Turkey-Kurdish Conflict: Every
Regional Power Has Betrayed the Kurds So Turkish Bombing Is No Surprise
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
You would have thought that, by now, the Kurds might have learnt
their lesson
Unrest in Tunceli, after a demonstration by Kurdish protesters
over the visit of a Turkish far-right nationalist leader to the city.
The Kurds were born to be betrayed. Almost every would-be Middle
East statelet was promised freedom after the First World War, and the Kurds
even sent a delegation to Versailles to ask for a nation and safe borders.
But under the Treaty of Sèvres, in 1920, they got a little
nation in what had been Turkey. Then along came the Turkish nationalist Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk who took back the land that the Kurdish nation might have gained.
So the victors of the Great War met in Lausanne in 1922-23 and abandoned the
Kurds (as well as the Armenians), who were now split between the new Turkish
state, French Syria and Iran and British Iraq. That has been their tragedy ever
since – and almost every regional power participated in it. The most brutal
were the Turks and the Iraqi Arabs, the most cynical the British and the
Americans. No wonder the Turks have gone back to bombing the Kurds.
When they rebelled against Saddam Hussein in Iraq in the early
1970s, the Americans supported them, along with the Shah of Iran. Then the US
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger engineered an agreement between Iran and
Iraq: the Shah would receive a territorial claim and, in return, abandon the
Kurds. The Americans closed off their arms supplies. Saddam slaughtered perhaps
182,000 of them. “Foreign policy,” remarked Mr Kissinger, “should not be
confused with missionary work.”
You would have thought the Kurds might have learnt their lesson.
But at the start of the first Gulf war to liberate Kuwait, they were urged by
the Americans – or rather, a covert CIA radio station operating from Saudi
Arabia – to rise against Saddam. And they did. The Americans let them die in
their thousands again, only shamed weeks later into creating a “safe” zone in
northern Iraq after tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians trekked under fire
in a biblical exodus to the safety of Turkey. America’s “safe” zone eventually
proved illusory.
Even when the US planned to invade Saddam’s Iraq through
Kurdistan in 2003, the Kurds found that the Turks planned to send 40,000 troops
with them. The Turks wanted to stop the Kurds grabbing the Iraqi cities of
Mosul and Kirkuk; Ankara feared that a self-governing Kurdish pseudo-state
would creep across the border to Turkey.
And when the Iraqi Kurds fought Isis last year – the Americans
deciding again that the Kurds had their uses – Turkey watched impotently as
Kurdistan became the vanguard of the West’s battle. Kobani was a mini
Stalingrad, and its defence by Kurds of Marxist orientation made Turkey’s
humiliation more painful. The pro-PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) fighters along
the northern strip of Syria and Iraq were seen as heroes.
This could not be permitted. Thus when Isis struck Turkish Kurds
seeking help for the reconstruction of Kobani with a devastating suicide
bombing in Suruc – followed by PKK claiming responsibility for the murder of
two Turkish policemen – Turkey decided to strike at the PKK under cover of an
anti-Isis bombardment. The Americans were to be kept sweet by the reopening of
Incirlik air base – in Turkish Kurdistan – and the world would forget that
Islamist fighters have received free passage across the Turkish-Syrian border.
With its latest air campaign, the Turks are following Pakistan’s
path to total corruption, when it became an arms and guerrilla conduit to
Afghanistan – with American encouragement – in the 1980s. The Pakistanis
variously supported the mujahedin, the Taliban and other Islamist groups.
As for the Kurds – have they come across the words of
Arthur Harris, the RAF squadron leader who helped crush the 1920 Iraqi
uprising? “The Arab and Kurd now know,” he said, “what real bombing means in
casualties and damage. Within 45 minutes a full-size village can be practically
wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” The Turks clearly
feel the same.
© 2014 The Independent
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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