Kurdish Issue Will Expolode In Bush's Face.

By Amitabh Pal
June 8, 2007

What was the Bush Administration thinking when it invaded Iraq?

If further proof was needed that the United States opened up a can of worms with its decision, check out the coming conflict between Turkey and Kurdistan, a “sideshow” of the entire Iraq mess that has received comparatively little coverage in the U.S. media. (The New York Times’s Greek edition of its overseas counterpart, the International Herald Tribune, had a lot of focus on this subject when I visited Greece in April.)

For those not following the matter closely, the Turkish armed forces have engaged in a huge buildup on the Turkey-Iraq border to intimidate (or worse) the Iraqi Kurdish leadership into ceasing to provide haven to Turkish Kurdish guerrillas (members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the PKK). There’s only one problem: The Iraqi Kurds are perhaps the only friends of the United States in Iraq. So now you have Turkey, a really close U.S. ally, taking them on.

Could the Bush Administration have created a bigger mess?

The Turkish government was extremely wary about the Iraq War, and understandably so. It feared that the establishment of an independent Kurdish state next door would provide a bad example to Kurds in Turkey. This is the main reason why the Turkish government refused to join in, in spite of pressure from U.S. officials such as Paul Wolfowitz, who called on the Turkish military to override the democratically elected government. Although ill-treatment of the Kurds has eased up in recent years, for decades repression was so harsh that even the Kurdish language was banned. Tens of thousands of people died in a tit-for-tat guerrilla war between the PKK and the Turkish armed forces, with both sides engaging in massive human rights abuses. (John Tirman’s “Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's Arms Trade” has details about the Turkish government’sbrutalization of its Kurdish minority.)

The impetus for the recent Turkish show of force has been an upsurge in Kurdish guerrilla activity following a years-long relative lull after the capture of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999. The most notable incident has been a suicide bombing last month in Ankara that killed eight people. The Turkish government blames the PKK for carrying out the attack; the PKK vehemently denies it. The Bush Administration has been frantically warning the Turkish army to not invade Iraq.

The Iraqi Kurds have received generally good press in this country, partly due to (justifiably so) the repression they suffered at the hands of Saddam, and partly due to the fact that they are relatively secular and pro-Western. But the record of their leadership hasn’t been without blemish. The Kurdish administration has engaged in censorship and suppression of civil liberties. (See David Enders’s “Squelching Freedom in Iraqi Kurdistan” in the June 2006 issue of The Progressive.)

And they have discriminated against ethnic Arabs and Turkoman (another sore point for Turks) in Kurdish-dominated towns.

The Iraqi Kurdish leadership has been biding its time and waiting for the opportune moment to secede from the parent country.

Even though Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is a Kurd, and although the Kurds have a large amount of autonomy provided for in the Iraqi Constitution, it’s only a matter of time before they raise the unspeakable question. When this happens, the Kurds will be on an inevitable collision course with the Turkish government, which will be in little mood to tolerate such a step. The result would very likely be all-out war.

What does the Bush Administration plan to do then?


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