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2 Roots of the Kurdish struggle run
deep By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - "In view of its strong
determination to eradicate terrorism, Turkey is
willing and ready to cooperate with any actor in
the fight against the PKK [Kurdistan Workers'
Party]." Those were the words of Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in an interview with
Forward Magazine, Syria's leading English monthly.
Last week, speaking in the northwestern
town of Golcuk, Erdogan added: "We will launch an
operation [against the PKK in northern
Iraq]
when it will be necessary, without asking for
anybody's opinion." He was clearly referring to
the United States, which is strongly opposed to a
military attack on Iraqi Kurdistan.
These two points, along with Erdogan's
determination to work with the devil - if need be - to root
out PKK rebels based in northern Iraq, explain why
the Iranians are suddenly very interested in what
is happening on the Turkish-Iraqi border. It is an
interest based on history, future, national
security and Iranian identity.
The PKK is
as much of a threat to Iran as it is to Turkey. In
February, the London Sunday Telegraph wrote that
the US was funding ethnic separatist groups
(non-Persian, which make up nearly 40% of Iran's
70 million) inside Iran to create trouble for the
Iranian regime. This was backed by several
editorials written by investigative reporter
Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, claiming that the
US plans to weaken the Islamic Republic through
separatist movements operating from within Iranian
territory against the Tehran government. These
include Kurds, Azeris and Ahwaz Arabs.
This won't break the Tehran regime, they
believe, but might exert enough pressure on Grand
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to abandon his nuclear
program. One of the many factions receiving
external support to apply pressure on the mullahs
of Tehran is the PKK. Last year, Iran launched
operations into Iraqi territory to track down
members of the PKK operating on the Iranian-Iraqi
border, arresting 40 Kurdish rebels.
At
the time, Ali Larijani, the then-secretary of the
Supreme National Security Council and chief
negotiator on Iran's nuclear portfolio, visited
Turkey to coordinate counter-PKK activity. For six
hours, he met with Yigit Alpogan, the secretary
general of the National Security Council,
then-foreign minister Abdullah Gul and Erdogan.
Larijani warned that he had documents
implicating US officials in meeting with the PKK,
although Washington considers the Kurdish group a
terrorist organization. The meetings, at the level
of military commanders, had taken place, he
claimed, in Mosul and Kirkuk. Larijani asked, "If
the US is fighting terrorism, why then is it
meeting with the PKK?"
This might explain
why last week Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad
spoke on the telephone with his Turkish
counterpart, Abdullah Gul, expressing his
country's support for an operation against the
PKK. This gave an "Iranian angle" to the
Turkish-Kurdish problem, to the displeasure of the
United States. Ahmadinejad showed solidarity and
stressed that Iran "had faced similar terrorism
from the PKK".
The Iranian
angle The Kurdish problem in Iran has been
a headache for Persian rulers since World War I.
The Iranian part of the dreamed-of Kurdish state
is called Eastern Kurdistan. It borders Iraq and
Turkey and includes parts of Azerbaijan,
Kermanshah, Ilam and Lorestan. These districts
house most of the Iran's 4 million Kurds.
During World War I, as a result of the central
government's weakness in Tehran, a Kurdish tribal
chief named Simko established a Kurdish authority
in an area west of Lake Urmia. This lasted from
1918 to 1922. Another tribal leader, Jaafar
Sultan, took control of territory between Marivan
and north of Halabja. This remained under Kurdish
control until it was restored to the central
government in 1925. Army commander and war
minister Reza Khan, (who later became shah of
Iran) responded with force, crushing Simko's
"Kurdistan" in 1922, and sending him off into
eight years in hiding. He was tracked down and
killed in 1930. Ambitious Kurds were taught a
lesson the hard way - forcing them to abandon
their separatist tactics and move into the
underground. Hundreds were arrested, uprooted and
persecuted for their separatist views.
This led to low-profile activity for a
Kurdish movement that was crushed in the 1920s.
They re-emerged with a separatist agenda during
World War II. A tribal chief named Hama Rashid
took control of three districts in western Iran,
Sardasht, Baneh and Mariwan. Again, the Iranian
government responded with force, crushing the
movement in 1944, restoring Persian authority to
them.
By 1946, a third attempt was
underway - this time supported by the Soviet
Union. The Russians created a Kurdish state in the
city of Mahabad (northwestern Iran) in December
1945 under the leadership of Qazi Mohammad. This
was the cornerstone from which Iraqi Kurds
demanded similar rights in northern Iraq after the
Gulf War of 1991. The area, known as the Republic
of Mahabad, was created in the cities of Mahabad,
Bukan, Naqada and Oshnaviyeh. It started with a
Kurdish rebellion in 1941 in which middle-class
Kurds and tribal leaders assembled authority of
the province, forming the Society for the Revival
of Kurdistan. Qazi Mohammad was named chairman of
the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Mullah Mustapha
Barzani became commander-in-chief of the Kurdish
army.
Mullah Mustapha's son Maasoud (the
president of modern-day Iraqi Kurdistan, was born
in Mahabad). The Russians provided the new entity
with financial and technical assistance, often
buying the entire tobacco crop of Iranian Kurds to
provide regular revenue to the coffers of Mahabad.
Among the republic's objectives - which remain
ripe in the minds of ambitious Iranian Kurds until
today - were, according to the republic's founding
declaration, "autonomy for the Iranian Kurds" and
"the use of Kurdish as the medium of education and
administration".
Once again, the
experiment did not last and was torpedoed by the
Iranian government when the war ended, lasting for
slightly less than one year. A decline in Soviet
support, along with isolation and economic woes
dislocated the young republic. Before collapse,
several senior officials united around Barzani and
promised Qazi Mohammad to fight until curtain-fall
if the Iranian army invaded Kurdistan.
When the troops stormed in the artificial
republic, they shut down the Kurdish printing
press, banned the teaching of Kurdish at schools
and burned all Kurdish books in sight. Qazi
Mohammad, regarded as a traitor by the central
government in Tehran, was
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