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Erdogan, a Turkish Assad?
2.1.2012
By Graeme Wood - NY Times Blog |
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Turkish PM
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
(L) Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad (R) Photo: AFP/Getty.
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January
2, 2012
ISTANBUL,— Which is scarier: a government
that hunts down and kills dozens in cold blood, or a
government that hunts down and kills dozens by
accident?
On Thursday, Turkey admitted to being the second
type of government, just as over the last few months
Syria has demonstrated itself conclusively to be the
first. Turkey’s mistake, which it acknowledged
sheepishly, was to launch air-strikes on Wednesday
against about
35 civilian Kurds
hiking along unmarked trails between Turkey and
Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turkish military says it
thought the men were terrorist members of the
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). But evidence found
near the corpses suggested a more benign activity:
the men were smugglers evading onerous Turkish and
Iraqi customs duties on diesel and tobacco at the
official crossing point of Habur. They carried Kools,
not Kalashnikovs.
In the past, Turkey’s Kurds have responded to
incidents like this one by protesting in the streets
and public squares, with a little bit of armed
struggle from actual terrorists on the side. Last
night in Istanbul,www.ekurd.net
Kurds and their allies went to the streets. On
Istliklal Avenue, in Beyoglu district in central
Istanbul, at street corners normally reserved for
upper-class shoppers in winter chic, riot police
stood huffing into their hands to chase away the
cold, waiting for violence that never came. But news
agencies reported that in the country’s
predominantly Kurdish southeast, crowds threw stones
and Molotov cocktails, and stores were shuttered for
the day.
After violence in the southeast, recriminations and
confrontations like these are common. But there’s a
notable change of vocabulary this time. Whereas
Kurds once looked to the West and patiently tried to
master the human rights language of the European
Union, now at least some of them are looking south,
to the more urgent and concrete language of protest
movements in the Arab world. And in adopting that
rhetoric, the Kurdish leaders are making missteps.
“A leader who kills his own people has lost his
legitimacy,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of
Turkey said of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in
September. Now Selahattin Demirtas, the Kurdish
member of parliament who heads the Peace and
Democracy Party, finds Erdogan’s words delicious.
“Now I say the same thing back to him,” Demirtas
said. “This was no accident: it was a massacre.”
Demirtas, whose party is the sole legal political
voice of the Kurds in Turkey these days, said he
considered the killing caused by Wednesday’s air
strike to be an Assad-level crime.
It’s a preposterous and self-discrediting
comparison: Erdogan and Assad resemble each other in
little more than their mustaches. The first people
to acknowledge the differences between the two
should be the Kurds themselves: Erdogan’s government
has in many ways improved upon the nationalist
Turkish governments of yesteryear, and the Kurds of
Syria have always suffered far more grievously than
the Kurds of Turkey. In the P.K.K. camps of northern
Iraq, Syrian Kurds are overrepresented — the result
of especially zealous oppression by the Assad
regime.
It’s hard to begrudge a movement as aggrieved as the
Kurds’ this moment of hyperbole. But let’s hope that
the Kurds will reconsider their annexation of Arab
Spring analogies. A movement that has spent the last
couple of decades mastering the art of patience
shouldn’t now sideline its own cause with a faulty
comparison to a more desperate one.
Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at The
Atlantic. He has lived and traveled in the Middle
East for most of the last 10 years.
Copyright © 2012, respective author or news agency,
latitude.blogs.nytimes.com
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