CAIRO, 14 April 2003 — Territorial gains by Iraqi Kurds have set alarm bells ringing in neighboring states, highlighting one of the most sensitive geopolitical problems in the Middle East — the Kurdish question.
When Kurdish fighters swept into the northern Iraq oil cities of Kirkuk and Mosul last week as President Saddam Hussein’s army crumbled, they triggered an immediate threat of Turkish military intervention unless the United States acted to remove them. US Secretary of State Colin Powell moved swiftly to defuse the immediate crisis, securing a Kurdish pledge to withdraw the “peshmerga” fighters as soon as US forces were able to provide security, and a Turkish promise not to march in for now.
But the longer-term future of the area remains a subject of acute concern not only to Ankara, which fears contagion with its own large Kurdish population, but also, less vocally, to Syria and Iran, which have Kurdish minorities.
Turkish leaders, especially in the powerful military, vehemently oppose a Kurdish state and are uncomfortable with the degree of autonomy the Iraqi Kurds have gained since Saddam lost control of a slice of northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War.
For Iraqi Kurds, that autonomy is the baseline from which they expect to improve their position as the price for staying in a federal post-Saddam Iraq and as a reward for helping Washington.
“Federalism for us is a compromise for not declaring independence,” said Burhan Jaf, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s envoy to the European Union.
“If federalism is not taken, then we have a problem. Then all options are open for us,” he told Reuters.
Jaf said the Kurds want a multiethnic Kirkuk as their regional capital, since it had a Kurdish majority before Baath Party ethnic cleansing “ArabiZed” the city, and expected a share of its oil revenues from a future Iraqi federal government.
A people without a country, the Kurds are spread across a swathe of mountain ranges that were divided among five states — Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and the Soviet Union — by Western powers after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
Estimated to number 20-25 million, they share a common language, closer to Persian than to Arabic or Turkish. Most are Sunni Muslims. About half live in Turkey.
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, there are Kurds in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan.
Apart from a short-lived Kurdish republic established in the Iranian town of Mahabad in 1946 with Soviet support, and whose leaders were hanged a few months later, they have never had their own state.
Each of the regional powers has backed Kurdish groups against a neighbor or to keep its own Kurdish separatists down at various times in the last half-century.
Pre-revolutionary Iran and its then ally Israel trained Iraqi Kurdish fighters to fight Iraq’s Baathist rulers from the mid-1960s until 1975, when the Shah of Iran cut a peace deal with Baghdad and abandoned the Kurds to their fate.
Iraq abetted Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who revolted after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Tehran and briefly controlled the cities of Sanandaj and Mahabad before being driven out by Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
Syria and Lebanon harbored Turkish Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas in the 1980s and 1990s, until a threat of war by Ankara in 1998 prompted Damascus to expel PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and close PKK camps there. The PKK launched a campaign for Kurdish self-rule in 1984. Their battle with Turkish forces claimed more than 30,000 lives and led to martial law in southeastern Turkey. Ankara has forces permanently inside northern Iraq to prevent PKK incursions.
During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, Iran and Syria supported Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) against Saddam. In 1988 Saddam used chemical weapons against the Kurds in the town of Halabja, killing about 5,000 people.
Turkey built relations with Masoud Barzani’s rival Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), mainly in bid to control the PKK.
After the 1991 Gulf War, the PUK and the KDP fought each other sporadically in northern Iraq until a 1998 truce. They have no strong ideological differences and are now cooperating in regional development with US encouragement.
In recent months, Turkey has pursued closer diplomatic ties with Iran and Syria, two neighbors with which relations have often been tense, but which share its interest in preventing the emergence of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq.
Although the United States has declared its opposition to such a state, the sight of Kurdish fighters operating in tandem with US special forces in northern Iraq has heightened Turkish fears that facts are being created on the ground.
Ironically that collaboration was cemented by Turkey’s refusal to let US troops open a northern front from its soil.
Professor Dogu Ergil of Turkey’s Tosam research institute said Ankara was unhappy even with a federal solution for Iraq, seeing in it too much autonomy for the Kurds.
“Turkey tends to project its own image on Iraq. Turkey is a very centraliZed state and it wants Iraq to be that way too,”he told Reuters.
Events in Iraq may add to pressure from the European Union for Turkey to grant its estimated 12 million Kurds more rights, to meet the political criteria for EU membership. Ankara has agreed to permit private broadcasting and education in Kurdish, but has yet to implement the new law in practice.
