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Some Iraqi Kurds find PKK-rebel cousins
'annoying'
15.11.2007
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Inside Kurdish enclave, many losing support for
those along Turkey border.
November 15, 2007
Erbil-Hewler, Kurdistan region 'Iraq',--
Turkey's Kurdish PKK guerrillas watch the border for
any signs that Turkey's military will carry out
threats to sweep across. But other rumblings are
coming from inside Iraqi Kurdistan: a new
ambivalence among Iraq's Kurds about support for
their rebel cousins holed up in the mountains.
The fear — expressed by Kurdish officials and on the
streets — is that the showdown could threaten the
relatively peaceful and prosperous enclave that
Kurds have carved out since 1991 after generations
of poverty and oppression.
Even a small shift in sentiment is meaningful since
the Kurdish separatists in Turkey — known as the
Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK — have counted on
deep Kurdish nationalism for decades to protect
their supply lines and hideouts in the Kurdistan
'northern Iraq'.
It's making a lot of people nervous," Ismail Zayer,
an Arab newspaper editor with long-standing ties to
the Kurds, speaking of the escalating PKK-Turkey
tensions.
"A lot of nationalistic Kurds have become less
nationalistic," he said. "The Kurds understand that
independence is not necessarily a state and a flag.
Rather it is having stability and a good economy."
Kurds are a major ethnic group straddling four
countries — Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria — totalling
about 40 million people.
Most live in Turkey, primarily in the southeast,
where the PKK has been fighting for autonomy since
1984 in a conflict that has killed nearly 40,000
people.
With the rest of Iraq plagued by bombings and
killings, the three northern Kurdish provinces in
Kurdistan autonomous region have emerged as an oasis
of calm and a magnet for foreign investment. www.ekurd.net
All that could be at risk if Turkey begins a major
attack against the Turkey's PKK, whose fighters
launch deadly attacks against Turkish soldiers
across the border.
PKK is 'annoying,' says governor.
On Tuesday, Turkish helicopter gunships fired on
abandoned villages believed used as PKK outposts.
The raid occurred in Duhok province, the booming
gateway for Turkish imports.
"To be honest, the PKK is an annoying organization,"
said Duhok's governor, Taher Fattah Ramadan, in his
office just 44 miles from the border.
Ramadan said both Turks and Iraqi Kurds benefit from
a bustling cross-border trade that a Turkish attack
would put in peril.
"The (Turkish) province just over the frontier has
over 180 companies and financial institutions that
benefit directly from trade and investment in
northern Iraq," he said.
To decrease their political isolation, Kurds are
reaching out to other countries, said Zayer, who
runs his newspaper from Erbil, the capital of
Kurdistan region, after repeated attempts on his
life in Baghdad.
As an example, the regional Ministry of Culture
invited Egyptian journalists and academics to a
recent conference in memory of Mohammed Ali Awni, a
Turkish-born Kurd who translated books on the Kurds
into Arabic in the last century.
"We hope that these sorts of celebrations will help
reduce the tensions in the region and allow space
for discussion," regional Culture Minister Falkadin
Kakei told AP.
Kakei also expressed frustration with the PKK's
reliance on attacks rather than dialogue or
political pressure.
"We have officially told them (the PKK) to lay down
their arms ... and fight the cause through other
means," he said.
Ironically, Turkey considers Kakei a PKK sympathizer
because he has campaigned for the release of Kurdish
prisoners in Turkey, including Abdullah Ocalan, the
founder of the PKK.
Six months ago, Turkish officials barred Kakei from
attending a cultural conference in Diyarbakir, a
main Kurdish city in Turkey's southeast.
"The problem is that the PKK and Turkey are both
hard-liners, the PKK is like Turkey. They both think
in the same way. The two are the same," Kakei said.
Even as the Kurds try to reach out to their
neighbors, they face a legacy of negative feelings.
The Egyptian press, for example, regularly accuses
them of trying to split up Iraq and even of
collaborating with Israel.
"We are not a new Israel. We have lived among the
Arabs for the last 1,400 years," Othman Rashid, the
mufti of Erbil, told the Egyptian delegation in his
mosque high in the city's ancient, crumbling
citadel.
According to Hawlati Kurdish newspaper issued in
Kurdistan region, on June 6, 2006, sixty-five per
cent of Iraqi Kurds think that diplomatic relations
between the Kurdistan Regional Government and Israel
are "necessary." www.ekurd.net
Of (1,519 people polled in Iraqi Kurdistan,) 22 per
cent said it was not necessary for the two states to
have relations, while 12 per cent responded that
they did not have an opinion.
Those Kurds who believed that the Kurdistan Regional
Government and Israel should have relations cited
the possible strengthening of the Kurds' position in
the region, Israel's democracy, trade (between the
two states,) the existence of Kurds in Israel and
that some Arab countries have relations with Israel.
The Kurdistan Institute for Political Inquiries
conducted the poll May 22 and May 27 in the
provinces of Erbil, Sulaimaniyah, Duhok and Kurdish
inhabited areas of Kirkuk.
According to Kurdish activist Ara Alan, the Jews and
Israelis are welcomed in Kurdistan region. Israel is
a perfect model for Kurds and Kurdistan to build the
nation on. We should build a good relation with
Israel, he told Israel national radio. In fact a
free Kurdistan would be the most pro-Western state
after Israel in the Middle East. www.ekurd.net
Many Kurds, however, still cleave to their fiercely
independent ways, and note how most Arab regimes
kept silent while they were being massacred by
Saddam Hussein. After the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi Kurds
came under the protection of U.S.-led air patrols
and broke nearly all ties with Baghdad.
Marxist historian Ezzeddine Rasoul Mustafa described
how, even today, the Arab satellite television
stations bristle with hostility toward the Kurds.
"The Arab satellite channels still have sympathy for
Saddam Hussein's viewpoint," he said. "We can't hide
the fact that there are Kurds who hope for an
independent united Kurdistan. The Arabs have to
understand this."
PKK: Kurds must stick together
This is precisely the view of the leftist PKK
rebels. They claim that Arabs, Turks and Iranians
will always be arrayed against them and that Kurds
must stick together.
"The Turks are just using the PKK as an excuse to
invade. Their main target is to destroy the
political and social infrastructure of Kurds in
northern Iraq," Nizamettin Toguc, a member of the
PKK-affiliated Kurdish National Congress, told the
AP in Erbil.
A colleague, Khalil Mohammad, called this "a golden
time" for the PKK since its fight has caught the
world's attention.
Turkey has made previous incursions against the PKK
bases in Kurdistan 'northern Iraq' in the 1990s, but
now the stakes are much higher.
"For 20 years no one had questioned the situation
with Turkey," Mohammad said. "Now they are."
For many Kurds in the autonomous region, however,
the grand fight for a Kurdish state seems less
pressing than just recovering from their own years
of war.
North of Erbil, in the rolling hills around the
village of Barzan, the tribal homeland of the
region's president and prime minister, is a cemetery
for 500 bodies of Barzanis — all that could be
recovered from mass graves in the south from a
massacre of 8,000 clan members carried out by Saddam
in 1983.
Nearby towns, though, show signs of construction.
Awkward new concrete buildings spring up next to the
more traditional stone huts.
Teacher Abdel Qader said the days of unchallenged
backing for the PKK appear to be waning.
"They are Kurds," he said.
"We don't support them. But we are not against
them."
AP | Agencies
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