<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE> RE: Kurds</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> Hakki wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE>Yes but whose blood? Or doesn't that count? At least 10K are Turkish army. Around 20K are ARGK combatants. Comparing Saddam's Halabja massacre with casualties of war is really smart. There are no independently verifiable statistics but noncombatant deaths are definitely under 10K, and not a few of those are the PKK's doing. Let me also remind you - I've posted at length about this - that the PKK was winning the war until 1995. If the Turkish army hadn't developed an effective conterinsurgency strategy and continued to bleed, you guys would be cheering stalinist drug warlord Ocalan now </BLOCKQUOTE> I agree, broadly, that comparing Saddam’s crimes with X, Y and Z crimes is pretty counterproductive. But if one is speaking of a putative Kurdish nationality and of crimes done against Kurds, then it seems fair to mention that there is substantial repression on the Turkish side also. So, leaving the body-counting to the ghouls, I was wondering about a few other issues that were raised: 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. 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... 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? 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? Thiago Oppermann </BODY> </HTML>