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When Kurds smell success, Turks go for
guns
12.10.2007
By Con Coughlin
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October
12, 2007
The semi-autonomous enclave of Kurdistan in northern
Iraq has long been regarded as an oasis of stability
and good governance in a country otherwise riven
with violence and sectarian strife.
Even when militant insurgent groups have carried out
attacks against Kurdish targets, such as the
devastating truck bombings of the Yazidi community
last August that claimed more than 400 lives, the
Kurds have managed to resist being drawn into the
endless spiral of tit-for-tat attacks that has
accounted for so many innocent lives throughout the
rest of the country.
The ability of the Kurds to rise above the
internecine blood-letting that has come to
characterise post-Saddam Iraq owes much to the fact
that they have administered their own affairs for
more than a decade; Iraq's Kurdish region was
protected from Saddam's murderous designs by the
no-fly zones established after the 1991 Gulf war.
The Kurds' aptitude for self-government was finally
rewarded in the summer when American military
commanders handed over control of the three Kurdish
provinces of Erbil, Dahuk and Sulaimaniyah to
Massoud Barzani, the veteran Kurdish warlord.
But this rare Iraqi success story now looks as
though it could soon implode, should the Turkish
government go ahead with its threat to invade
Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq to root out terror
cells that have been carrying out attacks on Turkish
soil.
If the banner headlines in yesterday's main Turkish
newspapers are any guide, the Turks are thirsting
for revenge after a series of attacks out in
south-eastern Turkey by the outlawed Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK).
In the worst attack, last weekend, 13 Turkish troops
were killed in a well-executed ambush. This and a
series of other attacks on military positions has
persuaded Turkey's political and military echelons
to bury their differences and present a united front
to deal with the PKK.
Following an emergency meeting this week of military
and political leaders chaired by Recep Erdogan, the
Turkish prime minister, the government agreed to
consider "every kind of legal, political and
economic measure – including an incursion across the
border".
Preparations for an invasion are well under way,
with the main roads to Turkey's southern border
yesterday clogged with tank and troop transporters.
Mr Erdogan says that, for the moment at least, he
has only ordered the military to make preparations
for an invasion, but his advisers believe that he is
likely to seek parliamentary approval for action
within the next few days.
As the mass-selling Hurriyet declared in an
editorial this week: "The government has given the
military a blank cheque for a cross-border
operation."
A Turkish invasion of northern Iraq is the last
thing coalition forces struggling to maintain order
in Iraq would want to see, but all the indications
from Ankara suggest there are many persuasive
arguments in favour of action.
To start with, it would fully occupy the energies of
Turkey's restless military establishment, which only
a few months ago was rumoured to be planning a coup
to protect the country from the growing Islamic
encroachment on its secular identity.
There is also mounting consternation within Turkey's
political establishment – both Muslim and secular –
about the emergence of an independent Kurdish state
in northern Iraq.
Although Iraq's Kurdish leaders have committed
themselves fully to supporting the new Iraqi
constitution, Ankara is concerned that the degree of
autonomy enjoyed by the three self-governing Kurdish
provinces could lead to the eventual creation of a
fully independent Kurdish state.
This could have potentially disastrous implications
for Turkey, where the estimated 12 million Kurds
living in the south of the country would intensify
their independence campaign.
Turkish concerns over what they see as the Kurds'
inexorable progress towards full statehood have not
been helped by what one Western diplomat in the
region recently described as Mr Barzani's
"irredentist rhetoric".
In speeches made since he assumed control of the
Kurds' mini-state in the summer, Mr Barzani has
appeared to assert a political and territorial claim
to the ethnic Turkish areas of south-eastern Turkey.
The bad blood between Ankara and Mr Barzani's
fiefdom has been exacerbated by the Kurdish leader's
inclination to turn a blind eye to the activities of
the PKK, which is deemed a terrorist organisation by
Washington and its allies.
Mr Barzani and the PKK make for strange bedfellows:
in the past, the fiercely nationalistic Mr Barzani
has fought to suppress the PKK's revolutionary
Marxist-Leninist ideology. But more recently it has
suited his political agenda to give the PKK a free
rein in northern Iraq.
It gives him a powerful bargaining chip with Ankara
in future discussions over the oil-rich region of
Kirkuk which, if it were ever to be placed under
Kurdish control, would make an independent Kurdish
state economically viable.
Indeed, Mr Barzani appears determined to protect the
right of the PKK to attack Turkish military
positions, warning that he would deploy his fierce
Peshmerga fighters to defend the rugged mountain
passes that provide a natural defensive shield
against a Turkish offensive. The last large-scale
Turkish incursions into northern Iraq in 1995 and
1997, which involved nearly 50,000 troops, failed to
dislodge the Kurdish rebels.
And even though any outbreak in hostilities between
the Turks and the Kurds could have catastrophic
consequences for Western interests in the region –
particularly Iraq – it appears the West is powerless
to defuse the crisis.
This week's decision by the US House of
Representatives' foreign affairs committee to
designate as genocide the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of Armenians at the hands of the Turks in
1915 has hardly helped to improve the Bush
Administration's ability to influence events in
Ankara.
And the European Union's patronising treatment of
Turkey's membership application has strengthened the
resolve of Turkish nationalists to adopt a more
robust approach to defending the country's
interests, irrespective of whether the threat comes
from Islamic radicals or Kurdish separatists.
telegraph co.uk
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