Turkey "Draining the Sea to Catch the Fish"

By Ahmed Ferhadi

Just as Kurds were preparing for nowruz, their new year which falls on March 21, a force of 35,000 Turkish troops with armor and air support crossed into the "safe haven" of Iraqi Kurdistan in an attempt to destroy the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. This zone usually is protected by the allied forces of the United States, Britain and France, but when the Turkish invasion began on March 20, these forces suspended all of their aircraft sorties. The Turkish attack, known as Operation Steel, created thousands of new refugees but utterly failed in its self-declared goals.

The incursion drew sharp criticism from Turkey's European allies, but was carried out with the connivance of the U.S., whose criticism of the invasion was only luke-warm, and with the cognizance of Iraq, which had been notified of the impending foray in mid-February when Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Said al-Sahaf visited Turkey. Iraq initially hoped the attack would help restore its control over the north, and Baghdad maintained a studied silence for days. When it became clear that Turkey was seeking the cooperation of the Iraqi Kurdish leadership in the expulsion of the PKK, however, Iraq strongly denounced the operation.

The ostensible aim of the Turkish invasion was to "root out" 2,500 PKK rebels in northern Iraq. The massive attack (the largest of its kind in the history of the Turkish republic, even outstripping its invasion of Cyprus two decades ago) was by no means commensurate with its declared objective.

The hidden agenda of Operation Steel was to coerce Iraqi Kurds into a rapprochement with Saddam Hussain's regime and to pressure the West to lift its international embargo of Iraq by exploiting apparent differences among the allies over sanctions. Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller makes no bones about longing to see Saddam's authority restored over Iraqi Kurdistan, and a week into the invasion then-Turkish Foreign Minister Murat Karayelcin stressed that the solution to the situation in northern Iraq lay in lifting the international embargo and implementing autonomy for Iraqi Kurds. Karayelcin was referring to the defunct autonomy deal of March 1974 between Baghdad and Iraqi Kurds, which was a travesty.

Kurdish Hopes and Turkish Fears

Both Masoud Barzani, head of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), and Jalal Talabani, leader of the Kurdistan Union Party (PUK), swiftly condemned the Turkish invasion. Although they have no ideological quarrel, the KDP and PUK have engaged in bitter intermittent fighting over the last year. American, Iranian and Turkish attempts to encourage reconciliation between Barzani and Talabani have been to no avail. Because of this power struggle, the average Iraqi Kurd is growing disillusioned with and increasingly skeptical of the two parties.

In May 1991, hopeful Iraqi Kurds had queued—many until midnight—to cast their votes in the first democratic elections in their lifetimes. The KDP and PUK split all of the seats in the new Iraqi Kurd parliament, resulting in a 50-50 split in all aspects of the first Kurdish government. The cabinet included a prime minister and various other ministers, but not defense or foreign affairs portfolios, since the goal of the Kurds was federation within a post-Saddam Iraq, not secession and independence.

Barzani and Talabani stayed outside the Kurdish government, however, rendering it cash-strapped and impotent. Real authority remained within the KDP and PUK, while the double embargo (that of the international community on all of Iraq and Saddam's own blockade of northern Iraq) further curtailed the resources available to the fledgling Kurdish government.

This situation, in addition to the recent KDP-PUK infighting, created the "vacuum" which, according to Ankara, has enabled Turkey's banned PKK to establish bases inside Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkey used this argument as a pretext for its incursion last March, yet Ankara itself has contributed to the vacuum of authority by refusing to deal with the Kurdish government and parliament, preferring to deal directly with the KDP and PUK—whose collaboration it is demanding in the fight against the PKK.

Turkey is very wary of the enormous disparity between its Kurds and their brethren south of the border in Iraqi Kurdistan. The latter, despite sundry problems and misgivings, have been governing themselves in a de facto Kurdish state for four years now, while the former still are constitutionally prohibited from even broadcasting or publishing in Kurdish. Instead of trying to ameliorate the condition of its own Kurds, Turkey is adamant about not allowing the Iraqi Kurdish entity to succeed.

Operation Steel lasted six weeks. Turkey said the last of its forces withdrew on May 4, amid rumors they were mining the landscape and repeated threats from Ankara that Turkish forces would return swiftly to northern Iraq if circumstances warrant. If we believe the Turkish government figures (which tend to be inflated), some 500 PKK rebels were killed. As Turkish troops returned across the international border, however, PKK rebels were flowing back into the vacated area! Jalal Talabani told Agence France Presse that Operation Steel only served to strengthen the PKK, not weaken it as intended.

Operation Steel failed both politically and militarily in its declared objective of destroying the PKK, just as Tansu Ciller's 1993 vow to make the end of that year the end of the PKK also failed. Time and again since the 1984 founding of the PKK, the military solution has proved to be no solution, yet Ciller again gave the army a free hand in dealing with the Kurdish issue, neglecting any type of political solution. The military's harsh, repressive tactics in Turkish Kurdistan have created more than 1.5 million internal refugees, in addition to thousands who have fled into northern Iraq. Five million Turkish Kurds have migrated to cities outside the Kurdish region.

The exorbitant costs of the ongoing operations in eastern Turkey have dragged the country into an unprecedented economic recession. High-ranking Turkish officials admit that 1994 was the worst year in memory, with inflation at 124 percent and GNP dropping six percent. Inflation has eroded the value of Turkey's currency so badly that Ankara plans to delete three zeroes from the lira beginning next year. Tourism is down, and under these conditions Turkey's empty coffers cannot defray the costs of such military actions much longer.

An Act of Denial

Turkey has been without a Kurdish policy since President Turgut Ozal, who, it is rumored, was to meet with the PKK shortly before his sudden death in 1993. Ozal wanted to resolve both Turkey's Kurdish problem and its Cyprus conflict with Greece, then focus on a new role for Turkey as a magnet for the Islamic, Turkic-speaking Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. To this end, he was the first Turkish leader to admit that mistakes vis-â-vis the Kurds had been made in the early days of the Turkish Republic. In 1991 he rescinded Law 2932, which prohibited the use of Kurdish language "in the expression and dissemination of thought."

Alparslan Pehlivanli, chairman of the justice committee of the Turkish parliament, reacted negatively. "Tomorrow there will be cafes where Kurdish folk songs are sung, theaters where Kurdish films are shown and tea houses where Kurdish is spoken," he complained. "If this is not separatism, what is separatism?"

In an astounding act of denial, Turkey refuses to admit it has to recognize Kurdish aspirations. It is utterly naive for Turkey to minimize a major issue—involving the political, cultural, linguistic and basic human rights of its 12 million Kurds (a fifth of its population)—by reducing it to a mere "problem" of "several thousand PKK terrorists."

"Ankara might be able to drain the sea but it will not be able to catch the fish," says Yesar Kemal, Turkey's most prominent author and a perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize for literature. His remark alludes to a statement by erstwhile Turkish Chief-of-Staff Dogan Goresh about the harsh measures needed in the search for the PKK "fish." Kemal charges that Turkish authorities have declared war on the defenseless Kurdish people, burning their villages and deporting the inhabitants. In "Campaign of Lies," a strongly worded essay in Der Spiegel, Kemal, born 71 years ago to Kurdish parents in a village near Adana, argued that Turkey's leaders have used systematic oppression "to kill the Kurdish language and culture since the founding of the republic."

In an April interview with the Turkish program "Day 31," the laconic Masoud Barzani said that an independent Kurdistan is "the hope and dream of every Kurd, and one day there will be a Kurdish state in the region." Yet, map in hand, Turkish President Suleiman Demirel told journalists on May 4 that the oil-rich, predominantly Kurdish and formerly Ottoman vilayet of Mosul was still Turkish.

Barzani's cool confidence and Demirel's coy ambition serve to underscore the international nature of the Kurdish issue, as well as the urgent need for a solution. Today, as the Arab-Israeli conflict is entering a phase of serious negotiations toward a peaceful settlement, the Kurdish question will replace it as the most contentious issue atop the Middle East's agenda for the rest of this century and beyond, unless a political solution is found. Can the world relegate more than 25 million Kurds—its "biggest and longest-oppressed minority"—to oblivion for yet another century?

Dr. Ahmed Ferhadi, an Iraqi Kurd, is a professor of Near Eastern Languages at New York University.