The Daily Telegraph, UK
Oct 12 2007
When Kurds smell success, Turks go for guns
By Con Coughlin
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 12/10/2007
The semi-autonomous enclave of Kurdistan in northern Iraq has long
been regarded as an oasis of stability and good governance in a
country otherwise riven with violence and sectarian strife.
News: Turkey condemns US genocide declaration advertisement
Even when militant insurgent groups have carried out attacks against
Kurdish targets, such as the devastating truck bombings of the Yazidi
community last August that claimed more than 400 lives, the Kurds
have managed to resist being drawn into the endless spiral of
tit-for-tat attacks that has accounted for so many innocent lives
throughout the rest of the country.
The ability of the Kurds to rise above the internecine blood-letting
that has come to characterise post-Saddam Iraq owes much to the fact
that they have administered their own affairs for more than a decade;
Iraq’s Kurdish region was protected from Saddam’s murderous designs
by the no-fly zones established after the 1991 Gulf war.
The Kurds’ aptitude for self-government was finally rewarded in the
summer when American military commanders handed over control of the
three Kurdish provinces of Arbil, Dahuk and Sulaymaniyeh to Massoud
Barzani, the veteran Kurdish warlord.
But this rare Iraqi success story now looks as though it could soon
implode, should the Turkish government go ahead with its threat to
invade Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq to root out terror cells that
have been carrying out attacks on Turkish soil.
If the banner headlines in yesterday’s main Turkish newspapers are
any guide, the Turks are thirsting for revenge after a series of
attacks out in south-eastern Turkey by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers
Party (PKK).
In the worst attack, last weekend, 13 Turkish troops were killed in a
well-executed ambush. This and a series of other attacks on military
positions has persuaded Turkey’s political and military echelons to
bury their differences and present a united front to deal with the
PKK.
Following an emergency meeting this week of military and political
leaders chaired by Recep Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, the
government agreed to consider "every kind of legal, political and
economic measure – including an incursion across the border".
Preparations for an invasion are well under way, with the main roads
to Turkey’s southern border yesterday clogged with tank and troop
transporters.
Mr Erdogan says that, for the moment at least, he has only ordered
the military to make preparations for an invasion, but his advisers
believe that he is likely to seek parliamentary approval for action
within the next few days.
As the mass-selling Hurriyet declared in an editorial this week: "The
government has given the military a blank cheque for a cross-border
operation."
A Turkish invasion of northern Iraq is the last thing coalition
forces struggling to maintain order in Iraq would want to see, but
all the indications from Ankara suggest there are many persuasive
arguments in favour of action.
To start with, it would fully occupy the energies of Turkey’s
restless military establishment, which only a few months ago was
rumoured to be planning a coup to protect the country from the
growing Islamic encroachment on its secular identity.
There is also mounting consternation within Turkey’s political
establishment – both Muslim and secular – about the emergence of an
independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq.
Although Iraq’s Kurdish leaders have committed themselves fully to
supporting the new Iraqi constitution, Ankara is concerned that the
degree of autonomy enjoyed by the three self-governing Kurdish
provinces could lead to the eventual creation of a fully independent
Kurdish state.
This could have potentially disastrous implications for Turkey, where
the estimated 12 million Kurds living in the south of the country
would intensify their independence campaign.
Turkish concerns over what they see as the Kurds’ inexorable progress
towards full statehood have not been helped by what one Western
diplomat in the region recently described as Mr Barzani’s
"irredentist rhetoric".
In speeches made since he assumed control of the Kurds’ mini-state in
the summer, Mr Barzani has appeared to assert a political and
territorial claim to the ethnic Turkish areas of south-eastern
Turkey.
The bad blood between Ankara and Mr Barzani’s fiefdom has been
exacerbated by the Kurdish leader’s inclination to turn a blind eye
to the activities of the PKK, which is deemed a terrorist
organisation by Washington and its allies.
Mr Barzani and the PKK make for strange bedfellows: in the past, the
fiercely nationalistic Mr Barzani has fought to suppress the PKK’s
revolutionary Marxist-Leninist ideology. But more recently it has
suited his political agenda to give the PKK a free rein in northern
Iraq.
It gives him a powerful bargaining chip with Ankara in future
discussions over the oil-rich region of Kirkuk which, if it were ever
to be placed under Kurdish control, would make an independent Kurdish
state economically viable.
Indeed, Mr Barzani appears determined to protect the right of the PKK
to attack Turkish military positions, warning that he would deploy
his fierce Peshmerga fighters to defend the rugged mountain passes
that provide a natural defensive shield against a Turkish offensive.
The last large-scale Turkish incursions into northern Iraq in 1995
and 1997, which involved nearly 50,000 troops, failed to dislodge the
Kurdish rebels.
And even though any outbreak in hostilities between the Turks and the
Kurds could have catastrophic consequences for Western interests in
the region – particularly Iraq – it appears the West is powerless to
defuse the crisis.
This week’s decision by the US House of Representatives’ foreign
affairs committee to designate as genocide the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of Armenians at the hands of the Turks in 1915 has hardly
helped to improve the Bush Administration’s ability to influence
events in Ankara.
And the European Union’s patronising treatment of Turkey’s membership
application has strengthened the resolve of Turkish nationalists to
adopt a more robust approach to defending the country’s interests,
irrespective of whether the threat comes from Islamic radicals or
Kurdish separatists.
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