TURKEY is rightly furious at Sunday’s killing of 12 soldiers, the highest military death toll in a dozen years. According to reports, Turkish troops yesterday pounded suspected Kurdish rebel camps in northern Iraq with artillery fire. And Premier Tayyip Erdogan has decided to allow the Turkish Army to make incursions into northern Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish PKK rebels and their Iraqi bases.
This would indeed be a serious mistake and would play into the hands of the PKK. The rebels now have few bases in Turkey itself. During the cease-fire and the subsequent political offensive to win the hearts and minds of Turkish Kurds, Ankara was able to re-establish its authority in major parts of what had once been rebel-dominated territory. Most local Kurds deplored the rebel violence but resented the marginalization of Kurdish culture within Turkey. Much but not all of this discrimination has now been rolled back, not least by the first Erdogan government. There is a general desire among Turkish Kurds for peace, making it hard for PKK rebels to operate within Turkey.
The Turks should therefore regard the forced relocation of the PKK’s bases to northern Iraq as both a political and military victory.
Invading Iraq would very probably enable Turkey’s generals (already angry over an Islamist president) to score some victories. But politically and diplomatically these triumphs would in fact be defeats. Many Iraqi Kurds who currently deplore the PKK’s regionally destabilizing campaign would be incensed by any Turkish incursion and sympathize with the rebels. Equally the Iraqi government would point angrily to the agreement it has just signed with Ankara, on cross-border cooperation, which specifically ruled out any authorization for Turkish pursuit-and-destroy missions.
It must be hoped that by yielding to the pressure of his politically hostile generals and accepting the principle of incursions into Iraq, Erdogan is hoping to alarm the Iraqi Kurdish authorities into acting against the PKK. But everybody knows how much power the government in Baghdad wields and in what parts of Iraq.
Erdogan has given himself something of an escape clause in that any incursion into Iraq must first be authorized by the Parliament, though that often-volatile assembly is very likely to reflect the deep anger of most Turks and demand that the PKK be dealt a severe blow. Nor is there any certainty that now they have received the premier’s approval in principle, Turkey’s uncompromising generals will not go ahead with an attack any way.
The bitter truth is that Turkey must endure these grievous provocations without violating what is left of Iraqi sovereignty. It must play the long game and not be provoked into actions that will actually exacerbate and in no way solve the PKK insurgency. And it must avoid doing anything that will only add to the instability and violence the region suffers from on account of US-led invasion of Iraq.
