Category Archives: Kurds

Mixed signals from the United States

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Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times reports that the United States is assur­ing the Kuwaitis that there will be no democ­racy in a post-Saddam Iraq because the 60 per­cent Shi’ite pop­u­la­tion would quickly estab­lish dom­i­nance:

Kuwaiti rulers seem to think, based on assur­ances from U.S. offi­cials, that Shi’ite dom­i­na­tion is poten­tially so desta­bi­liz­ing that democ­racy is not even an option for Iraq. As Kuwait sees it, the pos­si­bil­i­ties range from a Tommy Franks viceroy­alty to the instal­la­tion of a Sunni Hashemite king, some rel­a­tive of Jordan’s King Abdul­lah II. Jor­dan already seems to be qui­etly lob­by­ing for this out­come. “Democ­racy is just not in the cards there,” one Kuwaiti offi­cial said.

But this is in direct con­flict with state­ments from national secu­rity advi­sor Con­doleeza Rice and Sec­re­tary of State Colin Pow­ell:

The US will be “com­pletely devoted” to the recon­struc­tion of Iraq as a uni­fied, demo­c­ra­tic state in the event of a mil­i­tary strike that top­ples Sad­dam Hus­sein, said Con­doleezza Rice, US national secu­rity adviser. [Finan­cial Times, Sept. 23, 2002]

and

Pow­ell … told the House Inter­na­tional Rela­tions Com­mit­tee that the United States would seek to per­suade Iraqis that an assault on the Hus­sein regime would bring a “new era” defined by “a gov­ern­ment of Iraqis gov­ern­ing Iraqis in a demo­c­ra­tic fash­ion.” [Wash­ing­ton Post, Sept. 20, 2002.]

So what gives here? Will we sup­port democ­racy on won’t we? Are we will­ing to put up with the unpre­dictabil­ity of the bal­lot box? In a col­umn in the National Jour­nal (avail­able only to sub­scribers, sorry,) Tish Durkin inter­views a num­ber of Iraqi oppo­si­tion fig­ures in Dam­as­cus and comes to the not unrea­son­able con­clu­sion that any pup­pet installed by the United States, even a democ­rac­tic pup­pet, would be “a dis­as­ter.“
The Kurds cer­tainly think a democ­racy is in the cards, what with their pro­posed con­sti­tu­tion and all. Fowzi Hariri, the smooth, British-educated deputy head of the KDP Bureau of Inter­na­tional Rela­tions, told me in July that “We want Bagh­dad.” I didn’t know what he meant by that, but he went on to explain that the Kurds want the chance to hold the office of chief exec­u­tive in a Fed­eral Repub­lic of Iraq. “We want a direct say in gov­ern­ment,” he con­tin­ued. “When­ever we have relied on other sys­tems or peo­ple, we have ended up with a dic­ta­tor­ship.“
That was a thinly veiled barb at the on-again, off-again sup­port from the United States. My sus­pi­cion is that we’re at it again, telling the Kurds they will have a place at the table in order to lure them into com­mit­ting to a fight against Sad­dam while we tell the Kuwaitis, Turks and Syr­i­ans that a messy, unpre­dictable demo­c­ra­tic Iraq is “not in the cards,” as the Kuwaiti said to Kristof. And when the ham­mer hits the anvil, I think we’ll hang the Kurds out to dry.
Again.

Eastward bound…

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This is the sec­ond of my posts from Turkey, made after I arrived in Ankara. Prior to my arrival, I met with Turan Cey­lan, the man­ager of the Inter-Continental Hotel in Istan­bul. He’s a Kur­dish suc­cess story, one of many in Istan­bul where many Kurds have set­tled after the PKK trou­bles in the south­east dur­ing the 1980s and 1990s. I didn’t get much to get out of the inter­view, except that he is pro-EU (he’s a busi­ness­man) and he believes that dis­crim­i­na­tion against Kurds is blown way out of pro­por­tion by West­ern press (which is easy for him to say; he comes from a rich fam­ily that runs one of the largest con­struc­tion firms in Turkey.)

This was an atti­tude I dis­cov­ered among many middle-class Istan­bul res­i­dents. Aydin Kudu, my orig­i­nal fixer before he suf­fered a hip injury, had me over for din­ner and dur­ing the post-prandial tea, he and Raia, his girl­friend and some­times partner-guide, said the same thing: There is no dis­crim­i­na­tion in Turkey; Kurds can do what­ever they like, as long as they don’t break any laws.

On one level, they have a point. At least one pres­i­dent of Turkey, Turgut Ozal, has claimed Kur­dish ances­try and Istan­bul has seen a num­ber of Kurds other than Cey­lan rise to suc­cess in the busi­ness­world. But there is a great deal of unknown truth in the state­ment that “Kurds can do what­ever they like, as long as they don’t break any laws.” But until recently, it was ille­gal to be Kur­dish. It was ille­gal to teach or sing in Kur­dish. Yes, Kurds could suc­ceed in Turkey, but only if they assim­i­lated and acted Turk­ish. And even then, if someone’s ID card listed them as hail­ing from the south­east, they would often be greeted with sus­pi­cion and had a harder time find­ing jobs in the more cos­mopoli­tan west­ern part of the country.

At any rate, this gave me much to think about. So after a cou­ple of days, I took a bus from Tak­sim in Istan­bul where Aykut Uzun, my fixer, met me. After five hours on the road in Turkey, I was glad to see him.

Con­tinue read­ing →

Ecevit: Kurds dragging Turkey into war

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Wow. I posted the pro­posed Kur­dish and Iraqi con­sti­tu­tions last night—and my thoughts that the Kurds are ask­ing for trouble—and wouldn’t you know it? Today, the Guardian runs this. It’s more of that growl­ing that I men­tioned in my pre­vi­ous post, but what’s most alarm­ing about this is Turkey’s charges that the United States is direct­ing the Kurds: “It is beyond encour­age­ment, (Wash­ing­ton) is direct­ing them,” Prime Min­is­ter Bulent Ece­vit told the Turk­ish paper Mil­liyet. “We will talk to the United States.“
If the United States is direct­ing the PUK and the KDP, that would amount to a stun­ning rever­sal against Turkey, one of our most loyal allies in the region. I don’t think that we are, frankly, and these com­ments are likely play­ing to Ecevit’s nation­al­ist base of sup­port, which often views the U.S. with sus­pi­cion. (They still har­bor resent­ments over Cyprus form 1964 and 1974.)
The United States needs Turkey more than it needs the Kurds, sadly, as the Kurds have only about 80,000 lightly armed pesh­mer­gas while the Turks have tanks and F-16s (bought from the United States, of course.) They’re also a NATO ally and Incir­lik is a nec­es­sary base for run­ning sor­ties in the north­ern no-fly zone.
But beyond that Turkey is valu­able to the United States in that it pro­vides a “good exam­ple” of democ­racy and Islam, serv­ing as an effec­tive ide­o­log­i­cal coun­ter­weight to Iran. It also has close ties to the Turkish-speaking peo­ples of cen­tral Asia and their energy reserves.
This is why the United States has been such a pro­po­nent of Turkey’s ascen­sion to the Euro­pean Union. America’s sup­port is a com­plex web of self-interest (keep­ing a strong, demo­c­ra­tic Mus­lim nation tied to the West) and pay-back (see mil­i­tary alliance above.) It’s also why the Kurds of south­east Turkey both admire and resent the United States. They admire it for its stance on the Turkey-EU issue, and they see mem­ber­ship as the key to eco­nomic recov­ery in that depressed region. They resent Amer­ica because it was very very sup­port­ive of Turkey’s war against the PKK’s ter­ror cam­paign (which Turkey remem­bered when Sept. 11, 2001 hap­pened.)
So, again, I’m not sure what would hap­pen if Iraq’s Kurds attain some form of inde­pen­dence. That would almost cer­tainly drive the Turks to war in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, and what then would the Amer­i­cans do? This may turn out to be a big­ger ques­tion than who rules the day after Saddam…

Proposed Iraqi constitution(s) asking for trouble

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Here’s some­thing you won’t find any­where else. (I googled.) These are the scanned copies of the pro­posed con­sti­tu­tions for Iraq, post-Saddam. Sami Abdul Rah­man, the deputy prime min­is­ter (KDP) of the Kur­dis­tan Regional Gov­ern­ment, gave them to me after I inter­viewed him in his offices in the Par­lia­ment build­ing in Arbil. He wrote them, and the KDP and PUK, in a rare show of pub­lic unity, have signed on. Even State, back in July, said the ideas were “inter­est­ing.“
There are two files, the pro­posed con­sti­tu­tion for a Fed­eral Repub­lic of Iraq (3.0MB), heav­ily mod­eled on the United States Con­sti­tu­tion, and the con­sti­tu­tion for the Kur­dish region (5.6MB). Sorry for the size of the files. I tried to make them as small as I could.
The first one maps out a plan that would divide the coun­try into two regions: The Arabs would get the mid­dle and south­ern regions along with the province of Nin­eveh (except­ing regions that have Kur­dish majori­ties) and the Kurds would get the provinces of Kirkuk, Suleimaniya, Arbil and Duhok, the dis­tricts of Aqra, Sheihkan and Sin­jar and the sub-districts of Zimar (in Nin­eveh), Khaniqin and Man­dali (Diyala) and Badra (in the province of Al-Wasit.) Unlike the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, how­ever, there is a state reli­gion — Islam — and offi­cial lan­guages (Kur­dish in the Kur­dish regions and Ara­bic in the other.)
There is a lib­eral col­lec­tion of rights granted, but a wor­ri­some depen­dence on “the law,” as in, “No one can be cap­tured, detained, jailed, or searched except in cir­cum­stances defined in law.” This loop­hole is scat­tered through­out the doc­u­ment, sub­or­di­nat­ing the con­sti­tu­tions to what­ever the regional or national leg­is­la­tures want to write into the law­books. Instead of being the supreme law of the land, as in the United States, the con­sti­tu­tions instead pro­vide jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for, say, the harsh rule of shar’ia, should Islamists gain con­trol over the National Assem­bly.
And while “power is inher­ent in the peo­ple as they are the source of its legit­macy,” I worry that this draft is too weak to pro­tect the peo­ple of Iraq (and par­tic­u­larly the Kurds) from democ­racy gone bad. Jef­fer­son­ian these doc­u­ments ain’t.
There’s also a lot that will piss off the Turks, mak­ing the adop­tion of this char­ter less than likely. The Kurds blame much of Iraq’s (and by exten­sion their own) mis­for­tunes on the cen­tral­iza­tion of power in Iraq. This is exactly the prob­lem in Turkey and while a few Turk­ish intel­lec­tu­als have floated the idea of a fed­eral struc­ture in Turkey, that idea has about as much of a chance as Sad­dam does of win­ning another war and occu­py­ing Wash­ing­ton.
As the pre­am­ble says:

Cen­tral­iza­tion in gov­ern­ment has lost its appeal even within sim­ple and homoge­nous com­mu­ni­ties. It has espe­cially lost its ratio­nale for being resorted to in com­mu­ni­ties that are of a plu­ral­ist nature made up of var­i­ous nation­al­i­ties, reli­gious groups and lan­guages, such as the Iraqi [Ed: And Turk­ish] com­mu­nity. The high degree of cen­tral­iza­tion and the indif­fer­ence of deci­sion mak­ers to the pres­ence of the spe­cial char­ac­ter­is­tics of the Kur­dish peo­ple are among the basic rea­sons for the Kurds being deprived of their legit­i­mate rights under suc­ces­sive Iraqi gov­ern­ments, which came to power under both the monar­chy and the repub­lic. This style of restrict­ing author­ity in t he cen­tre and the unwill­ing­ness to share it with the Kurds on a prac­ti­cal basis, even after the March 11, 1970 auton­omy agree­ment has been the hall­mark of the role of the Iraqi state.

Well, yeah, and Sad­dam mur­der­ing inno­cent women and chil­dren with chem­i­cal weapons has also been a “hall­mark of the role of the Iraqi state.” Harp­ing on the evils cen­tral­iza­tion and the fail­ure to rec­og­nize the spe­cial nature of Kurds — which is exactly what has been hap­pen­ing in Turkey since 1921 — is ask­ing for trou­ble, if you ask me. Every crit­i­cism men­tioned in the pre­am­ble against Iraq could equally be lev­eled at Turkey. (Except the Turks haven’t bombed vil­lages with afla­toxin or other weapons of mass destruc­tion.) And Turkey has been growl­ing that any deal that leaves the Kurds with inde­pen­dence, either de facto or de jure, will be met with guns and tanks. And I have no idea what the United States, as the new regional power­bro­ker, would do if a NATO ally began oper­a­tions in the area Amer­ica claims as con­quered territory.