The Kurdish question, however, is not only confined to Turkey, since other neighboring countries such as Iraq, Iran and Syria are home to significant Kurdish populations. It should be acknowledged, therefore, that the Kurdish question is a serious one and that the old methods of dealing with it have proven to be shortsighted. The natural conclusion is that those countries with large Kurdish populations need to begin a soul-searching process with the aim of finding a workable political formula based on the principle that all citizens should enjoy equal rights and opportunities. If these countries fail to provide an answer to this question, it is not hard to foresee that this cycle of violence will continue to erupt sporadically.
Nobody is claiming, however, that this is an easy question to solve, bearing in mind that this problem has been accumulating since just after the First World War, when the former areas of the Ottoman Empire were divided up, leaving Kurds and Arabs without a nation state but with one major difference; Arabs' lands were made into several nations and consequently acquired regional states, while Kurdish lands were not and did not.
It is time that the Kurdish parties, especially those factions aiming to establish a separate state, adopted a position more based on realpolitik and initiated realistic and achievable goals. Changing the post-World War I order is something which is simply unworkable in the foreseeable future, since it would lead to total chaos across the whole region. Kurdish rebels need to lay their arms aside and adopt new and peaceful ways of promoting their cause. At the same time, the policy of using violence against Kurds should also be stopped because using violence has not so far been of any help in solving the problem. The evidence is that several Iraqi governments have used these methods, none of them successfully. Again, what happened was actually the total opposite of those governments' aims; the north of Iraq became a Vietnam for every Iraqi government since the state proclaimed its independence in 1924 and could be so for the Turkish government if peaceful and creative solutions are not reached. The question of the oppression theory, however, must be delineated in the light of the Kurdish policy in Iraq. In this regard, we need to differentiate between oppressed peoples and the political parties which represent them.
The Zionist movement is perhaps the best example to demonstrate that oppressed people might go in the wrong direction once they are represented by opportunist political parties. Political Zionism which claimed to free Jews from oppression (though Jews were never persecuted in the USA and in the Arab countries, and it must be remembered that Zionism appeared before the Nazi persecution of Jews began in the late 'thirties) has taken Jews from the position of being the oppressed to that of being the oppressor. Today, very few doubt the fact that the Zionist state in Palestine is an apartheid one. In this light, the current situation of the Kurds in northern Iraq is not promising and may actually be moving along a dangerous path. The Iraqi Kurdish political parties have allied themselves with the USA against the majority of the Iraqis and other Arabs in the region. They want to share in governing Iraq, but without accepting the Iraqi flag being raised in northern Iraq. They want to have a say in Iraqi polices while, according to one Iraqi politician, the Baghdad government lacks the power to send even one policeman to northern Iraq. This policy has, no doubt, made many who were sympathetic to the Kurds' cause distance themselves from it, to the extent that some have begun to draw an analogy between Iraqi Kurdistan and Israel, supported by the existence of clandestine links between the two.
Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party needs to carry out a comprehensive review of Turkish politics towards the Kurdish question over the last 80 years. The primary purpose of such a review would be to find a new approach to dealing with the Kurdish question in Turkey. This approach must be based on the principle that the state is for all its citizens regardless of ethnicity, faith etc.
There is no doubt that the Turkish army is powerful and able to invade the north of Iraq whenever it wants. Past experience has shown, however, that military power will not solve the problem, but would instead push Kurds towards frustration and consequently towards adopting a more aggressive position towards mainstream society, possibly turning them into a destabilizing factor in the Turkish state. The Iraqi lesson must be studied very carefully in this regard.
* Dr. Salim Nazzal is a Palestinian-Norwegian historian in the Middle East, who has written extensively on social and political issues in the region. He can be contacted at: snazzal5@gmail.com |
