Turks & Kurds, is anyone paying attention?
The Kurds one of those nationalities that never quite got their own state in the Wilsonian post-WWI spate of nation-building, and their unhappiness with that has been plaguing the intersection of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran for almost a century now. A recent article in the Washington Post draws attention to a new round of the row, in which the rebel/terrorist PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) is being superseded in the worries of Turkish military planners by the possibility of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq. The Turks are mad that the de facto Kurdish regime in the north has allowed the PKK to operate from camps inside Iraq, and are threatening incursions into Iraq to deal with this if the US or Iraqi governments do not. This, of course, could destabilize what the Post and others have noted is the most stable, least violent, most functional part of Iraq, and create yet another dangerous cross-cutting cleavage in the already-roiling civil war of Iraq. It could also give additional stimulus to Iran to intervene, since such a conflict could have a knock-on effect on Iran’s large Kurdish population.
This potential powder-keg, though, is also an enormous opportunity, if the Bush administration would wake up and start paying attention to its own foreign policy. The Turks and the Kurds have a history that is not quite as fraught as that of Israelis and Palestinian, but in some ways it’s quite analogous. More than anything, the Turks are afraid that a Kurdish state could increase the resources and predilection of Kurds for violence against the Turkish state and Turkish citizens, similar to Israel’s fear of a Palestinian state. However, the location of a Kurdish state (real or de facto) would not be on what is currently Turkish territory, which differs from the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Another difference is that the Kurds are not backed by a multi-country coalition egging them on, and Kurds do not generally harp on the total destruction of Turkey as an important goal. In fact, to judge from the behavior of the Kurdish part of Iraq, this is a group whose elites would rather live in prosperity than devote themselves towards whipping their citizens up for constant war and confrontation.
The upshot of this is that there is an opportunity to divert from the Israeli-Palestinian model to the Hungarian-Romanian model. After WWI, a large number of Hungarians were left on newly-acquired territory of Romania, which irredenta was an important local fuse that Hitler was able to light in seeking central European allies to help start WWII. The conflict between the countries was smothered during the Cold War, but had the potential to lead to renewed ethnic strife in the 1990s (as happened slightly further south). But instead, both countries in their desire to live in peace and prosperity, and brought to the table by the European Union whom both countries supported and wanted to join, signed an agreement and buried the hatchet without war or changing borders. Romania granted certain rights to Hungarians and would treat them well, and Hungary would renounce territorial claims and forswear support for any violent activity.
There is no reason that the Turkish-Kurdish problem could not be lead on the same path. The Iraqi Kurdish administration has good relations with the US, as does Turkey, historically. Most Turks seem more interested in living prosperously and peacefully (and getting into the EU) than with fighting for the sake of fighting, and the behavior of the Iraqi Kurdish administration gives evidence of the same (which cannot be said for other parts of Iraq). The PKK ought to be the odd man out, and some careful negotiations and non-territorial concessions on the part of the Turkish government could potentially placate them, especially if the Iraqi Kurds would devote themselves toward peace in this way. It would take some self-effacing compromises from all sides, and some major leadership from the US (which perhaps could take a self-effacing lead by backing down from its stiff-necked refusal to speak with a group it’s labeled as "terrorist" and sit down at a table whereat PKK leaders also are seated). But benefits that could be reaped by paying attention to this problem, and showing a little humility in order to get other groups to do so, could be phenomenal. Imagine if the northern part of Iraq and eastern part of Turkey could be characterized by the same degree of comity and even cooperation and economic interaction seen in Hungary and Romania today? And if Turks and Kurds could reverse centuries of hostility (and both groups are now in positions where the benefits of avoiding violence are obvious to them), the stability in that part of Iraq could significantly reduce the scope of troubles that the US has to deal with in the region.
However, I suppose this is a pipe-dream, given the ignorance of the people running US foreign policy, their tendency to neglect problems until too late, their stubbornly arrogant refusal to talk to anybody who does not already agree with them, and their self-centered desire that any negotiations go directly through them, instead of negotiating with other people in the middle east. What is likely to happen instead is that US officials annoy the Iraqi Kurdish administration, turning it against the US and making it more aggressive without accomplishing the Turkish goal of ending its benign neglect of the PKK. This could lead to both a hedgehog mentality amongst the Iraqi Kurds, girding themselves for war (instead of pursuing peaceful development, as they’ve more-or-less been doing for the past 4 years), and then actual war with Turkish (and perhaps even Iranian) incursions into northern Iraq. And if Turkish government troops cross the Iraqi border into the Kurdish region, what then is there to dissuade Iraqi Kurds from sending forces across the border into Turkey, to link up with the PKK? This chain-reaction of events that will only undermine whatever stability there is in Iraq, and bring other countries into the civil war there in violence-enhancing roles. Whatever terrorist character there is to the PKK will have won, and accomplished more violence and terror. If only somebody in this State Department or White House cared about peace or stability, then a redux of 1978’s Camp David accords for the Kurds and Turks could be a major step towards stability in Iraq.
