-----Original Message-----
From: Thiago Oppermann
Why were the PKK up in arms in the first place? Wasn’t there a fairly solid history of repression? So – couldn’t the government have avoided a lot of the bloodletting by negotiating , avoiding the nasty factionalisation that comes with civil war? Or was the PKK simply not in the game for negotiations? If the PKK demands were reasonable, or if the government could have undercut their support by easing off on the Kurds, then the responsibility for 10K government deaths isn’t to be laid only at the PKK’s feet. Do you think there is a case, even an only partially justified case, for Kurdish insurrection? Forgive me if I find the example of Kurds mourning a policeman to be insufficient evidence of non-support for the PKK and, more broadly, independence. The Kurds in the southeast are tribal so when you're talking about Kurdish demands you're talking about their sheiks' shifting alliances, or those of supposedly popular leaders like Ocalan, Barzani, or Talabani who are substitute sheiks. There is no national kurdish consensus as they don't even speak the same language. The three armed groups are at each others' throats. Their supposed gripe is that Ataturk promised them independence and then reneged. They then revolted, and repression followed. Calling Dersim a Kurdish national uprising is ludicrous. The Turks weren't a nation then, let alone the tribal Kurds. Their sheiks imagined they could pull of a quick one at a time when the republic was still weak. Their slogans weren't nationalist; they were accusing Ataturk of betraying Islam.
So what particularly brutal repression have Turkish kurds been subject to before 1984 that made them revolt and yearn for independence? I really can't say, except that in the second half of the 70's Ocalan was really giving them hell. The army & police had allowed "liberated areas" to pop up around the country to give them a pretext for the planned coup, and Ocalan was merrily terrorizing the southeast, which had become his personal fief. The army was nowhere to be seen. Nor was any sort of private or public investment, OC, thus ensuring that the region remained dirt-poor and discontented. Ocalan's "Apoists" wiped out the rival Rizgari, KUK, and Azadi groups. They didn't stop with murdering their Kurdish rivals but also attacked non-kurdish leftists.
After the 1980 coup, repression hit the areas where the Apoists were active, as it hit other once "liberated" areas. But most Kurds, living outside of so-called Kurdistan (or Armenia, to taste) continued life as before. Like other minorities not covered by the Lausanne treaty, they couldn't set up their own schools but they had their businesses, their mafias, their politicians, their artists, and spoke Kurdish any time they wanted to, including in the army. They couldn't broadcast in Kurdish but they could sell Kurdish music and literature. The same restrictions applied to everyone else. Some old-timers and Kurdish women kept under house arrest by their jealous husbands couldn't speak Turkish at all, so translators would be present in courtrooms and other govt offices.
After the coup Ocalan set up shop in Damascus and the Bekaa, where he trained his army and began his attacks starting in 1984. Syria was a winner on two counts: It collected the proceeds of the PKK's drugs operation and used it to shut down Turkey's GAP project dam construction. There's another pack of lies about Turkey threatening Iraq and Syria by controlling their water. Iraq has more water than Turkey and Syria illegally appropriates the entire Orontes river flow, polluting it in the process. They have never agreed to discuss a fair distribution of the Tigres and Euphrates waters, always preferring to use the Arab League, the OIC or the PKK instead.
As for Ocalan’s dodgy credentials – isn’t there even a remote possibility that free Kurdistan in Turkey could look like the semi-free Kurdistan in Iraq? Those guys in Iraq were even more sectarian than the PKK before we started funnelling huge wads of cash to them. The upshot of this is that had the PKK won, perhaps the result would not be utterly terrible – at least that is not the precedent apparently set by the semi-free Kurds in Iraq now... I hope that the Iraqi Kurds can get a real economy going as opposed to the rentier one of collecting aid and extorting transit traffic. That would be the key to ending their tribalism. But there's no guarantee for that as long as the warlords are in power. I mean look at Iraq, which was a pretty sophisticated place before Saddam took over. As long as the warlords remain, the Kurds' best hope is to emigrate, which they continue to do. Turkey would be far better off giving the Kurds their land and letting their overpopulation and poverty be Kurdistan's problem. But it would be naive to think that they would stay quietly behind their borders. Instead yet another mercenary state would enter the ME, ready to fight or train terrorists for the highest bidder.
Also, isn’t dismantling, or even discrediting the PKK a big gamble? Even if it is a pretty perverse Worker’s Party, doesn’t it at least talk the secularist talk? Won’t destroying them drive people towards the more millenarian fundamentalists – like pretty much everywhere else in the middle east? Or am I overestimating the PKK’s support? Between the thuggish PKK and the thuggish fundies, it's not much of a choice. How can the PKK be a workers' party when there's no working class? What they are is a sort of Khmer Rouge. And yes, given the level of unemployment and poverty, it's very likely the southeastern Kurds will keep overpopulating and filling the fundies' ranks. The only hope would be if the PKK really decommissioned like the IRA. Then HADEP could maybe become a socialist party, but that's a big if. Populism is so much more attractive.
Another question entirely is why drug running is so bad – isn’t it at least none of our business if the FARC or PKK are running drugs? Isn’t this a demand-side problem? They would probably be selling tulips if they had better terms of trade on those. What do they care if some kid in London gets addicted to smack? The drugs aren't the problem, the money is. It corrupts the economy, it corrupts politics, it finances dictators, etc. If it wasn't illegal, then sure, no problem, but then we'd see that the army and the PKK were in business together, which wouldn't do, would it?
Hakki
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