THE KURDISH CARD IN TURKEY
[This Monday’s Archive was originally published on April 3, 2007. The map you see are the regions of four countries where the great majority of people there are Kurds: Syrian Kurdistan in yellow, Iraqi Kurdistan in green, Iranian Kurdistan in blue, and Turkish Kurdistan in rose red. With the fall of the Assad dictatorship in Syria this week that was engineered by the dictator of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, the map above becomes enormously relevant.
After taking Damascus,, Erdogan’s next target is the genocidal takeover of Syrian Kurdistan. Yet his enormous Achilles Heel are the 20 million Kurds in his own country. The Kurdish card is ready to be played to stop Erdogan. Will Trump play it?]
TTP. April 3, 2007
The current media freak-out in the US is about the silly mouth of radio buffoon Don Imus. Multiply the frenzy by, say, 100 times, and it might give you an idea of the media hysteria right now in Turkey about the serious mouth of Massoud Barzani, President of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq.
Sick and tired of Turkish threats to his government, Barzani, in an interview on Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite television, unloaded on Turkey: “If Ankara allows itself to interfere in our affairs, we will then interfere for the 30 million Kurds in Turkey.”
The interview was broadcast while I was in Arbil (Hawler), capital of Iraqi Kurdistan last Saturday (4/7), and the Kurds there were in a state of ecstatic glee over Barzani’s daring to identify Turkey’s deepest fear. It’s hard for us here in America to grasp what sort of rhetorical nuclear bomb Barzani dropped with these words.
Turkey is bigger than Texas, about 300,000 square miles. The entire southeastern third, some 100,000 square miles, is predominately Kurdish. Turkey’s total population is a little over 70 million. Barzani was stretching it to claim 30 million of them are Kurdish, but there’s certainly well over 20.
This means one third of Turkey’s land and population isn’t Turkish – it’s Kurdish.
The Kurds were allowed to pretty much run their affairs during the Ottoman Empire. But as we saw last week in Where the Cold War Began, Where Islamofascism Can End, when the Allies broke apart the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I and Kemal Attaturk carved modern Turkey out of it, Turkey’s Kurds were left out in the tyrannical cold.
The Turkish government officially denied their very existence, insisting they were “Mountain Turks,” and their ancient Indo-European language was a form of Turkish. Even so, the Kurdish language was banned – you couldn’t even speak it in the streets, much less teach or use it in schools.
As the government in Ankara brutally suppressed the Kurds, it became an ally of the West in the Cold War and a dedicated member of NATO. A major goal of the Soviet Union was the destabilization of Turkey, which it bordered on three sides (east with Soviet Armenia, north across the Black Sea, and northwest with Soviet Bulgaria).
When various other efforts failed, the Soviets decided to play the “Kurdish card” in the destabilization game. A KGB agent named Yevgeny Primakov was dispatched in 1978 to work with a Kurdish student leader on the Soviet payroll named Abdullah Öcalan (pronounced Urch-a-lon) to form a Marxist-Leninist “liberation movement” called the Kurdish Workers Party, known as the PKK (Kurdish initials for Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan).
Primakov, working out of the Soviet embassy in Ankara, also helped organize a series of riots and disturbances in cities throughout the country, resulting in a military coup by the Turkish Army in 1980 as the only way to stop them.
The PKK, with Soviet money and arms, began a guerrilla insurgency with the declared goal of liberating Turkish Kurdistan and creating a separate Kurdish state – albeit a Soviet colony, either encompassed within the USSR like Armenia or without as a “satellite” like Bulgaria.
The Turkish military fought back with incredible heartlessness. Army “special war units” slaughtered tens of thousands of Kurds, wiped out hundreds of entire towns and villages off the map after indulging in mass rape and pillage.
The PKK, posing as liberators, were more ruthless towards Kurds who did not join them, who rejected Communism forced upon them, than against Turkish soldiers. PKK guerrillas and Communist fanatics killed almost as many Kurds as the Turkish Army.
This was throughout the 1980s, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the PKK steadily lost ground. Finally, in 1999, Öcalan was captured. And what do you suppose happened? The PKK formed an alliance with the “special war units” of the Turkish Army.
What was the purpose of such an alliance? The same as that between Afghanistan’s Taliban and Pakistan’s military intelligence – to make drug money.
Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s opium poppies made into heroin. I explained how the ISI (Pakistan military intel) set up the Taliban as its partner in the opium business way back in October, 2003 in Afghan Poppies. (And to update the article, the CIA has still done nothing about it.)
The ISI oversees labs in Afghanistan, such as in Nangarhar and Helmand provinces, that convert the opium sap into morphine paste molded into bricks. The major drug conduit to Europe is now from Afghanistan through Iran – transshipment made possible by the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guard) – and into Turkey, where the morphine bricks are reprocessed into grades of white or brown heroin.
In other words, the heroin drug smuggling corridor from poppy farmer in Afghanistan to lab processing to shipment into Europe is operated by government/military networks in Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey in collusion with terrorist groups such as the Taliban and the PKK.
Note this means that the PKK works with both elements in the Turkish Army and elements in the Iranian military.
As a cover, the Turkish military uses the PKK as a scaremongering rationale for suppressing Kurdish freedoms – while allowing the PKK to suppress any competition as monopoly “spokesman” for Kurds in Turkey.
This cozy affair has been upset by the success of a semi-independent Kurdish state right across the Turkish border in Iraq – and by the emergence of rivals to the PKK, legitimate Kurdish political parties advocating genuine democracy for all people in Turkey and ending the second-class citizen status of Turkish Kurds.
So how does the Turkish government respond? Threaten the government of Iraqi Kurdistan, of course.
The made-up excuse is the “rights” of the Turcomans – an ethnic group with whom Ankara claims kinship residing in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk.
Traditionally the center of Kurdish culture, after the Gulf War in 1991 and a horrifically suppressed Kurdish revolt, Kirkuk was “Arabized” by Saddam Hussein, with hundreds of thousands of Kurds forcibly removed and Arabs moved in who got to seize Kurdish homes and property.
Since the American liberation of Iraq in 2003, Kirkuk has been systematically “de-Arabized” with the dispossessed Kurds moving back in and Arabs moving out. This has now reached the stage where the Barzani government feels comfortable with holding a Kirkuk Status Referendum on November 15, 2007 for the residents of Kirkuk to decide on their city being formally annexed to the Kurdistan Regional Government.
This is enraging Ankara – for after the referendum (which will overwhelmingly choose to join the KRG), Kirkuk will be the capital of a strong – and rich – Kurdish state. Rich because of the legendary Kirkuk multi-billion barrel oil fields.
So Ankara issues threats of military invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, and finally Barzani last weekend struck back.
Every Turkish language newspaper is lashing out with diatribes against Barzani. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pronounced Air-doh-wan) proclaims Barzani will be “crushed.” These are words of very scared people.
They know Barzani’s Kurdish card is far more powerful than any they can play. If the tens of millions of Kurds in Turkey look to Barzani as their liberator, the Turkish state could end as we know it.
Yet Barzani’s purpose is not to cause a civil war in Turkey and break it apart. He wants for Turkey’s Kurds what he has achieved for Iraq’s – regional autonomy and freedom, and playing a full role in the country’s governance.
More and more, the predictions made in The Kurdish Key to the Middle East have a likelihood of coming true. Barzani is forcing the Turks to understand the Kurds are a solution, not a threat. It’s going to be a difficult lesson for stubborn Turks to learn – but one way or the other, they will learn to treat Kurds as full citizens of their country.
Either that, or they won’t have their country in one piece for long.