When the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Greeks, Arabs, Armenians, Jews and Palestinians demanded their own homelands. The Kurds lacked the resolve that comes from possessing a single ethnic origin and thus were relegated to the sidelines of the nationalist drama.
Most of the world’s 20 million Kurds live in the rugged mountains where Turkey, Iraq and Iran meet, although well over a million have emigrated to Istanbul, Baghdad, Tehran and Beirut, often assimilating well with the local people. There has been a Kurdish prime minister in Turkey and today the economy minister, Mehmet Simsek, is a Kurd.
But just as the Kurds of Istanbul appear cut off from the political attitudes of the rural Kurds of southeast Turkey, so too the Kurds of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Russia and the Lebanon might as well be six different peoples. Of course, when Saddam Hussein bombed Iraq’s northern Kurds in the wake of the ending of the first Gulf War, they poured across the mountains into Turkey and the Turkish Kurds helped them.
And today, after the Iraqi Kurds have entrenched their autonomy in the Iraqi constitution, there has been some buzz on the Turkish side of the mountains about building a new, united Kurdistan.
But most of the time Kurdish leaders from these countries do not meet, do not talk, and often speak different languages.
Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, thought that it would be relatively easy to make a Faustian bargain with the Turkish Kurds, offering them full and complete citizenship in exchange for demanding they give up their language, traditions and identity.
But many Kurds never sat easy with this arrangement. From the beginning they resented the banning of the use of Kurdish language in the schools and law courts. The first major revolt broke out in 1925 and was brutally repressed.
In the time since the violent PKK emerged in the 1980s, spearheading a new revolt, the best estimates suggest that war with the central government led to the destruction of over 2000 villages and the creation of over 2 million refugees. After the capture in 1999 of its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, the movement lost steam. But two years ago, under the leadership of his brother and in the face of what seemed like broken promises from the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the PKK returned to the gun.
At this point the tale becomes weirdly convoluted. Rogue elements within the military, determined to find a way to derail Turkey’s EU entry bid, stirred up the Kurds to support the PKK by running them guns and also acting as agent provocateurs, as when in early 2006 they blew up a Kurdish bookshop in the town of Seminole. The local prosecutor, in his zeal to nail the army, prepared an indictment that seemed to point a finger at Turkey’s senior general, Yasar Büyükanit, who earlier on in the war, as the local commander, was probably responsible for many of the army’s harsh tactics. This pushed Erdogan, who for most of his tenure has had a politicized army on his back, to publicly denounce the prosecutor and support the military.
But behind the scenes the government went into high gear to improve Kurdish life.
Within a couple of years water and electricity have been brought to almost very Kurdish village. And in the most recent elections Erdogan’s governing party racked up a spectacular victory among Kurdish voters.
This seems to have provoked the PKK, fearing it was becoming redundant, to replay the terrorism card. But in a piece of triangulation that would make the Clintons envious, Erdogan has placated the army that wanted to bomb PKK bases on the Iraqi side of the mountains, placated Washington that feared such bombing would be a new source of instability in Iraq and placated a big chunk of public opinion that resents the PKK and the Americans almost equally.
Now is the time for patience, on all sides. Doubtless the PKK and the more conservative, anti-EU, elements in the Turkish Army will try and stir the pot, but if Erdogan and Washington continue to play it calmly and the Turkish Army can be kept in check, we should expect to see an end to Turkey’s “Kurdish problem” once and for all.
