[Marxism] Kurdish contradictions

[Louis Proyect]

LA Times, October 27, 2006
No easy answer to 'Kurdish question'
By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer

Driving north through these folded, wheat-colored mountains, it is easy to 
forget you are in Iraq.

Miles to the south, the Iraqi flags disappear, replaced by the flags of 
Kurdistan, a state that does not officially exist. Here in the northern 
mountains, though, even the symbols of the Iraqi Kurdish authority are 
nowhere to be seen.

Most of the flags here are those of the Kurdistan Workers Party — the PKK, 
listed by the U.S. and the European Union as a terrorist organization 
responsible for the loss of thousands of lives in a separatist campaign 
across the border in Turkey. Deep in the mountains, all the road 
checkpoints are operated by PKK guerrillas. A giant portrait of imprisoned 
guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan stretches across a rocky slope.

The fact that much of Iraq's rugged northern borderlands with Turkey and 
Iran are under the day-to-day control of a militant organization might come 
as a surprise to those who thought U.S. forces had handed over authority 
nationwide to a new Iraqi government.

The PKK's guerrilla camps, ordered closed by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri 
Maliki last month, still dot some of the steep valleys and ravines near the 
group's makeshift headquarters here; at least half the offices of its 
political affiliate, the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party, also remain open.

The efforts to rein in the PKK are a new and strategically important front 
in the Bush administration's campaign to create a new Middle East, and one 
of the most complicated political problems U.S. forces face in Iraq. 
Kurdish leaders, for instance, have battled the PKK over the years in 
various intramural squabbles, but have been reluctant to clamp down on the 
group because of its popularity among the Kurdish public and out of 
sympathy for Kurds in Turkey.

Founded three decades ago as a violent Marxist resistance movement battling 
for independence of Kurds in Turkey, the PKK began a concerted paramilitary 
campaign in 1984. It since has mellowed its politics but still fields a 
force of as many as 6,000 guerrillas along the Iraqi-Turkish border, with 
about 1,000 of them well within Iraq, government officials estimate.

Within Turkey, violence connected with Kurdish separatists has escalated 
this year. In August, a group calling itself the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons 
claimed responsibility for several bomb attacks aimed at tourists that 
killed three people and injured dozens in Turkish coastal resorts. The 
group is widely believed to be an urban guerrilla offshoot of the PKK. The 
PKK has concentrated on attacking Turkish soldiers, using bases in northern 
Iraq as sanctuaries, according to the Turkish government.

In northern Iraq, the PKK militants get training in Shakespeare and Goethe, 
in the military tactics of the Thirty Years' War and how to operate a 
Russian-made BKC machine gun and a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher.

"We are here for one reason, and that is to obtain the objective of the 
freedom of our people of Kurdistan," said a doe-eyed young guerrilla who 
gave her name only as Ozgur and said she joined the movement when she was 13.

America's Kurdish dilemma stems from the fact that more than 20 million 
Kurds straddle the strategic borders of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria.

Iraq's roughly 4 million Kurds are arguably the United States' strongest 
allies in the war-torn nation, and U.S. forces would almost surely face a 
political backlash in Baghdad if they took military action against 
guerrilla fighters many Kurds see as heroes.

Yet the Kurdish guerrilla force here is battling one of America's bedrock 
allies in the region — Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty 
Organization and a stable, secular Muslim state in a region trending in 
other directions. The continuing failure to end PKK violence coming out of 
Iraq has driven Turkey toward a stronger security arrangement with Iran, 
which also faces militant Kurds along the Iraqi border, a relationship that 
can't help but be worrying for Washington.

"How important is the PKK as an issue? Let me tell you that it's important 
enough that the president of the United States decided that we needed a 
special envoy to counter the PKK and to try to get all of our efforts in 
the United States focused in the right direction, along with those of 
Turkey and Iraq," retired Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, recently appointed the 
U.S. special envoy to counter the PKK, said after a visit to the region 
late last month.

"We all believe that the use of force is the last resort, not the first 
resort," he said. "But having said that, that does not mean that we will 
not take military action. Quite the contrary: All options are on the table."

The continuing polarization of Iraq and the mounting sectarian violence 
there have only exacerbated worries among its neighbors about 
reverberations within the substantial Kurdish minorities in Turkey, Iran 
and Syria.

Iraqi Kurdistan has moved steadily to distance itself from the violent 
skirmishing between Sunni and Shiite Arabs to the south; regional President 
Massoud Barzani's recent order to pull down the Iraqi flag on public 
buildings and replace it with the Kurdish flag is only one in a long line 
of moves to establish a truly autonomous Kurdish republic. Here in the 
north, there are Kurdish schools, Kurdish broadcast channels, Kurdish 
cellphone companies and a full-fledged Kurdish regional government.

Militant groups such as the PKK are demanding an end to repression of Kurds 
elsewhere, recognition of their national status and language and eventually 
some degree of political autonomy — measures that government leaders fear 
will open the door to demands for a Kurdish state, discarding the borders 
of four nations, a recipe for regional war.

That is why solving "the Kurdish question" has become a top priority for 
the U.S., and why tackling the PKK, its most militant face, has become step 
No. 1.

After Ralston's visit to the region, Iraqi leaders persuaded the PKK to 
declare a unilateral cease-fire, an end to the regular cross-border attacks 
that are claiming the lives of Turkish soldiers on a regular basis.

The PKK agreed, its leaders hoping the expression of goodwill could open 
the door to significant movement on Turkey's part, starting with an end to 
what it sees as human rights abuses, recognition of the Kurdish language 
and possibly amnesty for some PKK fighters who have not been involved in 
violence.

"I would like to say that the cease-fire has not been announced because of 
pressure at all," Cemil Bayak, a longtime leader of the group's most 
militant wing and a member of its ruling council, said in an interview over 
a lunch of grilled chicken and steaming vegetable stew at his mountain redoubt.

"The most important reason is that we want the Kurdish question to be 
solved peacefully, politically and by means of dialogue. This is what we 
want," said Bayak, who believed Turkey's bid to join the European Union 
would provide the impetus for human rights improvements needed to alleviate 
repression of the nation's Kurds. "We want violence to be put aside, and a 
new era to be opened on the issue."

But although the PKK has pledged to end its attacks on Turkish military 
targets, it is unclear whether the cease-fire will be embraced by other 
Kurdish militants, including the Falcons.

Turkish officials say the PKK is a terrorist organization that finances its 
activities through an international network of drug smuggling and human 
trafficking that reaches to Europe. Turkey is demanding the use of military 
force to disarm the PKK, but Iraq so far has refused, said Kosrat Rasoul 
Ali, vice president of the Kurdish regional government and a well-known 
former Kurdish peshmerga fighter.

"They want us to attack the PKK, they want us to crack down on the PKK," 
Ali said. "But it cannot be done. In the past we tried, but it was without 
result.

"We think that this problem cannot be solved with force," he said. "Because 
they are Kurds. It's very difficult for us Kurds to kill Kurds. In fact, it 
is impossible."

Ralston has refused to meet with PKK leaders, declaring, "We do not meet 
with terrorist groups." But Ali said Kurdish leaders hoped to broker a 
solution in which the PKK would disarm in exchange for guarantees on behalf 
of Kurds in Turkey.

"PKK is ready to hand over their weapons to the Americans, in return for 
several political steps by Turkey," Ali said. "Like a general amnesty to be 
published, to recognize Kurdish existence as a people in Turkey."

At the same time, some Iraqi officials believe Turkey and possibly Iran are 
behind some of the escalating violence in northern Iraq, especially in the 
city of Kirkuk, an oil center that Kurds hope to include within their 
federated republic, whose inclusion could form the basis for a powerful 
future Kurdistan economy.

In a pointed warning, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said last 
month that Iraq was prepared to support opposition groups within 
neighboring nations whose governments it saw as instigating violence in Iraq.

Recognizing that America's prime aim is to discourage the growing closeness 
of Turkey and Iran at a time when the U.S. is seeking to isolate Tehran, 
PKK leaders are arguing that solving the Kurdish question — the main issue 
that Turkey and Iran have in common — is the best way to accomplish that goal.

"If you cannot solve the Kurdish problem in Turkey, you cannot separate 
Turkey from Syria and Iran," Bayak said.

"And so without putting Turkey and the Kurds together, you cannot have the 
fundamental basis for this project of a new Middle East."

kim.murphy at latimes.com

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