No end in sight of the Kurdish
fight By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - Turkish Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan appears willing to give diplomacy a
chance, although he now has a mandate from the
Turkish Parliament to launch military attacks on
Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels harbored in
northern Iraq.
That mandate is supported
by all ranks within the Turkish army and
politicians from every end of the political
spectrum in Ankara. In response, the PKK has said
it would stop cross-border attacks
if the
Turkish government called off its military
invasion.
History and logic say that the
PKK promise should be treated with skepticism, and
nobody knows that better than Erdogan, who, while
playing along with US pleas for restraint, is
personally convinced that the PKK will continue to
be a problem for Turkey.
The PKK's roots The Kurds are a dominant minority in Turkey,
comprising 9 million of the country's 60 million
people. Kurdish nationalists, who dream of
creating the State of Kurdistan, envision 55% of
it on Turkish territory.
They have been a
problem for every Turkish administration since the
end of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. As a
result, consecutive Turkish governments banned the
use of Kurdish in schools, on radio and
television. Kurdish families were also prohibited
from giving Kurdish names to their children, and
violation of these regulations was considered a
criminal offense, punishable with up to five years
in prison.
Kurdish political parties were
also banned, and Kurdish separatists were arrested
and persecuted for their views. Kurdish rebellions
broke out in 1925, 1930 and 1937-1938. Various
states, like Greece, Syria, Iraq and Iran, have
extensively used the "Kurdish card" against Turkey
over the past 50 years. As a result of continued
foreign meddling, the PKK was born in 1978.
Originally named the Ankara Democratic
Patriotic Association of Higher Education, it had
a large student membership, and was headed by
Abdullah Ocelan. What started out in Ankara
mushroomed to southeast Turkey, which has a large
Kurdish population.
The PKK in its present
form came out with an inauguration manifesto,
which it called "Declaration of Independence", on
October 27, 1978. It adopted a heavy revolutionary
communist ideology, influenced by Mao Zedong's
"people's war" in China, and aimed at creating an
independent socialist State of Kurdistan on
territory controlled by Syria, Turkey, Iraq and
Iran. The communist influence remained strong
until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The main target of PKK military activity
has always been Turkey. Tactics have included
ambush, sabotage, riots, protests, suicide
bombings and target assassinations.
The
militants' most notorious acts have been the
assassination of prime minister Nihat Erim in July
1980 and the bombing of the Turkish consulate in
Strasbourg, France, in November 1980. The Turkish
Ministry of Justice says that during the years
1984-1998, 35,000 people were killed by the PKK,
17,500 of them being assassinations. Another 1,000
people were assassinated in 1999. When
interrogating arrested members of the outlawed
organization, Turkey realized that 86% of them
joined due to poverty, with a family income of
less than US$380 per month. Sixty percent are high
school drop-outs.
Given its record, it is
no surprise that the US, the European Union and
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization branded the
PKK a "terrorist organization". PKK assets in the
US were frozen by the US Treasury in 2004.
According to Robert Olson, author of books
on Turkey's relations with Iran, Syria, Israel and
Russia, Turkey spends an estimated $8 billion a
year to combat the PKK rebellion.
When
pressure became too strong for the rebels, they
fled to neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan after the
establishment of its autonomy at the end of the
Gulf War in 1991. They were received with open
arms by Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, who
subsequently became the presidents of Kurdistan
and Iraq respectively.
The rebels were
allowed to set up base in the mountainous regions,
where they hide out in caves, making air
operations difficult for the Turkish military.
The PKK has an annual budget of $86
million, mostly tapped through private donations
from wealthy Kurdish businessmen and revenue from
narcotic trafficking. According to the French, 80%
of heroin in Paris is smuggled into the country by
the PKK. There is a sizeable Kurdish community
scattered around Europe and at certain stages
several of its heavyweights have been sympathetic
to the PKK.
Germany alone has about
400,000 Kurds, France has 60,000 and Sweden has
10,000. Smaller communities can be found in
Belgium, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Italy.
According to reports, 14.7% of the PKK's
Kalashnikov assault rifles come from China, 3.6%
from Hungary and 3.6% from Belgium. Nearly 46% of
"assassination weapons" have traceable serial
numbers from Russia, with 13.2% from Great Britain
and 9.4% from the US. Grenades (19.8%) come from
the US, and 60.8% of mines come from Italy.
The turning point in the PKK's history was
1999 when its founder and leader Abdullah Ocelan
was apprehended by the Turks, in collaboration
with the US Central Intelligence Agency, in Kenya.
He was carrying a Cypriot passport in the name of
Mavros Lazaros. He was tried and sentenced to
death by a Turkish court but his sentence was
commuted to life imprisonment in 2002.
Since then, the PKK has operated with no
strong leadership and as a result has lost much of
its power base both within Turkey and abroad. It
declared a truce in 2006, but Erdogan refused to
commit to it, saying: "A ceasefire is done between
states. It is not something for a terrorist
organization."
The Turks expected the
United States, with which it had cooperated in the
past to combat communism and Islamic
fundamentalism, to take serious action against the
PKK after September 11, 2001.
Too busy
fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan
and insurgents in Iraq, the US has done very
little to root out the PKK. In fact, it turned a
blind eye, not wanting to upset its two strong
Kurdish allies, Barzani and Talabani. In
October-November 2004, the Turks mobilized on the
border with Iraqi Kurdistan, planning for an
invasion by 20,000 troops. That was halted by the
Americans.
For now, the world is waiting
to see what American diplomacy will lead to with
regard to the PKK. Although Washington brands the
group as "terrorist", the US has much to gain from
a continued PKK presence in Iraq. One clear
advantage is appeasement of Kurdish politicians
like Barzani and Talabani, who are needed for the
political process in Baghdad. The second reason is
that Washington cannot, even if it wished, combat
another guerrilla movement, with so much already
on its hands: al-Qaeda, the Mahdi Army of Shi'ite
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and Ba'athists fighting US
troops in Iraq.
According to The New
Yorker, the US government and Israel support the
Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, the Iranian
branch of the PKK, that works against the Islamic
government in Tehran. Murat Karayilan, a senior
PKK militant, was once quoted in an interview with
The Daily Telegraph of London as saying that the
US has had direct contact with the PKK in northern
Iraq. That was confirmed last year by Ali
Larijani, the former senior nuclear negotiator
under President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
Such
facts are well-known to the Turks, and their
patience has limits. Unless the US steps in soon
to help resolve the PKK problem, it risks Turkey
walking out of the "war on terror" and halting US
use of a Turkish air base that is a vital conduit
for supplying US forces in Iraq.
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian
political analyst.
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