DIYARBAKIR (Turkey): It was 11 years ago when Faruk Yigit headed for the rugged mountains bordering Iraq to become a fighter for Kurdish independence. Just 18, Yigit thought he would be fighting his traditional enemy, Turkey.
But everything changed when the US-led coalition invaded Iraq this spring and unseated Saddam Hussein. As part of the “war on terror”, the United States pledged to take military action against about 5,000 Turkish Kurd rebels in the part of northern Iraq, controlled by the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.
The PKK “will be gone because we have always said that one of the visions that all of us, Turks and Americans, have for Iraq is an Iraq that has no connection to terrorists and the PKK is a terrorist organization and so that group of PKK will be gone,” said Marc Grossman, US undersecretary of State for political affairs, in a recent interview with private Turkish news channel CNN-Turk.
The comments have fuelled a growing fear of what the United States will do next. “What I never imagined,” said Azize Yigit, 52, mother of nine children including Faruk, “was that he might be butchered by Americans instead (of by the Turks).”
Turkey accuses the PKK of being a terrorist organization for waging a 15-year insurgency. But to millions of ethnic Kurds, the guerrillas are freedom fighters. Pressure on Washington, D.C., to dislodge the rebels has been mounting in recent weeks as the Ankara government weighs whether to send up to 10,000 troops to help US forces bring Iraq under control.
“The United States remains committed to working with Turkey to eliminate the PKK ... threat in Iraq, and to ensure that a free Iraq does not serve as a sanctuary for terrorists,” a State Department official said last Monday.
The official was careful not to link US action on the PKK to Turkish cooperation on troops for Iraq.
“I don’t think there’s any explicit quid pro quo any place,” the official said. “But we’re working with them on PKK. We have been for a long time.”
For Turkey, the offer of sending troops is aimed at mending relations with the United States while giving Turkey a say in shaping the future of its Arab neighbour to the south. Turkish officials have made it clear, that they expect the United States to disarm and evict the PKK in exchange for the help.
Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party is expected to come up with a final decision on dispatching forces in the coming days and likely will present a motion to Parliament authorizing their deployment next month, according to Murat Mercan, a party legislator. Even though a majority of Turks are opposed to the move, Mercan insists that, “the motion will pass this time for sure.”
On March 1, Parliament rejected a bill to allow thousands of US combat troops to use Turkey as a launching pad to invade northern Iraq, straining relations between Turkey and the Bush administration.
Acrimony between the traditional allies mounted in July when US troops captured 11 Turkish special forces in the Kurdish- controlled city of Sulaymaniyah and accused them of plotting the murder of Kurdish governor from the oil-rich province of Kirkuk.
About 3,000 Turkish troops are deployed in northern Iraq to hunt down PKK rebels. But Iraqi Kurdish leaders say they are there to undermine Kurdish self-rule, which Turkey fears could reignite separatist passions among its own 14 million Kurds. Both the Iraqi Kurds and the United States want the Turks to pull out of northern Iraq, and stress that any Turkish military presence would only be welcome outside of the Kurdish zone. Turkey’s military leaders have pledged to withdraw from northern Iraq once the PKK is gone.
The dilemma for US policymakers, according to some Western analysts, is how to move against the PKK without risking further instability in Iraq.
“The US is in so much trouble in central and southern Iraq that I don’t believe there’s much stomach for action in the one place (the Kurdish-controlled north) that’s in good shape,” said Peter Galbraith, a retired US ambassador and expert on Iraq, in a telephone interview.
Bulent Aliriza, a Turkey analyst with the Washington, D.C.- based Center for Strategic and International Studies, claims that the United States has not acted against the PKK so far because “its military machine in Iraq is overstretched and its decision- making process overloaded.” But failure to do so ahead of any further Turkish troop deployment in Iraq would be wrong, he said, and would lead to further “Sulaymaniyah-type dust-ups between the Americans and Turks.”
It would also make it harder for the Turkish government to justify potential casualties in Iraq to a Turkish public that is largely opposed to involvement in support of the United States.
Counted among the world’s toughest guerrilla groups and deployed in the forbidding Qandil mountain range separating Iraq from Iran, the PKK has said it would resist any US attack. The rebels also have threatened to end on Monday a ceasefire declared following the capture of their leader, Abdullah Ocalan, in 1999 and to carry their armed battle outside Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast region to urban centres in the country’s west.
“Violence could resume and on a much broader scale,” warned Firat Anli, chairman of the Diyarbakir branch of Turkey’s largest legal pro-Kurdish party, Dehap. Like many people here, Anli points out that anti-American feelings fed by tacit US backing for Turkey’s campaign against the rebels — both in providing weapons to the Turkish army and providing intelligence that led to Ocalan’s capture in Kenya — had eased over the past year because of perceived US support for Kurdish autonomy in Iraq.
“Now we see that the Americans are applying double standards again, with the Iraqi Kurds treated as the good guys and our (Turkish) Kurds as the bad guys,” said Ahmet Turan Demir, who leads a smaller pro-Kurdish group.
The Bush administration hoped that the rebels would turn themselves over to the Turkish authorities under a repentance law passed by the Parliament in August, but the PKK rejected the amnesty because it does not cover the party’s leaders and offers reduced sentences for Kurds who provided intelligence on their comrades. Eight rebels have given themselves up.
“I would rather see my children die then have them come back under such dishonourable terms,” said Rifat Ozbek, a retired health worker, whose 25-year-old son Nihat and 33-year-old daughter Nilufer joined the PKK in 1993.
“We Kurds are at the edge of a precipice,” he said. “We have nothing left to lose.”—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Los Angeles Times.