[Media-watch] U.S.A Must Address Kurdish Concerns Over Turkish Involvement in Iraq

[Iain Campbell]

by Matthew Riemer, November 18 2003
The United States, the Republic of Turkey, and the de facto state of 
Kurdistan maintain a tense three-way relationship punctuated by distrust and 
uncertainty. Turkey is the most Western looking of the world's Muslim 
countries and because of this has always been groomed by the United States 
to be a model for a Muslim world supposedly treading the path of 
democratization; and the country's geographical usefulness was employed to 
great effect during the Cold War. Such a relationship gradually led to a 
condition of relative understanding and cooperation between Washington and 
Ankara.

This aside, Turkey is still a Muslim country while the United States is not. 
This simple difference, despite the fact that Turkey "modernized" following 
the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire, is quite obvious when dealing with 
cultural, social, and political issues. Washington discovered this to its 
dismay during the build-up to the recent invasion of Iraq.

Ankara and the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan were long 
reluctant to support the U.S. military action in Iraq. Before the war, on 
March 1, a vote in the Turkish parliament denied the U.S. military the right 
to use Turkish military bases to launch air strikes aimed at dislodging 
Saddam Hussein's regime.
>
At the time this decision was controversial in the U.S. as many war 
advocates accused Turkey of siding with popular Arab sentiment and not its 
new tradition of Western alignment. However, negative feelings were quickly 
mollified by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who conceded that the 
Mediterranean state is indeed a democracy and that Washington would have to 
maturely accept the parliament's decision -- though Rumsfeld's deputy Paul 
Wolfowitz did pay a visit to Ankara to express Washington's disappointment.
>
More recently, Turkey, in an about face, decided to send troops to Iraq and 
become active in the proceedings following the ouster of Saddam Hussein. 
Presumably, Ankara had realized -- or perhaps finally accepted -- that 
Turkish interests would be best served by engaging themselves in the 
rebuilding process in Iraq. However, many in the Turkish parliament realized 
the implications of such a move and were leery of Turkey and Turkish 
interests becoming fresh targets for al-Qaeda and related organizations now 
connected to the conflict.
>
These fears were borne out when just days after officially deciding to send 
forces to Iraq, virtually simultaneous, twin bombings rocked Turkish 
interests in Baghdad and in Turkey itself. While these bombings were claimed 
not to have been a result of Turkey's decision to deploy troops, it is 
difficult to see it as otherwise. Then, this past weekend on November 15 in 
Istanbul, truck bombs destroyed two synagogues, killing twenty and injuring 
more than 300.
>
Following the disapproval of many in the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) and 
subsequent talks between the Council and the Turkish leadership, the 
proposed troop deployment of 10,000 was called off. The current president of 
the IGC is Jalal Talabani, one of the most prominent Kurds who also heads 
the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).
>
Turkey enjoys a mildly paradoxical and triangular relationship with the 
United States and the Kurds -- one not without its fair share of irony. One 
of the main justifications for the removal of Saddam Hussein was that the 
former Ba'athist leader had committed human rights atrocities in his 
treatment of the Iraqi Kurds. Two incidents are commonly mentioned with 
regard to this position. One is the gas attack on the Kurdish village of 
Halabja during the Iran-Iraq war, killing and maiming several thousand 
Kurds. The other is what is known as the Anfal campaign in which Kurdish 
males were rounded up, driven to remote areas of northern Iraq and then 
executed. Exact figures are unclear, but perhaps as many as 100,000 Kurdish 
males died in this manner. However, the Turkish government has also been 
involved in human rights abuses against the Kurds in the southeast of its 
country. Turkish Kurds have long been the victim of Turkish military attacks 
as Ankara has fought what they consid!
er to be a terrorist organization,
the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK).

Many of Turkey's gravest offenses took place during the Clinton 
administration's watch of the mid-nineties. In a 1999 report, the Bulletin 
of the Atomic Scientists reported that "In the last decade the Turkish army 
has leveled, burned, or forcibly evacuated more than 3,000 Kurdish villages. 
That is roughly three-quarters the number of Kurdish settlements destroyed 
in Iraq in the 1980s during Saddam Hussein's infamous 'Anfal' campaign, when 
the West was arming Iraq and turning a blind eye to widespread human rights 
violations."
>
The United States was also supporting both Turkey and Iraq during their 
respective oppression of the Kurds. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 
report continues:
>
"In 1995 the [Clinton] administration acknowledged that American arms had 
been used by the Turkish government in domestic military operations 'during 
which human rights abuses have occurred.' In a report ordered by Congress, 
the State Department admitted that the abuses included the use of U.S. Cobra 
helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and F-16 fighter bombers. In some 
instances, critics say, entire Kurdish villages were obliterated from the 
air."
>
"The administration conceded that the Turkish policy had forced more than 
two million Kurds from their homes. Some of the villages were evacuated and 
burned, bombed, or shelled by government forces to deprive the PKK of a 
'logistical base of operations,' according to the State Department report, 
while others were targeted because their inhabitants refused to join the 
'village guards,' a brutal military tactic -- patterned on the Vietnam-era 
'model villages' program -- that requires civilian Kurds to fight Kurdish 
guerrillas."

During Saddam Hussein's repression and ethnic cleansing of the Kurds of 
northern Iraq during the '80s, the United States was also aiding the 
Ba'athist regime in its war of attrition with neighboring Iran. The U.S. 
actually chose to fund both countries in hopes that a prolonged war would 
weaken both of them not only in military and economic terms but also in a 
regional context. The strategy worked as two of the most powerful Gulf 
states were weakened considerably at a crucial point in Mideast developments 
-- though Iran considerably more than Iraq, which sustained far greater 
casualties.
>
Following the Gulf War in '91, the United States failed to back a Kurdish 
uprising in the North -- as well as a Shiite one in the south of the country 
-- as then-President George H. W. Bush had promised to do. The result was a 
massacre that still reverberates through the Kurdish population today.
>
This is the historical context in which the politics of current day Iraq are 
being played out and explains why there is -- as U.S. Secretary of State 
Colin Powell has pointed out -- great "sensitivities" to a Turkish troop 
deployment not only in Iraq in general but in the Kurdish areas of the north 
where Turkish crimes on the civilian population are well known. Kurdish 
leaders are also leery of allowing the Turks to gain even a temporary 
military foothold in a region that was formerly controlled by the Ottoman 
Empire for centuries. And now, in the most recent chapter, the Iraqi 
Governing Council with Talabani at its head has stopped the Turks from once 
again becoming involved in the internal affairs of Iraq and the de facto 
Kurdish state.

For its part the United States must incorporate these historical legacies 
into its current foreign policy strategy and realize that they have acted in 
the interests of the Kurds while contributing to human rights abuses against 
them. Washington must address the gravity of how Turkey is seen in Iraq and 
go beyond calling these historical issues mere "sensitivities."

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