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Turkey fears Kurds, not Armenians 16.10.2007
By Spengler |
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October
16, 2007
Turkey’s integration into the global economy was
sealed last week by a billion-dollar offer by the
American private-equity firm KKR for a local
shipping company. Days later, Turkish troops shelled
Kurdish villages in Kurdistan region 'northern Iraq'
and prepared an incursion against Kurdish rebels, a
measure that would undermine Turkey’s economic
standing. Whether Turkey will fling away its
new-found prosperity in a fit of national pique is
hard to forecast, but that has been the way of all
flesh. Europe plunged into World War I in 1914
at the peak of its prosperity for similar reasons.
News accounts link Turkey’s threat to invade
northern Iraq with outrage over a resolution before
the US Congress recognizing that Turkey committed
genocide against its Armenian population in 1915.
American diplomats are in Ankara seeking to persuade
the Turks to stay on their side of the border. Why
the Turks should take out their rancour at the US on
the Kurds might seem anomalous until we consider
that the issue of Armenian genocide has become a
proxy for Turkey’s future disposition towards the
Kurds. “We did not exterminate the Armenians,”
Ankara says in effect, “and, by the way, we’re going
to not exterminate the Kurds, too.”
Nations have tragic flaws, just as do individuals.
The task of the tragedian is to show how
catastrophic occurrences arise from hidden faults
rather than from random error. Turkish history is
tragic: a fatal flaw in the national character set
loose the 1915 genocide against the Armenians, as
much as Macbeth’s ambition forced him to murder
Banquo. Because the same flaw still torments the
Turkish nation, and the tragedy has a sequel in the
person of the Kurds, Turkey cannot face up to its
century-old crime against the Armenians.
Shakespeare included the drunken Porter in Macbeth
for comic relief; in the present version, the
cognate role is played by US President George W
Bush, who has begged Congress not to offend an
important ally by stating the truth about what
happened 100 years ago. The sorry spectacle of an
American president begging Congress not to affirm
what the whole civilized world knows to be true
underlines the overall stupidity of US policy
towards the Middle East. It is particularly
despicable for a Western nation to avert its eyes
from a Muslim genocide against a Christian
population.
It offends reason to claim that the Turkish
government’s 1915 campaign to exterminate the
Armenians was not a genocide. Documentary evidence
of a central plan is exhaustive, and available to
anyone with access to Wikipedia. It was not quite
the same as Hitler’s genocide against the Jews, that
is, the Turks did not propose to kill every ethnic
Armenian everywhere in the world, but only those in
Anatolia. But it was genocide, or the word has no
meaning. To teach Turkish schoolchildren that more
Turks than Armenians died in a “conflict” is a
symptom of national hysteria. Hysteria, however,
does not occur spontaneously in countries with
Turkey’s record of national success. One must dig
for the root cause.
Turkey’s tragedy is that the 11th Seljuk conquerors
of the Anatolian peninsula became masters of a
majority Christian population, a cradle of Greek
culture for two millennia, in which the oldest and
hardiest ethnicity, the Armenians, held fast to the
Christian religion they adopted in 301 AD. Even
after the forced conversion of Anatolia to Islam,
the Ottoman Turks comprised a minority. Turkey, so
to speak, was ill-born to begin with, and the
Armenian genocide touches upon a profound and
well-justified insecurity in the Turkish national
character.
After the loss of the European part of its empire in
the Balkans, in the midst of World War I, the
Ottoman Empire feared for its hold upon Anatolia
itself, and decided to settle the long-unfinished
business of conquest with a conscious act of
genocide. But the Turks lacked the resources to do
so in the midst of war, and Turkey’s military
leaders enlisted Kurdish tribes to do most of the
actual killing in return for Armenian land. That is
why Kurds dominate eastern Turkey, which used to be
called, “Western Armenia”. The Armenian genocide, in
short, gave rise to what today is Turkey’s Kurdish
problem.
Commentators close to the Bush administration allege
that Democrats in Congress are exploiting the
Armenian issue in order to sabotage America’s war
effort in Iraq. Ralph Peters writes in the October
14 New York Post, for example, “The Dems calculate
that, without those [US] flights and convoys
[through Turkey], we won't be able to keep our
troops adequately supplied. Key intelligence and
strike missions would disappear. It's a brilliant
ploy - the Dems get to stab our troops in the back,
but lay the blame off on the Turks.”
I am shocked, shocked to learn that the Democratic
Party is engaged in politics. Col Peters, though,
misses the big picture. With or without the Armenian
resolution, conflict had to erupt with Turkey. Far
more threatening to Turkey than the resolution on
Armenian genocide was the 75-23 vote in the US
Senate last month in favor of dividing Iraq into
Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurdish zones. Republicans as
well as Democrats supported this resolution, and
with good reason. I have advocated the breakup of
the Mesopotamian monster named “Iraq” for years, and
do not think this step can long be withheld.
Kurdish nationhood will be the likely outcome of
Iraq’s breakup. Ethnic Kurds comprise a full fifth
of Turkey’s population, and the existence of a
Kurdish nation will exercise a gravitational pull
upon Kurds in Turkey. Turkey fears with good reason
for its national integrity. If the American Congress
accuses the Turkey of genocide against the Armenians
(as 22 countries already have), the Kurds will have
a stronger argument for autonomy - despite the fact
that the Kurds dominate eastern Turkey precisely
because they slaughtered the Armenians. The Kurds
may not deserve nationhood, but “’Deserves’ got
nothing to do with it,” as Clint Eastwood’s
character offered in the movie Unforgiven.
When the issue of Armenian genocide erupted, I
immediately looked for news about the Turkish
novelist Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize
for Literature, and the only Turk with a global
voice. Pamuk reportedly spent his prize money on a
Manhattan apartment, suggesting that he has no plans
to return to a homeland that threatened to jail him
for mentioning the Armenian massacres to a Swiss
interviewer. That speaks volumes about the Turkish
frame of mind.
Pamuk’s novel Snow comes as close to a national
tragedy as Turkey is likely to produce. Set in the
eastern border city of Kars, it shows how Islam is
filling the hollow spaces in the secular Turkish
society created by Kemal Ataturk, the great
modernizer who fashioned the post-Ottoman state.
Young women hang themselves in protest against the
proscription of Islamic garb, and young men turn to
Islamist terrorism. The decaying mansions of the
murdered Armenians of Kars look down upon the
tragedy like a spectral chorus. In past essays I
have recommended Pamuk’s work to anyone who seeks to
understand Turkey (The fallen bridge over the
Bosporus, Oct 31, 2006; In defense of Turkish
cigarettes, Aug 24, 2006). To his own chagrin, Pamuk
has become the conscience of his nation, and a
nation that exiles its conscience becomes a danger
to itself and others.
Iraq never has been viable as a national entity, not
when the British Colonial Office cobbled it together
out of former Ottoman provinces in 1921, nor when
Saddam Hussein ruled it by terror, and surely not
under the present American occupation. As the US
Senate has had the belated wisdom to recognize, it
will break up. The Ottoman Empire never was viable -
at its peak half of its population was Christian -
and its Anatolian rump, namely modern Turkey, may
break up as well. Iran, the mini-empire of the
Persians who comprise only half the population, may
not hold together, nor may Syria, a witches’
cauldron of ethnicities ruled by the brutal hand of
the Alawite minority.
America is not responsible for chaos in the Middle
East. The Middle East has known nothing but chaos
for most of its history. The colonial policy of the
European powers after World War I left inherently
unstable structures in place that must, one day,
meet their reckoning. But America’s obsession with
the surgical implant of democracy in the region
forces it into a murderous game of whack-a-mole with
a welter of armed ethnicities.
How should American strategy respond to violent
expressions of existential despair by failing
ethnicities? One approach was suggested by
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on October
14: “A starting point is [former Carter
Administration National Security Advisor] Zbigniew
Brzezinski's new book, Second Chance, which argues
that America's best hope is to align itself with
what he calls a 'global political awakening'. The
former national security adviser explains: ‘In
today's restless world, America needs to identify
with the quest for universal human dignity, a
dignity that embodies both freedom and democracy but
also implies respect for cultural diversity.'"
I suppose Brzezinski means that America should avoid
offending Turkish dignity when speaking about the
Armenians, and do the same with the Armenians when
speaking of the Turks. What makes the appeal to
“cultural diversity” preposterous is that the
self-expression of Seljuk Turk culture is the
suppression of the Kurds, the self-expression of
Sunni identity is to suppress the Shi’ites, and so
on and so forth. Ethnic tantrums in response to
perceived indignities are amplified by a sense of
failure in the modern world that cannot be assuaged
by American “respect”.
Live and let die, I propose instead. For the past
seven years I have argued that the West cannot avoid
perpetual conflict in the Middle East, and, rather
than seeking stability, should steer the instability
towards its own ends. Washington should forget about
Turkish support in Iraq, allow the Mesopotamian
entity to disintegrate into its constituent parts,
while helping the Kurds maintain autonomy against
Iraq. That would teach the Turks to bite the hand
that feeds them. A pro-Western Kurdish state would
strengthen Washington’s hand throughout region, with
adumbrations in Syria and Iran as well as Turkey.
One should, of course, take Turkish interests into
account. To restore its national dignity, Turkey
should be encouraged to incorporate the
Turkish-speaking (“Azeri”) minority of Iran, and so
forth. Turkey ultimately may concede territory to an
independent Kurdistan, but more than replace it by
annexing portions of Western Iran. One cannot accord
respect to failing nationalities; one can only let
them fight it out. Breaking up Iraq will not foster
stability. On the contrary, it will make the old
instabilities a permanent feature of the regional
landscape.
In the case of Iraq, the danger associated with
partition stems from Iran’s influence among Iraqi
Shi’ites. But Iran, as noted, is just as vulnerable
to ethnic disintegration as Iraq, and Washington
should do its best to encourage this. If, as I
expect, the West employs force against Iran’s
nuclear weapons development capacity, the ensuing
humiliation of the Tehran regime would provide an
opportunity to undo some of the dirty work of World
War I-era cartographers. All this is hypothetical,
of course; the little men behind the desks in
Washington do not have the stomach for it.
atimes com
* First world war
massacres | Related
issue:
Armenian Genocide by Turkish Muslims against
Christians
Turkey faces international pressure to recognise
that more than 1 million Armenians were massacred
during a 1915 campaign of ethnic cleansing by
Ottoman Turks. Turkish officials claim that most
deaths were caused by hunger and disease.
More about Armenian Genocide by Turks at
Genocide1915.info - The Armenian Genocide
Recognition Struggle!
**
Kurds are not recognized as an official minority in
Turkey and are denied rights granted to other
minority groups. Under EU pressure, Turkey recently
granted Kurds limited rights for broadcasts and
education in the Kurdish language, but critics say
the measures do not go far enough.
The use of the term "Kurdistan" is vigorously
rejected due to its alleged political implications
by the Republic of Turkey, which does not recognize
the existence of a "Turkish Kurdistan" Southeast
Turkey.
Others estimate over 40 million Kurds live in
Big Kurdistan (Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Armenia),
which covers an area as big as France, about half of
all Kurds which estimate to 20 million live in
Turkey.
Turkey is home to over 25 million ethnic Kurds, some
of whom openly sympathise with the Kurdish PKK for a
Kurdish homeland in the country's mainly Kurdish
southeast of Turkey.
Before August 2002, the Turkish government placed
severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish language,
prohibiting the language in education and broadcast
media.
The Kurdish alphabet is still not recognized
in Turkey, and use of the Kurdish letters X, W, Q
which do not exist in the Turkish
alphabet has led to judicial persecution in 2000 and
2003
The Kurdish flag flown officially in Iraqi Kurdistan
but unofficially flown by Kurds in Armenia. The flag
is banned in Iran, Syria, and Turkey where flying it
is a criminal offence"
Southeastern Turkey:
North Kurdistan ( Kurdistan-Turkey)
wikipedia
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