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Let's not acquiesce in undermining Iraqi
Kurds
30.12.2007
By
Christopher Hitchens
- Opinion
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December
30, 2007
In the past century, the principal victims of
genocide or attempted genocide have been, or at
least have prominently included, the Armenians, the
Jews and the Kurds.
During most of last October, events and politicians
conspired to set these three peoples at one
another's throats.
What is there to be learned from this fiasco for
humanity?
To recapitulate, at the very suggestion that the US
House of Representatives might finally pass a
long-proposed resolution recognising the 1915
massacres in Armenia as a planned act of "race
murder" (that was US ambassador Henry Morgenthau's
term for it at a time when the word genocide had not
yet been coined),www.ekurd.net
the Turkish authorities
redoubled their threat to invade the autonomous
Kurdish-run provinces of Kurdistan of northern Iraq.
And many American Jews found themselves divided
between their sympathy for the oppressed and the
slaughtered and their commitment to the state
interest of Israel, which maintains a strategic
partnership with Turkey, and in particular with
Turkey's highly politicised armed forces.
To illuminate this depressing picture, one might
begin by offering a few distinctions. In 1991, in
northern Iraq, where you could still see and smell
the gassed and poisoned towns and villages of
Kurdistan, I heard Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan say that Kurds ought to apologise
to the Armenians for the role they had played as
enforcers for the Ottomans during the time of the
genocide. Talabani, who has often repeated that
statement, is now President of Iraq.
(I would regard his unforced statement as evidence
in itself, by the way, in that proud peoples do not
generally offer to apologise for revolting crimes
that they did not, in fact, commit.) So, of course,
it was on him, both as an Iraqi and as a Kurd, that
Turkish guns and missiles were trained in October.
And here, a further distinction: many of us who are
ardent supporters of Kurdish rights and aspirations
have the gravest reservations about the so-called
Turkey's Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. This is a
Stalinist cult organisation, roughly akin to a
Middle Eastern Shining Path group. (Its story, and
the story of its bizarre leader Abdullah Ocalan, are
well told in Aliza Marcus's new book Blood and
Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for
Independence.)
The attempt of this thuggish faction to exploit the
new zone of freedom in Iraqi Kurdistan is highly
irresponsible and plays directly into the hands of
those forces in the Turkish military who want to
resurrect Kemalist chauvinism as a weapon against
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Government,
which it sees as soft on Kurdish demands.
There's a paradox here, in that the uniformed
satraps who claim to defend Turkish secularism are
often more reactionary than the recently re-elected
and broadly Islamist Justice and Development Party.
The generals vetoed a meeting earlier this year
between Abdullah Gul - now President of Turkey and
then foreign minister - and the Kurdistan regional
government in Iraq. This alone shows that they are
using the border question and the PKK as a wedge
issue for domestic politics.
This is enough complexity to be going on with, but
the US Congress and the executive branch have been
handling it with appalling amateurishness. The
Armenian resolution (that has been put off until at
least 2008 in the US house under pressure from
Turkey and the Bush administration) is an old story.
I can remember when it was sponsored by then senator
Robert Dole and stonewalled by then president Bill
Clinton. What a shame we didn't get it firmly on the
record decades ago.
But now a house and a White House that can barely
bring themselves to utter the word Kurdish are both
acting as if nothing mattered except Turkish
amour-propre. And, as a consequence, the US and its
friends are being squeezed by Ankara instead of, to
put it shortly, the other way around. This is
disgracefully undignified.
In 2003, the Turkish authorities, who had been
parasitic on US and NATO support for several
decades, refused to allow US bases in Turkey to be
employed for a northern front in the removal of
Saddam Hussein unless their forces were allowed to
follow into Iraqi Kurdistan. The Bush administration
quite rightly refused this bargain.
The damage done by Turkey's subsequent fit of pique
was enormous: nobody ever mentions it, but if the
coalition had come at Baghdad from two directions, a
number of Sunni areas would have got the point (of
irreversible regime change) a lot sooner than they
did. The rogue PKK presence was not then a hot
issue; Turkey simply wished to pre-empt the
emergence of any form of Iraqi Kurdish
self-government that could be an incitement or
encouragement to the huge Kurdish minority in
Turkey.
So, let us be clear on a few things. The European
Union, to which Turkey has applied for membership
with US support, has insisted on recognition of
Kurdish language rights and political rights within
Turkey. The US can hardly ask for less.
If the Turks wish to continue lying officially about
what happened to the Armenians, then the US cannot
be expected to oblige them by doing the same (and
should certainly resent and repudiate any threats
against itself or its allies that would ensue from
the US Congress affirming the truth).
Then there remains the question of Cyprus, where
Turkey maintains an occupation force that has
repeatedly been condemned by a thesaurus of UN
resolutions since 1974. It is not US conduct that
should be modified by Turkey's arrogance; the US
does a favour to the democratisation and
modernisation of that country by insisting that it
get its troops out of Cyprus, pull its forces back
from the border with Iraq, face the historic truth
about Armenia,www.ekurd.net
and in other ways cease
to act as if the Ottoman system were still in
operation.
* IN Slate recently, I mentioned that security for
(author, former Dutch MP and critic of Islam's
treatment of women) Ayaan Hirsi Ali might have to be
paid for partly by private subscription.
On the web link below are the details for all who
may wish to contribute to this eminently deserving
cause. This appeal is a test of our seriousness in
the face of theocracy and its assassins.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity
Fair and the author of God is Not Great: How
Religion Poisons Everything.
theaustralian.news.com.au
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