Washington-Ankara Rapprochement Doesn’t Extend to Turkey’s Kurds

By Jon Gorvett


	President George W. Bush listens as Turkish President Abdullah Gul speaks to reporters outside the White House following the two leaders’ Jan. 8 meeting (AFP Photo/Tim Sloan).

WHEN TURKEY’S president recently told journalists on a trip to Washington that he could never have imagined one day visiting the U.S. as leader of the Turkish nation, he was not the only one feeling some surprise.

The early-January trip, which culminated in Abdullah Gul having a quick lunch with President George W. Bush—dubbed “fast food diplomacy” by the Turkish press—also marked a rather surprising new flowering of friendship between the two NATO allies.

Central to this new burst of affection were recent events far away from both Ankara and Washington—in the bitterly cold mountains of southern Turkey and northern Iraq.

“We are at a new stage now in terms of U.S. support in the fight against the PKK [Kurdish Workers Party],” Gul had also told reporters on the plane home.

He was referring to the succession of air strikes, artillery barrages and cross-border incursions that the Turkish military carried out in the closing weeks of 2007 against PKK guerrillas based in northern Iraq.

The guerrillas, composed mainly of ethnic Kurds of Turkish origin, have been using northern Iraq as a safe haven for many years in their campaign for a separate Kurdish homeland in neighboring Turkey. Since the PKK took to the field in the early 1980s, an unknown number of people have died in this conflict, with the most common figure put at over 30,000—most of them ethnic Kurds.

Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Turkey had been demanding that the Washington assist in removing these PKK safe havens. These demands, however, had long fallen on deaf ears. Washington claimed it was doing all it could, but with the Iraqi insurgency raging, it was too overstretched to commit to another campaign.

Yet this explanation cut little ice with Ankara. The U.S., in common with the European Union and Turkey itself, has labelled the PKK a terrorist organization since the late 1990s, leading to charges by many Turks—and at times also by the Turkish government—of double standards in the U.S. “war on terror.”

At the same time, many believed the U.S. was using the PKK and its Iranian arm, PJAK, as tools against Tehran, which has a large ethnic Kurdish population as well. The northern Iraqi Kurds also are some of the few people in the region to broadly support the U.S. presence, and Washington was loathe to disturb the stability and peace of Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq by conducting a campaign against the PKK there.

This all appears to have shifted in 2007, however. Throughout the year, pressure had been mounting on the Turkish government to itself take military action against the PKK bases, particularly with both a general election and a presidential ballot on Turkey’s domestic political agenda.

The issue also became a political football in the lengthy contest between the staunchly secular Turkish military and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has Islamist roots. Clearly, the AKP leadership saw major pitfalls in such a campaign—as, off the record, did the military itself—yet a wave of nationalist sentiment, manipulated by extensive media coverage of the funerals of Turkish soldiers killed in combat with the PKK inside Turkey, left both having to claim that they were ready to go in at any moment.

Meanwhile, the spectacle of Turkish troops invading Kurdish territory in northern Iraq placed considerable pressure on the northern Iraqi Kurdish leadership, who responded by swearing to defend all Kurds against attack.

With such a conflict of interests among the several players in the conflict, it was perhaps not surprising that nothing happened for a very long time. The Turkish parliament began debating a cross-border incursion in January 2007, but the first air strike and artillery operation was not mounted until November and the first ground incursion in December.

What also took time was the securing of Washington’s support. When it came, however, it was clearly decisive. In the summer of 2007 a joint intelligence center was established in Ankara, where U.S. and Turkish personnel worked together on tracking events in northern Iraq. U.S. military officials from Iraq also were fairly frequent visitors to the Turkish capital throughout the year. When the cross-border operations began, they did so with U.S.-supplied real time satellite intelligence.

By winter, then, it seemed to many Turks that a deal finally had been made between all the parties that enabled Turkey to strike. Each attack was accompanied by condemnation from Baghdad—still nominally the sovereign government in northern Iraq, although de facto powerless there—although this was immediately tempered by an acknowledgment of Turkey’s right to defend itself against the PKK.

The northern Iraqi Kurdish leadership was more strident still in its condemnation, despite the fact that the limited nature of the Turkish attacks clearly left that leadership under no threat. What was being bombed and shelled was usually mostly empty farmland and hillside in a strip of mountainous terrain along the frontier—although some bombing raids were up to 60 miles inside Iraqi territory. The border strip has been mostly abandoned since the 1990s, when Turkey would regularly launch such cross-border operations. Since PKK guerrillas would have to cross the strip to get to Turkey, with the attacks happening in winter, when the area is snow-covered and usually dormant, it seemed unlikely that the PKK would be doing any grand maneuvers.

This arrangement has enabled Ankara to demonstrate domestically that it is taking action, while also keeping its opponents in the Turkish military within the confines of a limited strategy. The U.S. role has also created a window of opportunity for the two countries to begin a rapprochement.

Yet for all the skill with which the government has handled the situation, the larger issues on the ground in Turkey’s Kurdish region remain largely unaddressed. There is a vicious circle of deprivation and alienation feeding much of the discontent felt by many of Turkey’s Kurds, with economic, social and cultural implications.

Deprivation and Alienation

The region’s capital, Diyarbakir, hit by a particularly bloody bomb attack in January, strongly illustrates this. Unemployment is over 60 percent, with investment in new factories and shops promised before the elections failing to materialize as the security situation has worsened. Almost all the main economic sectors—textiles, cotton and quarrying, mainly of marble—are in decline.

Meanwhile, the population has rocketed from around 250,000 in the early 1990s to 1.25 million now, with internally displaced persons (IDPs) making up a large part of the total, as the conflict forced many to flee the surrounding countryside.

These IDPs remain unacknowledged by the government, but also mean the social infrastructure is at the bursting point. Hospitals are overcrowded, schools have classes of 60. The number of students gaining university entrance is 0.01 percent, as compared to 3 percent for Turkey as a whole.

These socioeconomic problems are compounded by cultural and political ones. Schools must teach in Turkish and there are punishments for speaking Kurdish. This is a major problem when for the majority of students Kurdish is their mother tongue. The mayor of the city was also recently charged with breaking language laws by issuing New Year cards in Turkish and Kurdish. He faces a possible prison sentence for doing so.

At the same time, there is little, if any, faith in the Turkish judiciary, while many Kurds say they are terrified of the police, given their lengthy reputation for brutality and arbitrary arrests.

There is, however, some hope in the city that the AKP may be able to change things. The party did well there during the general elections, taking votes from the traditional pro-Kurdish party, the Democratic Society Party (DTP). The AKP did provide the region with investment in infrastructure during its previous tenure in national office, including connecting up some 1,200 villages in the Diyarbakir region to the electricity and water grid.

Yet people are also used to hopes being confounded in this region. How much room the AKP has to address the substantive issues is debatable, too, given the surge of nationalist sentiment among Turks in the country as a whole. Demands for mother tongue education were brushed aside by AKP Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan on a visit to the city in January. Many fear that moves in the AKP’s current rewrite of the country’s constitution to allow more rights for ethnic minorities may also now fall by the wayside.

Bombing northern Iraq is one thing, it seems—sorting out southeastern Turkey will likely be quite another.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.