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How the Kurds have changed Turkey’s
calculations on Syria
7.8.2012
By Pelin Turgut, Istanbul - TIME |
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Kurdish fighter from the Kurdish YPG have taken
control over the outskirts of the Kurdish town of
Derik in Syrian Kurdistan (northern Syria).
Photo: Corbis
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Heavy armoured vehicles of Turkish military are
stationed in front of Gecimli military outpost where
Kurdish PKK rebels attacked and killed 6 Turkish
soldiers and 2 pro-Turkish village guards on August
5, 2012 at Cukurca in Hakkari, Turkey's Kurdish
region (Northern Kurdistan). Photo: Getty
Support for the anti-Assad
rebellion has been complicated by Syria's Kurds
moving to establish autonomy, raising Ankara's fears
about implications for Turkey's domestic Kurdish
challenge
August 7, 2012
For many years, the Kurdish tragedy was
poignantly illustrated by the gifts and sweets
stuffed through gaps in a barbed-wire fence, the
babies held high and the news shared across the
closed Syria-Turkey border. Every religious holiday
saw thousands of people dressed in their finest line
the border at dawn just to see their relatives on
the other side of a boundary arbitrarily drawn by
Britain and France after World War I. The nation
states invented by the war’s victorious Western
powers left the Kurds divided between Turkey, Syria,
Iraq and Iran, each of which sought to deny and
suppress Kurdish identity.
Almost a century later, however, the geopolitical
earthquake that began with the U.S. invasion of Iraq
and continued through the Syrian uprising has
challenged the foundations of the regional political
order built by the French and the British, putting
the future of the Middle East once again up for
grabs. This time, the estimated 30 million-plus
Kurds, whose numbers make them the world’s largest
stateless people, are better organized. Buoyed by
the oil-fueled prosperity of Iraqi Kurdistan — first
severed from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq by the U.S. after
the 1991 Gulf War, and then formalized as a
crypto-state after his fall — they are emerging as
the region’s new wild card, nowhere more so than in
the turmoil of Syria’s rebellion.
Syrian-Kurdish fighters two weeks ago took control
of towns across northern Syria after Assad ceded
them to shore up his forces in Damascus and Aleppo.
Prior to that, on July 12, Iraqi-Kurdish leader
Massoud Barzani brokered a deal between rival
Syrian-Kurdish groups, forming a national council
and vowing to suppress their differences in order to
pursue common Kurdish interests. That development
stunned Ankara. Mainstream Turkish commentator
Mehmet Ali Birand notes that the creation of an
autonomous Kurdish zone in northeast Syria,
following the emergence of a similar entity in Iraq,
could portend the realization of one of Turkey’s
worst nightmares coming true — “a mega–Kurdish
state” along the southeastern border where the
largest section of its own, restive Kurdish
population of some 14 million is concentrated. Even
the word Kurdistan is taboo in Turkey, where a
separatist insurgency and efforts to suppress it
have claimed more than 30,000 lives over the past
three decades.
“The Kurdish move in Syria is historic,” says
Mustafa Gundogdu, of the London-based Kurdish Human
Rights Project. “They forged a third way. Instead of
being squashed between the Assad regime or the
opposition, they made a move based on establishing
their own long-term interests. They work with the
opposition forces, but they are also independent of
them. They have established themselves not as a
victim, but as a player in the game.”
In the months since the Syrian uprising first began,
a Kurdish community leery of both the Assad regime
and the Islamist-tinged Syrian opposition has been
organizing to take advantage of what may be a
historic opportunity. “They used [the] momentum [of
the uprising] to set up community centers and hold
public debates, all of which were unheard of under
Assad,” says Seda Altug, a historian and expert on
Syrian Kurds based at Istanbul’s Bogazici
University. “They took part in the big
demonstrations every Friday, but they always carried
their own flags and chanted their own slogans too.
Now they are reaping the fruits of that process.”
Turkey’s chief concern is that the single most
powerful organization among Syrian Kurds, the PYD,
has close ties to the PKK, a separatist group listed
as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the
European Union, which has been fighting for
self-rule in the country’s southeast since 1984. “We
will never tolerate initiatives that would threaten
Turkey’s security,” said Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan in a national address on July 31. Turkey
would “intervene” in Syria should the PKK set up
camp there, Erdogan warned, and the Turkish military
began diverting troops, tanks and antiaircraft
missiles to that section of the border.
Shortly after northern Syria fell, the PKK launched
an attack on Semdinli, a Turkish town near the
Iraq-Iraq border. Though they usually stage
hit-and-run attacks on military outposts, this time,
rebels laid siege to the remote eastern town —
apparently to make a point. Fighting has continued
for nearly two weeks as PKK rebels are said to have
entrenched themselves in positions around the town.
The Turkish government has refused to give details
and there is a virtual news blackout. The
independent news website Bianet says hundreds of
villagers have been forced to flee their homes due
to heavy aerial bombardment.
But for all Erdogan’s bluster, a military
intervention is unlikely for the simple reason that
it could be disastrous. It would put paid to
Ankara’s self-styled image as a champion of
democracy in the post–Arab Spring Middle East. It
would provoke hostilities with the Kurds, whether
internally or in Iraq and Syria. And it would also
antagonize the Syrian-Arab opposition, whose pleas
for intervention to topple Assad have thus far been
ignored.
“Turkey sees itself as much larger than it actually
is. It can’t intervene unilaterally in Syria without
the support of NATO, or the U.S.,” says Altug. “I
think they are going to go the diplomatic route, to
try and control developments in Syrian Kurdistan
that way.” Indeed, despite similar fears about the
emergence of Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government (KRG),www.ekurd.net
Ankara has built strong commercial ties with the
Iraqi-Kurdish leadership in Erbil, which has acted
to prevent the PKK operating freely from its
territory. Last Thursday, Turkish Foreign Minister
Ahmet Davutoglu met with Barzani, presumably to ask
him to restrain Syria’s Kurds. Erbil needs Turkey’s
cooperation to create a route independent of Baghdad
for exporting oil pumped on KRG territory.
Kurds on both sides of the Syria-Turkey border say
they’re not seeking an independent Kurdistan, but
instead to establish autonomous and fully recognized
Kurdish regions along the lines of Iraq’s KRG, which
remains under the sovereignty of a federal Iraq.
These regions would nonetheless also share in some
version of an open-border supra-Kurdish federation.
That’s a perspective long espoused by jailed PKK
leader Abdullah Ocalan, who believes that the nation
state is an outdated model unsuited to the needs of
the Kurds.
“Of course, whether or not a federation emerges
depends on so many other determinants, like the
international community, not to mention how events
in Damascus turn out,” says Altug. “But this is a
political coming of age for the Kurds. They are
pursuing a pragmatic and politically astute
strategy.”
Asked whether the region was ready for an
independent Kurdistan, Barzani was fairly open.
“It’s a natural right of the people. But when and
how it will be ready is a different question,” he
told al-Jazeera last week.
Turkey’s problem is that events in Syria could force
its hand in dealing with its domestic Kurdish
challenge — and not just militarily. Erdogan has
seesawed between conceding more democratic and
cultural rights to Turkey’s Kurds, and adopting a
hawkish militarist stand — thousands of Kurdish
politicians and activists are currently under arrest
for allegedly belonging to a political offshoot of
the PKK. “That’s the most essential question,” wrote
Birand. “What effort are we making to solve our own
Kurdish issue, to comfort our own citizens of
Kurdish origin?” Regardless of the answer, that
question is now increasingly central to shaping
Turkey’s responses to the rebellion next door.
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