The Turks are angry. Despite the fact that his government has done more than any other to recognize the position of Kurds in Turkish society, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has seen renewed violence by the PKK. The Turkish military, many of whose generals believed they were on the verge of breaking the Marxist PKK in 1999 when its leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured and instituted a cease-fire, is furious that PKK terrorism, which restarted in 2004, is now increasing.
The rebels are receiving support from the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Turkish troops are this week concentrating in the border region, threatening to carry out a punitive raid against PKK bases. Washington has warned its NATO ally it will not countenance such an attack. Ankara views the incursion of two US F-16 fighters into its airspace last week as a veiled threat, even though the Americans say the incident was an accident.
Turkish frustration is the greater because for the last three years, the Americans have been promising to use their influence with the Iraqi Kurdish authorities to stem the flow of support for the PKK. As recently as January a retired US general was flown into Kirkuk to coordinate the policy. Ankara sees this initiative as a failure. The US does not seem to be able to persuade the Iraqi Kurdish authorities to act effectively against the PKK. Turkish suspicions will only have been heightened by the US announcement yesterday that the largely ethnic Kurdish provinces of Duhok, Irbil and Sulaymaniyah are being handed over to local control.
A Turkish invasion of Iraq, for whatever limited purpose, would be entirely unacceptable. It would also probably be operationally useless since, as the move has been so widely anticipated, it is certain the PKK targets will have moved away from danger. If it invades, Turkey will therefore incur international condemnation for no very good reason.
The real cause of this dangerous situation however is the shortsighted policy of the Bush administration. Ever since its jets flew a protective umbrella over Kurdish Iraq following Saddam’s ouster from Kuwait, Washington has quietly encouraged the growth of Kurdish nationalism. That historic rivals such as the Talabani and Barzani factions have come together in northern Iraq suggests the degree of separatist ambitions in the autonomous region — ambitions fueled by the presence of oil fields. The Bush people, as has been so often the case, did not understand the complexities with which they were meddling. They clearly did not appreciate that by effectively countenancing the rise of Kurdish nationalism on the one hand, they were undermining on the other the government of national unity they set up in Baghdad.
Nor, it seems, did anyone in Washington foresee either the difficulties of controlling Iraqi Kurds or the impact that free cross-border support for PKK terrorists would have on an important NATO partner such as Turkey. With Russia reawakening militarily, a more thoughtful US administration would have fostered, not frustrated, relations with Ankara. Once again blundering Bush and his cohorts have opened a Pandora’s box with potentially extremely grave consequences for the Middle East.
