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Talking Turkey
1.5.2008
By Lorna Tychostup
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May
1, 2008
Little noticed by an American public already
overwhelmed by the complexities of a never-ending
war in Iraq, on February 22, Turkish military forces
invaded the most stable part of Iraq—its northern,
US-created autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Turkey’s stated intention: to eradicate the
so-called “terrorist” forces of Turkey’s home-grown
Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). Previously invaded on
at least two dozen occasions—1995 and 1997
operations involved as many as 30,000 and 50,000
troops respectively—northern Iraq is no stranger to
Turkish military incursions. They began in the mid
1980s in response to PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan’s
decision to turn political activism into a
Marxist-inspired guerilla war in an attempt to
counter Turkey’s massive cultural repression of its
Kurdish population.
Aimed at creating an independent “Kurdish state
within Turkey” for Turkey’s 15 million (plus or
minus a few million, depending on the source) Kurds,
the PKK’s fight turned a large part of southeastern
Turkey—home to a majority of Turkey’s Kurdish
population—into a warzone during the 1980s and ’90s.
As the Turkish military flooded the rural southeast,
destroying villages, and forcing hundreds of
thousands of Kurds to urban areas, the force of the
war died down. According to a 2005 Human Rights
Watch report, there remain 378,000 internally
displaced people—mainly Kurds—in Turkey. PKK
fighters,www.ekurd.net
which include many of
the dislocated who have no alternative but to keep
up the fight, continue to make deadly strikes within
Turkey. They then flee across the Turkish-Iraqi
border to camps located in the hinterlands of Qandil
Mountain on Iraq’s border with Iran, part of a range
that reaches north to the Turkish border. Estimates
vary, but it has been reported that between 35,000
and 40,000 people—most of them Kurds—have been
killed since the PKK began its fight for
independence in 1984. Before his capture in 1999,
Ocalan claimed he wanted to revert the PKK’s focus
away from military and back to political activism.
As with most international conflicts, there is more
than meets the eye in this most recent Turkish
incursion—the first since the US ousted Saddam
Hussein and took responsibility for the security of
Iraq. While it can be said that PKK actions incited
this latest foray, the question of ownership of
Iraq’s third largest city of Kirkuk looms large in
the minds not just of Iraqi Kurds, but of just about
everyone else in the region, including Shiite
factional leaders Moqtada al Sadr and Ayad Allawi,
not to mention Iran and Syria. Since 2003, Kurds
have been attempting to reclaim the oil-rich city
that underwent a forced “Arabisation” program under
Saddam’s regime. Turkey, as well as Iraq’s Shiite
and Sunni Arabs, fear that Kurdish control of Kirkuk—its
surrounding territory accounts for 40 percent of
Iraq’s oil production and 70 percent of its natural
gas production—will lead to an independent Kurdish
state. Adding to concerns is the fact that the
Kurdistan Regional Government has begun to act
independently, signing oil exploration contracts
with international entities. December’s
constitutionally mandated referendum, predicted to
cede the control of Kirkuk to the semiautonomous
government of Kurdistan, suffered a last minute
six-month delay, much to the ire of Iraqi Kurds,
whose leaders, as early as 2005, began to
incorporate thousands of Kurdish militia members
into the Iraqi military with the assumed intention
of eventually taking control of Kirkuk and securing
the borders of an independent Kurdistan.
There is also the issue of Turkey’s European Union
accession, and the internal political sparring
between Turkey’s moderate Islamist prime minister,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Turkey’s secular
guardians, the military. Erdogan’s 2003 election
campaign pledged to address the concerns of EU
accession critics who, among other grievances,
continue to cite Turkey’s poor human rights record
and its lack of civilian control over its military
as stumbling blocks to EU membership. Since sweeping
the elections, not only has Erdogan been supportive
of expanding Kurdish rights, he is reportedly the
first Turkish leader to admit that Turkey has made
“mistakes” in dealing with its Kurdish population.
While endearing him to more pious Islamist Kurds,
who have added to his electoral base, Erdogan’s
courting of Turkey’s Kurds has irritated the
watchful eye of Turkey’s military—already alarmed
by his Islamist agenda in an avowedly secular
society.
In a September 12, 2007 article for Time, former CIA
agent Robert Baer hinted at the possibility of yet
another coup taking place in Turkey, where, since
1960, the Turkish military has staged four “soft”
coups against civilian governments. Baer stated that
since Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party swept
last summer’s parliamentary elections, “the Turkish
generals have been casting around for an excuse to
take power.” Senior Editor Lorna Tychostup spoke
with Baer by phone from Pakistan about Iraq, the
Turkish incursion, and all things Kurdish. Baer’s
latest book, The Devil You Know: Dealing with the
New Iranian Superpower, will be published in
September by Crown.
In your Time magazine article, you raised some very
interesting points regarding Turkey and Iraqi
Kurdistan. What do you think was behind this latest
Turkish incursion of Kurdistan in February?
The Turks, first of all, are tired of having their
soldiers killed. They had specifically raised this
issue before we invaded Iraq. That is, what [is the
US] going to do to [prevent Turkish people from
being killed]. The White House said, “Don’t worry
about it. We’ll keep a lid on Iraq.” Obviously, we
didn’t. We couldn’t. We completely mislead the
Turks. So Turkey had to go into a country we’re
nominally in charge of to clean it up, just as the
Iranians might one day do.
“Clean up” the PKK?
Yes, the PKK.
Where does Kirkuk stand in all of this?
The Kurds in Northern Iraq want Kirkuk. They want
the one million barrels a day of oil. They keep on
pushing for a referendum. They want a couple of
other fields as well. Simply, that’s the only thing
that will sustain a Kurdish government or region.
They’re afraid the Shiites will steal all the oil if
they don’t seize Kirkuk.
Zalmay Khalilzad had come up with an oil-sharing
plan immediately before he left his position as US
ambassador to Iraq, where distribution of the oil
would be based on population. Each governorate would
be free to contract with oil companies and all
profits would go to Baghdad to be divvied up among
the governorates based on population figures. With
no census taken in recent years in Iraq, from what I
understand, the numbers of those who voted in Iraq’s
first election were going to be used to determine
this distribution of oil profits. The Sunnis put up
a fuss. Obviously, they would not be appropriately
represented because a majority of them did not vote,
or chose not to vote.
Yeah, I know the plan. It’s never going to happen.
Why?
Because the Shiites are never going to agree. They
have been oppressed since 680 AD and they’ve been
completely cut out of Iraq’s wealth since that day.
They may agree to anything, but they are going to
completely cheat on the oil, whether they agree to a
profit-sharing plan or not. I mean, it’s all a nice
dream. Right now the Iranians and the Shiites are
stealing hundreds of thousands of barrels a day,
which is in nobody’s plan. They are just doing it.
Where are they stealing the oil from?
They are stealing the oil from Basra, through the
main terminals. They are tapping the pipelines. So
the Shiites may say this is a good idea—sharing
it—but that’s not the way they are acting. There is
no one Shiite group in charge. The whole
understanding of Iraq was destroyed with the state
in [the invasion of] March 2003. It’s gone and the
Iraqis will never agree to live in the same country
under the same constitution. It will never happen.
We can dream on for a hundred years. McCain says,
“Stay a hundred years.” Fine. They still will never
want to live together.
One would argue that to some degree they were living
together before 2003.
That’s because Saddam forced them to live together.
He would put people in acid baths if they revolted.
It was a system based on total, complete repression;
they didn’t willingly live together.
My experience in Iraq, from speaking to Sunni and
Shiite people who lived across the street from each
other, was that this schism wasn’t really an issue
until the invasion of Iraq by the Coalition forces.
In Baghdad and in certain areas, people got along.
There was intermarriage between Sunni and Shiite.
Well, yeah, I know. But, see, that was the
bourgeoisie who were intermarrying—the secular
Iraqis. But secular Iraq is going away faster than
we can even keep track of. You will never get the
Sadrists in Sadr City to accept Sunni into Sadr
City. The division, even before Samarra, was too
deep between the Sunnis and the Shiites.
So you would envision a three-state solution?
Yeah, but it’s going to be messy. Nothing is going
to be complete. You’ve got a country with two
million internal refugees. They are running from
something. They are not running from Americans. They
are running from Sunni, and from Shiite and vice
versa. An ecumenical, secular Iraq is done for and
finished.
That’s a pretty intense assessment. I’d like to get
to the issue of Kurdistan. Kurdistan has been a
beacon of calm. I was there this summer. It is
certainly nothing like the rest of Iraq. It was very
safe; there was no visible presence of American
soldiers. The Peshmerga provide security—
That’s because there is virtually no intermixing. If
you go to Erbil, if there are any Shiites there, or
Sunni Arabs, their numbers are so insignificant that
they don’t really matter even as a minority. Since
1991, Kurdistan has had the chance to coalesce into
a sort of country—a de facto country. It’s much
easier to unify the Kurds—the KDP and PUK
[Kurdistan’s leading political parties]—than it is
to unify the rest of Iraq. There’s a solution you
can come up with, getting the Kurds to agree to a
constitution of some sort and sharing the wealth.
That’s very feasible, but of course it would be
outside the boundary. The Kurds don’t want to be
part of Iraq again.
The Kurds want their independence. They want to be a
separate state.
That’s what I said.
Well, there’s a bit of a semantic difference. The
Kurds have always wanted their independence since
post-WWI, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and they
were promised a separate state via the Treaty of
Sevres. When Ataturk wrested Turkish independence
from the Allied forces and disposed of the Sultan,
he demanded and got a new treaty. It incorporated
the Kurdish population into what we know today as
Turkey. Ataturk worked to diminish and eradicate
their culture under a banner of Turkish
nationalism—“One country one Turk,www.ekurd.net
We’re all Turks.” Ever
since, the Kurds have always wanted their
independence. This is what the PKK has violently
been trying to bring about. The referendum for
Kirkuk was supposed to take place in December. It
was canceled. You wrote about the potential of some
kind of incursion back in September when Turkey was
beating war drums. I’m just wondering, is it truly
the PKK that Turkey is after? Or is it this fear of
separatism that is driving them and, more
importantly, a desire to control Kirkuk?
I think the Turks don’t want either one. They don’t
want a Kurdish nation because a Kurdish nation will
always be a source of instability for Turkey. They
don’t want de facto or de jure Kurdish state in
Iraq. It undermines their legitimacy over their own
country. It would be a bad example for their Kurds
who would say, “Well if the Iraqi Kurds got a
Kurdish state, why can’t we?”
And the Kurds couldn’t have an independent state
without the economic flow from Kirkuk?
They could, but they have irredentist claims to
Kirkuk. They really believe it’s theirs. Well, I
don’t know if they really believe it, but they say
it’s theirs. And they claim that there are more
Kurds in Kirkuk than Arabs. So they say, “Lets do a
referendum. We’re going to win the referendum. We’re
going to get the oil. We’ll ship it out to Turkey,
or to Jordan, or wherever and we become a viable
state.” That, in itself, upsets [Turkey]. But, more
immediately, what is upsetting them is this constant
warfare on their border.
And within Turkey proper.
Yes, the violence goes everywhere. And so are the
Iranians. The PJAK [in late April] said, “We’re
going to start an offensive against Tehran.” PJAK is
based in Northern Iraq. And the Iranians look at
PJAK as part of the PKK. I mean they call it the PKK
but it doesn’t matter what it is, that’s what they
call it. The Iranians and Turks actually met on
Monday to discuss what to do about the Kurdish
problem. The Iranian delegation flew to Ankara to
discuss what to do about the PKK and the PJAK.
[Editor’s note: According to its website, PJAK
stands for the Free Life Party of Kurdistan, and is
“in constant battle for the unity and freedom of the
Iranian peoples” and supportive of “democratic
values, to achieve a radical type of democracy and
to be able to launch a system of democratic
confederacy in eastern Kurdistan.” As the PKK’s
Iranian Kurdish allies, wrote James Brandon, who is
currently a senior research fellow at the Center for
Social Cohesion in London, PJAK is “potentially one
of Washington’s strongest hands against Iran if used
in conjunction with nascent Azeri and Arab
separatist movements. For these reasons, Ankara is
unlikely to force the United States to choose
between an increasing Islamic and Iran-allied Turkey
and the secular Kurds.”]
I don’t want to belabor the Kirkuk issue, but one of
my NYU professors, Jarret Brachman, the director of
research at the United States West Point Military
Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center, mentioned last
semester that military sources have said the fight
for Kirkuk would be “to the death.” Turkey was
included in this calculation. Turkey cites the fact
of their Turkomen “brothers” living in Kirkuk as a
reason for their concern. And they talk about the
PKK. But in reality, there is a big trade issue that
includes oil; there is the US relationship with
Turkey, a NATO ally, and the need on the part of the
US to use Turkish territory as a staging ground for
oil and military supplies entering Iraq. Trade
volume between Iraq and Turkey is expected to exceed
$10 billion per year in 2009. How does Turkey’s EU
accession fit into all of this?
That’s the problem for Turkey. They can’t simply go
into Diyarbakir and start killing Kurds randomly
because they’ll never make it into the EU. They have
to walk a fine line. On the other hand, if it comes
down to joining the EU or the breaking up of Turkey,
they will stop the breaking up of Turkey.
It has been reported that Turkish Prime Minister
Erdogan has been negotiating with the PKK and the
Kurdish population within Turkey. You alluded to
this in your Time article. You suggested another
military coup was in the air in Turkey, citing the
fact that the Turkish armed forces chief, General
Yasar Buyukanit, did not attend the swearing-in
ceremony of President Abdullah Gul as one sign of
this. Can you explain?
If the civilian government does not do something but
go along with the military, and the situation gets
worse, the Turkish military would declare martial
law and suspend civilian government. Right now,
Erdogan is basically okaying the attacks. The
military is going to Erdogan and saying, “This is
what we have to do.” And Erdogan is saying, “Yes,
sir,” and saluting.
Yes, but previous to this incursion Erdogan was
talking to the PKK in Turkey. They represent an
Islamist electorate base for him. The EU made it
clear, effectively telling Erdogan, “If you want
entry to the EU, you’ve got to work out your issues
with the Kurds. You can’t keep suppressing them. You
have to address their grievances, allow them a level
of freedom that they are not being allowed now.”
Erdogan was talking with the Kurds. He was in
negotiation with them. Based on what you said in the
article, the military is opposed to this, his using
his Islamist position—
Well, the Turkish military thinks he is being naive.
I was in northern Iraq in 1995. The PKK ambushed a
Turkish Red Cross van, which was really TNIO—Turkish
intelligence—and killed four of them. So, the
Turkish military is not too excited about this. It
will give [Erdogan’s government] a certain rope to
go deal with the Kurds, to stop the Kurds from
fighting. But, at the end of the day, the military
wants a free hand to go into northern Iraq. When it
comes to Kurdistan and the Iraqi Kurds, the Turkish
military calls the shots. And if the civilian
government, if Erdogan were to oppose them, they
would simply declare martial law.
You mentioned there is a coup brewing.
It was. I haven’t followed it recently, but there
was a series of…The military was unhappy about the
elections. Now, where they actually have the nerve
to go over the line, you’re going to have to wait
for something to provoke this, something more to
happen. It has been fairly quiet.
You also mentioned in the piece that there had been
some support in Washington to have Ayad Allawi
replace Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. I was
in northern Iraq this summer in a room of Sunni and
Shiite men from Baghdad [central] and southern Iraq
watching TV. Iranian President Ahmadinejad was
hosting Maliki and there they stood holding hands.
Outraged, the men began shouting, “This is a sign
that Iran owns us.” One turned to me, saying, “Why
doesn’t your government remove Maliki? Why don’t
they replace him and make someone like Ayad Allawi
President? It doesn’t have to be him, but someone
who will kill equally. Not kill because you are
Sunni or Shiite, but because you are breaking the
law.”
There has been an active attempt to get rid of
Maliki on the part of many people in the Iraqi
government—all sorts of ministers and the people who
are pro-American have really tried. But they simply
don’t have the votes. Then you have the whole
problem of Moqtada al Sadr. You have Maliki fighting
Moqtada al Sadr and then fighting the Shiite groups
in Basra. New issues keep on coming up. There are
still [a lot of] people in Washington who would like
to put Ayad Allawi in because he is well liked. But
he has no positive base in Iraq. [American
Ambassador Ryan] Crocker is reluctant to go in and
say, “Well, alright, you guys can put in Allawi.”
Some Middle East experts have suggested Moqtada al
Sadr would be a good replacement for Maliki as prime
minister of Iraq.
I think if Moqtada had enough votes he would just
vote the US out [of Iraq]. He’s very much disliked
by the Shiite bourgeoisie, he’s mistrusted by
Sistani. [Once] in power, he would definitely
attempt a social revolution. Maliki is basically an
elitist. He was educated DAWA, he followed Mohammed
Bakr Sadr. He comes from a different class of
Shiite. So these people, and SCIRI, are trying to
hold onto an old order. The oldest order is Allawi’s—Westernized,
on Western payrolls, he is looked at as an agent of
the British, sometimes of the Americans. He doesn’t
stand a chance in a chaotic Iraq of having a popular
base. Then you’ve got the older guys like Dr.
Ibrahim al-Jaffari and Maliki who are feeling the
pressure from Sadr. It’s a struggle of who is going
to rule the country. I think that Sadr would
probably kick us out if he became prime minister. In
as much as he could force the vote and get people to
follow him. [Editor’s note: Prime Minister Maliki’s
conservative political party, DAWA, or the Islamic
Call Party, was formerly a militant Shiite Islamist
group. DAWA shares the majority of seats in the
Iraqi parliament with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi
Council, SIIC, formerly known as SCIRI, the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.]
Some sources explained to me that the recent
fighting going on in Basra was more political party
battling. Where Maliki was going in to try and
weaken Moqtada’s base, or eliminate it, thus giving
his DAWA party more clout in the south in the next
general election. What do you think about that?
If you are Shiite and you want a beating economic
heart in Iraq, it’s the south, it’s Basra, and it’s
the oil. So if Maliki ever hopes to extend his writ,
he’s got to take Basra. He’s got to take it from
Fadhila, and you’ve got hundreds of groups there—we
don’t even know who they are. He needs to go there
and own that city. Obviously, he couldn’t do it. He
didn’t have the army to do it. Iraq is a mess. I
will not be surprised if we stayed there for a
hundred years. But it would be a very unfortunate
experience for this country. [Editor’s note: Fadhila,
also known as the Islamic Virtue Party, is supported
mostly by poor Shiites in the south and is
considered one of many rivals to Moqtada al Sadr’s
powerbase.]
In your Time article you also say that the irony is
that the liberation of Iraq is undermining democracy
in the region, not planting it. Could you give some
examples?
Basically, anytime there is chaos in the region it
gives central governments the justification for
repressing rights. You’ve got Iran, which since the
invasion has become more conservative. There are
more people going to jail, their religious [faction]
is stronger. You’ve got Bahrain cracking down on
their Shiites. You’ve got the Kuwaitis fighting
every day in Kuwait one way or another, where the
royal family [is trying] to suppress any dissent.
Just like in this country, any time you have warfare
or chaos, civil rights go out the window. It’s a
human law and I don’t know of any place where it
hasn’t [been that way], from the Spartans to the
Greeks. Once you have this gaping wound on the
borders of Iran and Turkey, and Syria even, in
Kuwait, in Bahrain, and even Saudi Arabia, you have
a tendency of people to not tolerate dissent and the
drift toward democracy.
Do you have anything you want to add on the
situation?
Look at it this way. PJAK is saying, “We are going
to war with Tehran very soon.” Now, whether they are
or not doesn’t matter. But if you are in Tehran,
you’re going to say, “Wait a minute. The Americans
are supposed to be putting a lid on [Iraq] and
turning it into a civilized nation. And yet you’ve
got an admitted terrorist group ready to attack us.”
And this will just keep on going to this edge of
regional conflict. And if you get Turkey and Iran
going into Iraq, let’s say, in some combined
operation—this is a total speculation, I don’t know
anything about this—what’s the world going to see?
You’ve got Iran potentially invading Iraq, which
they are capable of doing. All that needs to happen
is for PJAK to set up a couple of car bombs in
Tehran and the Iranians will go into [northern
Iraq]. And then what do we do? We can’t send
soldiers into the north to control them. The
mountains are too high. Logistically, it’s
impossible, we don’t have enough troops.
From what I gleaned from Turkish newspapers, people
in Turkey were shocked their military went into
northern Iraq—in February, no less, when weather
conditions in the mountains are not optimal for
operations—and then left a week later. It’s very
difficult territory to be fighting in to begin with,
despite the fact they reportedly had anywhere from
thousands to a hundred thousand troops on the
border. It seemed to me Turkey wasn’t that
successful.
They can’t be. You can’t find those people [the PKK]
in those mountains. They come across the border in
small groups, they attack, and then they disappear
into the villages. They are obviously protected by
the Kurds there. The Turks are faced with the choice
of these cosmetic incursions to make people feel
better, or to go in in force. But, then, you are at
war with Iraqi Kurds. Turkey is between a rock and a
hard place.
We can call the PKK a terrorist organization. Other
people might say that they are freedom fighters,
because they want—
Yeah, yeah, I won’t go near that. That’s a
definition that—
The Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world
that does not have its own state. Even though they
continue to perpetrate violence, the PKK stance has
changed from saying, “We want an independent state,”
to “Well, its not so much that we want an
independent state, but we want freedom within Turkey
to speak our language, to have Kurdish programs on
TV, to have basic human rights,” which they are not
getting. And Erdogan’s government does seem to me to
be trying to make some movement to address these
grievances, the Turkish military says, “No. We are
one Turkey. We are all Turks. Assimilate or die.”
The figures range, depending on what publication you
read, that 30,000 to 40,000 people have died in this
Turkish-Kurdish fighting over the last 30 years,
most of them have Kurds. Do you see as a resolution
in this region?
I don’t know if there is a resolution.
Don’t you think that addressing the human rights
concerns—
The problem is that Kurds aren’t Turks. They’re
Indo-Europeans. They speak a different language,
their grammatical structure is different, and they
look different. And they just don’t want to live
with Turks. How do you address this? I don’t ever
foresee the Kurds being treated equally in Turkey.
It’s a nice dream, but it’s not for now. So I don’t
have a solution. I just deal with problems.
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