The latest incursion by the Turkish Army into northern Iraq has once again focused the ... spotlight on its long-running war with the separatist Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK as it is popularly called after its Kurdish initials. More than 25,0000 troops with air and artillery cover are committed to the onslaught in an attempt to deliver a fatal blow to some 2000 and odd PKK guerrillas using northern Iraq (as base).
Whether Ankara will succeed in its mission to clean up the PKK bases is open to question. However, this foray into Iraq is symptomatic of its military approach to the whole Kurdish issue ... Pursuing an exclusively military solution, Turkish leaders hope to stamp out the PKK-led insurgency that has raged in Turkey for more than a decade and taken more than 17,000 lives .. The PKK's terrorist attacks have stretched beyond south-eastern Turkey where it has based its armed struggle for a homeland of 12 million Kurds who make up fifth of the country's total population ..
Abd Allah Ocalan, widely known by his nickname Apo' who, alongwith a small group of his followers launched the Patitiya Karkaran Kurdistan (PKK) in 1978 Unlike other Kurdish factions, notably the KDP and PUK in Iraq, which have cultivated a following through neo-tribal patronage networks. the (followers) of Apo were drawn exclusively from Turkey's growing proletariat. In fact, the PKK has imbued Kurdish nationalism with the idea of class war. Following the demise of the moderate Left-wing political parties representing Kurdish interest in the seventies, the PKK became the rallying point for the Kurdish collective movement in Turkey's poor ... south-east.
Kurdistan, the land of the Kurds, was divided during seventeenth century between the Ottoman and Persian Empires , but it enjoyed considerable de factor independence until ... After the First World War, when new states were carved our of disintegrating Ottoman Empire. The Kurds ... were also regarded as natural candidates for nationhood.
The design for an independent Kurdistan was on the drawing-board of the victorious allies at the Conference of Serves ... The reconstructe1 Turkish Army overran Kurdish territories in 1922 and a large chunk of Kurdish population was left within the borders of a new Turkish Republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923. Britain and France indirectly awarded themselves Kurdish areas through their client states Syria and Iraq.
Consequently, the Kurds were trapped by the stronger states seeking to maintain the status quo by imposing the homogenising ideology of the 'dominant core'. In Kemalist Turkey, for example, the Turks, who are also a majority, constitute the 'dominant core', which views itself as a historic institutional and symbolic creation and hence, the appropriate hegemony of the state. Obversely, such large ethnic groups as the Kurds who comprise the periphery are subjected to the forceful process of assimilation.
Although the Turkish Republic inherited the social composition of a multi-ethnic empire, the framers of the Republic opted for the French nation-state model, which does not recognise the indigenous minority, ethnic or religious. Indeed, this very nature of the Turkish state is the basic issue in the 13-year-old Turkish-Kurdish conflict. For the Kurdish rebels with their Marxist ideology and separatist aspirations represent a dire threat, not just to the Turkish Government as presently configured, but to the cohesion of the ... nation state itself.
Interestingly, however, the Turkish state discourse has consistently avoided recognising the Kurdishness of the Kurdish question. The issue of Kurds is viewed in terms of reactionary politics, tribal resistance, regional backwardness, terrorism, but never as ethno-political.
The Turkish authorities even deny that the Kurds exist. They are instead categorised as 'mountain Turks' or the 'Kurdish Turks' and, more important, their language is portrayed as a 'rotten branch of Turkish' though it has distinct Indo-European ancestry.
On the whole, denying the Kurds their separate identity has been the main plank of Turkey's official ideology. So much so that there are no government records or statistics indicating the exact size or geographic distribution of the Kurdish population.
Members of the Turkish establishment, however, argue that the absence of distinction between the two shows that there is no barrier to the advancement of Kurds within the state
It is true that people identifiable as being of Kurdish origin have achieved high office that includes Ministers and Members of Parliament. It is also true that they have secured those positions in the state apparatus only by concealing their Kurdish identities. In contrast, those who do not deny their heritage, like the noted ... sociologist Ismail Besikci, film director Yilmaz Guney and the well- known novelist Yasser Kemal, have suffered the wrath of the avenging state.
In its implacable campaign against "terrorism", Turkey has consciously destroyed the middle-ground of non-violent protest and debate. For example, Ozgur Gundem, a legal Kurdish journal was closed in 1994 after less than two years during which 17 journalists and distributors were assassinated squads. By locking away the leading representatives of Kurdish aspirations on the charge of separatism, and closing down the legally constituted pro-Kurdish organisations like the People's Democracy Party (HADEP), the state has foreclosed a legitimate forum for the Turks and Kurds to re-negotiate the coexistence on which the well-being of the Republic depends.
Worse still, the Turkish establishment, by denying the Kurds political platform at the time when the Turkish Centre-Left is in disarray, has enlarged the electoral space of the Islamist contingent led by the Refah (Welfare) party. Refah may not be a natural partner of Kurdish nationalism, but it has now attracted growing support from the discontented Kurdish peasants, particularly those displaced from their rural (houses) in the troubled east of the country Since 1990, the security forcers have evacuated nearly three thousand villages and hamlets apparently with the intention to deprive the PKK guerrillas of any form of shelter and food in the border areas. According to the reports published by the Human Right Watch and Amnesty International, approximately three million people have abandoned their villages on orders from the Army, and half the Kurdish rural habitat has been emptied. The surge of immigration to the nearby towns has already caused social upheaval as the Turkish newspapers and starvation of Kurdish migrants in Diyarbaker and Hakkari towns.
Paradoxically, such a schizophrenic attitude of the state has strengthened the symbolic value of the PKK, the only surviving organisation that upholds the concept of Kurdish identity. If the PKK has emerged as the vehicle for Kurdish aspirations, despite its reputation for brutality, this is not due to its Marxist-Leninist ideology ...
Nor is it because the majority of the Kurdish population shares its ultimate goal of establishing an independent Kurdish state. In fact, many Kurds living in most of western Turkey, especially Istanbul and Izmir, are unlikely to abandon their homes to settle in a hypothetical state that would be surrounded by hostile countries. The PKK exists because Kurdish political parties, language and dress, indeed, the very word 'Kurd' have been outlawed. It may not possess resources and the kind of international support required to transform the movement into ... a Kurdish intifada.
All the same the PKK has won a significant political victory by forcing Turkey's political elite, known for their strong mono-ethnic tendency, to acknowledge what President Suleyman Demirel described the "Kurdish reality". More so, his predecessor, Turgut Ozal, broke the Kemalist taboo on Kurds by amending the Constitution to allow "non-Turkish" languages to be spoken, and even published.
Ozal's initiative, though it outraged the establishment, was the first ever sign of a non-military solution to the conflict. (When) he died ... politicians abandoned his pursuit of a political solution in favour of an all-out war.
In the past 12 years of frightful war, which costs Turkey $ 7 to $ 8 billion a year, the Army has achieved precious little save spreading the very nationalism that Ankara wishes to contain. No wonder, the Turkish security forces are now under pressure to show results in the current operation in northern Iraq. But ... Ankara risks bogging down its Army in vicious hostilities.
The 'safe haven' created in northern Iraq by the US- led allied forces after the Gulf War has descended into a state of anarchy following the resumption of armed conflict between the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in 1996. The power vacuum created by an interminable factional fighting among the Iraqi Kurds has benefited the PKK artisans particularly in consolidating its forward base in the northern region of Bahdian close to the Turkish border. Backed by logistic support from Iran and its surrogate, the PUK, the PKK's military activities constitute a veritable threat in the KDP's sphere of influence where a majority of Kurds speak the Kurmanji dialect like their Turkish counterpart.
The conflict in northern Iraq may appear obscure, but it is deceptively dangerous.
It is currently a political twilight zone, where the regional powers including Turkey compete among themselves to promote their respective geo-strategic interests using the fractious Kurds as natural pawns. In an area famed for shifting alliances, success in the battlefield does not necessarily guarantee long-term security; ongoing conflicts are rather part of the region's status quo. The KDP, for instance, which today acts as an auxiliary force for the Turkish Army, was not long ago aligned with the PKK in its bid to recapture Arbil, the unofficial capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, from the control of the PUK, its arch rival In any event, the imperative towards a military solution is itself an expression of weakness rather than strength, for a state unable to achieve consensus politically will remain fragile. Instead of exclusively relying on the Army ... Turkey ... should search for a non-military, civilian solution possibly by reviving public debate over the Basque model. Just as in Spain where Catalan and Basque separatist movements have ebbed with greater devolution of power, a measure of cultural and administrative autonomy will satisfy Kurdish aspirations. Until then the Kurdish question will remain Turkey's festering sore. (Source: The Mainstream, 19 July 1997)
