds leading to integration in the Turkish state.
However, Iraqi Kurdistan remains a more open society than SE Turkey, with fewer people being arrested and tortured for what they say or think. Political life in the KRG is still deeply flawed and there are significant human rights violations... but anyone who spends significant time on both sides of the border will have to agree that the "red lines" beyond which political speech is criminalized are more restrictive on the Turkish side of the border. The hardline Turkish nationalist stance has in many ways prevented more moderate Kurdish political development and forced many into the arms of the PKK. Kurds vote similar to other Turkish citizens because more moderate pro-Kurdish parties are harrassed or closed regularly, and because political action far short of support for the PKK gets you arrested and tortured in Turkey. Read the history of Layla Zana for an example of what happens to Kurdish politicians who attempt peaceful change. Turkey simply does not allow the political space for any Martin Luther King equivalent.
So it's complicated. There are few heroes here, and a whole lot of unrealistic overreaching and bad behavior on all sides. But the conference you attended in Ankara does not provide adequate balance to the equation, any more than a southern University in 1965 would on the US civil rights movement. Turkey is not a sufficiently open society for Turkish academics or political scientists to freely study the KRG or Kurdish issues. Just as few Americans can easily confront the extent of war crimes committed by US soldiers in Iraq, few mainstream Turkish academics can quite bring themselves to look objectively at the long legacy of brutality and repression in SE Turkey.
Mr Cole, you say you are surprised "no one in authority in Iraq" is taking any steps to stop the outbreak of war. Who do you expect to take action? The Kurdish parties that are collaborating with the U.S. and who are part of the Green Zone government? Maliki? Crocker?
I don't see any forces that have much of an interest in "taking action" against the battle-hardened PKK. Your post quotes Barzani threatening major terrorist actions inside Turkey if they tried to interfere with the Kurdish acquisition of Kirkuk. If Barzani is willing to go that far, any one "high up" in Iraq who did want to do something would clearly have to go through the Kurdish parties ensconced in the government worse, opening up a new front in Iraq's already out-of-control civil war.
Do train wrecks unfold?
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