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.

Holy crap, I’m in Istanbul (redux)

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This was my email to a list of friends and fam­ily that I sent out after I landed in Istan­bul and started my trip. Except for some minor edit­ing (typos, spelling errors, con­ti­nu­ity and some gram­mar clean-up) this is what went out, more or less (except for really stu­pid, per­sonal stuff.) This entry was emailed July 2, 2002 while I was over­look­ing the Bosporus, the nar­row strait that divides the city and the two con­ti­nents of Europe and Asia.
This is the first entry of a con­tin­u­ing series of my emails and jour­nal entries of my trip over there. It’s designed to whet your appetite so you will send me back. (Hint: Donate but­ton is over to the right.)
From: Christopher Allbritton
Date: Tue Jul 2, 2002 3:20:59 AM US/Pacific

Istan­bul!
I landed at Atatürk Inter­na­tional yes­ter­day at 3 p.m. or so after a cou­ple of hours cool­ing my heels in Budapest. Took a bus to Tak­sim, the cen­tral plaza in the “mod­ern” part of the city, and from there, I took a taxi up to Boğazi’i Uni­ver­sity, where I’m stay­ing thanks to the hos­pi­tal­ity of Prof. Deniz Ilgaz.
Damn, this is a con­fus­ing place. The street energy is like New York at a rave but with­out the feel­good vibe. The taxi dri­vers are homi­ci­dal (and sui­ci­dal) and the cars bear the scars of numer­ous encoun­ters with bumpers and doors and hap­less pedes­tri­ans. The city passes by in a blur, but ancient struc­tures exist among mod­ern sky­scrap­ers and west­ern fast­food chains. It’s all a bit over­whelm­ing.
And Turk­ish is just impos­si­ble. But first, some basic geog­ra­phy: Istan­bul is divided in half by the Bosporus, duh, into Euro­pean and Asian (Ana­to­lian) sides. The Euro­pean side is fur­ther divided into North and South parts by the Golden Horn, a great nat­ural har­bor. South is the old, Ottoman city with all the tourist stuff (Aya Sofia, the Blue Mosque, yadda yadda yadda.) In the 19th cen­tury this part of the city, called Eminönü, was left to the Sul­tans as an Ottoman play­ground with harems, palaces, hookahs, and the whole Dis­ney­land on opium thing. The north­ern part, (Bey­oğlu) where I’m stay­ing, was mod­ern­ized, with street­cars, tele­phones, plumb­ing, etc. So I have to go into Eminönü to get my press creds. The office is housed in one of innu­mer­able palaces on the Bosporus. And there are a lot of them.
[Editor’s note: Here lie three para­graphs that detail the dynam­ics of a par­tic­u­larly bad liai­son I had while in Ger­many. It really doesn’t do any­one any good to rehash this stuff, so I cut them.]
Back to Turkey. I took out 200,000,000 Turk­ish Lira from my account at the air­port yes­ter­day. I’ve never with­drawn 200 mil­lion of any­thing before, so I felt like a real rich guy. (It’s about $125 or so.) I still have, after pay­ing for a cou­ple of meals, a taxi ride and a bus ride, … Uh, shit. A whole lot of zeros. Actu­ally, I still have 178 mil­lion TL, or about $111.25… Jesus, all of that cost just under $15? I could live like a king in Istan­bul if I had dol­lars com­ing in.
I’m stay­ing in an antique Ottoman house near the Bosporus ( Boğazi’i in Turk­ish, don’t ask me how to pro­nounce it.) From my win­dow, I can see the old fortress Hisar, the fort built by Sul­tan Fatih to con­quer Con­stan­tino­ple in 1453. There’s an even older fort on the oppo­site side, the Asian side, built by the Byzan­tines, and I don’t mean the East­ern Roman Empire. I mean the peo­ple who built the city of Byzan­tium that pre­dates even Emperor Con­stan­tine, who founded Con­stan­tino­ple in AD 338, if I recall the date cor­rectly.
At any rate, it’s really, really old.
And why did they change the name from Con­stan­tino­ple? That’s nobody’s busi­ness but the Turks. (Actu­ally, it’s a cor­rup­tion of a Greek term that means “in the city.”)
Today, at 2:30, I meet with Kemal Kiriş’i, a Boğazi’i Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor who wrote a book on the Kurds and now deals with EU-Turkey issues. I think he will be very infor­ma­tive. After that, I have to go in to the old city, across the Golden Horn, and pick up my press cre­den­tials. That should take the bet­ter part of the rest of the day. Then I’m meet­ing some peo­ple I’ve been email­ing for din­ner and that’s that. Whew!
On Thurs­day, in cel­e­bra­tion of July 4, I will get on a bus to Ankara, where I will meet my fixer. We’ll work on some logis­tics and plan for a few days and then head out to Diyarbakir and the rest of the coun­try. It’s a shame I won’t have more time in Istan­bul, as it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing city. Big­ger than NYC, too. Nine mil­lion peo­ple (although that’s only about 5.625 peo­ple thanks to the exchange rate.)
So that’s it. All is well, and I have my own Inter­net access. Life is good.

Calif. congressman: “I don’t trust this president”

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Woah. This firery deunciation of Bush comes from Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif. (He represents Fremont, home of the largest population of Afghanis in the United States, interestingly enough.) His statement is full of red meat for leftists, calling Bush a lightweight National Guardsman in the 1960s, and questioning his tough-guy cred by quoting columnist Molly Ivins: "For an upper-class white boy, Bush comes on way too hard. At a guess, to make up for being an upper-class white boy."
I'm not one to take away from Mssr. Stark's statement. I agree with most of it, in that the people who will pick up the $200 billion (estimated) tab for Gulf War II: The Sequel will likely be people like my grandmother who depends on Medicare, but will see it cut to make way for Bush's tax cut and war costs. Others likely to pay include those who need unemployment insurance, students who don't get federal money to go to college and any number of natural Democratic constituencies.
And now that the House and Seanate have passed their respective war resolutions, we have politicians like Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who say things like, "The bottom line is . . . we want to move on." The impression one gets is that Democrats want to move on to economic issues that play well a month from now, that might give them back the House and cement their hold on the Senate. Understandible, true, but at what cost?
It seems the Democrats were outmaneuvered by Bush & Co. yet again, just as Republicans were constantly outmaneuvered by President Clinton through most of the 1990s. Bush cranked up the war rhetoric from September on, to force an early vote, knowing the Democrats would be forced to either delay the vote, and open themselves up to charges of treason and/or wimpism (the Bush family's least favorite slur!) or rush the vote and give the president what he wanted in the first place. Of course, this week's quickie vote on war will come back to haunt the Democrats, when their liberal, anti-war supporters get wooed by the Green Party charging that Democrats and Republicans are but two sides of the same coin. (Nader's party is active in many close races, potentially threatening Democrats from the left.)
So Mssr. Stark can afford to vote no and denounce Bush on the House floor. He’s in a safe dis­trict. The ques­tion is, now that he’s got his war on, will Bush’s action leave any­where safe?