THE Turkish bombardment, air attacks and brief troop incursion into Iraq yesterday were madness. The handful of PKK rebels allegedly slain is likely to be out of all proportion to the diplomatic and political consequences the Turks will suffer.
Thanks to Turkey’s threat of military action, the Maliki government in Baghdad had agreed to close down the PKK Kurdish rebels in Iraq. Since the Iraqi prime minister’s influence does not extend very far beyond his office door, this agreement could only have been implemented with the cooperation of the authorities in the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. The regional leader Massud Barzani made it clear last week that any Turkish attack on the PKK in Iraq would be resisted by all Iraqi Kurds. Now that the Turks have struck, albeit lightly, the mood of the local Kurdish authorities will have hardened against proscribing the PKK.
That is not to say that many Iraqi Kurds do not wish that the 3,000 or so PKK guerrillas, who have located themselves on their side of the border, would go away. The Kurdish region enjoys stability and commercial prosperity that exists nowhere else in Iraq. For the first time since the short-lived 1946 Republic of Mahabad in Iran, the Kurds have a self-governing region in which they are largely masters of their own destiny. The machinations of a bunch of formerly doctrinaire Marxist Turkish Kurds menace this achievement.
Just as the recent PKK murders of a score of Turkish soldiers has inflamed nationalist passions in Turkey, so revenge attacks by Turks into Iraq will ignite the anger of all Kurds. The stage is therefore rapidly being set for bloodletting and misery that will solve nothing but rather bring chaos to northern Iraq and international humiliation to Turkey.
There are grounds to believe that the Erdogan government in Ankara did not specifically authorize these attacks. Turkey’s generals who mistrust this moderate Islamic administration see the public mood is behind military revenge, not Erdogan’s diplomacy. Yet by carrying out the threat of force, even to such a limited degree, Turkey may have thrown away the diplomatic lever that seemed to be working.
Washington, of course, has condemned the pre-emptive Turkish assault. This is arrant hypocrisy from a US government whose disastrous “pre-emptive” invasion of Iraq was mounted on a fabric of falsehoods, which backs Israeli strikes into Palestine, Lebanon or Syria and which even now threatens military assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The truth of course is that Washington is actually quite closely involved with the PKK. Even though it has declared it a terrorist organization, the Bush regime is actively supporting the PKK’s PJAK guerrillas in Iran. Thus it is perfectly possible that US weapons and aid shipped to PJAK are being used by the PKK against Turkey, one of America’s staunchest NATO allies.
US duplicity must not be allowed to plunge Kurdish Iraq into the same bloodbath it has created in the rest of the country. Rather than posturing, Washington must do whatever it takes to persuade Barzani to close down the PKK locally while at the same time convincing Turkey’s US-equipped generals to back off.
