ANKARA DISPATCH
Storm Clouds Over Northern Iraq
The U.S.-Turkey alliance is too valuable to be jeopardized by Kurdish terrorists.
ANKARA, Turkey--Condoleezza Rice stepped from an aircraft onto Turkish soil early this month for a short, and surely uncomfortable, visit. The U.S. secretary of state fielded sharply pointed and well-informed questions about Iraq and the ongoing attacks on Turkish troops just across the border. Many of those questions were no doubt repeated in Washington during last week's meeting between Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and President Bush.
Despite assurances from Ms. Rice that Turkey and the U.S. share a "common enemy" in Kurdish militants, the situation boils down to something of a conundrum: What for America is a solution--the Kurds--is for Turkey a terrible problem. In the last few months a terrorist organization, the PKK (it stands for Kurdish Workers' Party) has been killing young Turkish soldiers--reportedly, at times, with American weapons--and has established safe havens just over the Iraqi border.
The PKK is--along with Sendero Luminoso in Peru, and the Basque terrorists in Spain--the last of the Mao-inspired "National Liberation Fronts" that caused such mayhem in what we have to call the developing world. The PKK was founded in 1979, by Turkish-educated students, and in the 1980s and 1990s it was responsible for 37,000 deaths, most of them Kurdish.
Now, from its apparent safe haven in Kurdish northern Iraq, and with an office in Armenia--was the timing of the U.S. Congress resolution anent the "genocide" coincidental?--the PKK is back, and this time in a much more dangerous form. The attacks in Turkey have been well-organized, and seemingly on the basis of serious intelligence. So it was that Ms. Rice landed in a Turkey in uproar--and with an increasingly anti-American citizenry.
One must remember that Turkey and the U.S. have long been key allies, if not dear friends. Adnan Menderes, the first Turkish prime minister to be democratically elected (in 1950), said "whatever America does, is right for us." Menderes opened up the economy and joined NATO. Turkey is a relatively new country, established in 1923 in the rubble of the old Ottoman Empire, and foreign models have been very important. The dominant one was once French, but is now American; and if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Americans in Turkey have good reason to be pleased.
Turkey is now in the same league as, say, South Korea or Taiwan or even Japan as a testimony to the incredible positive influence of postwar America. With her geographical location and her demographic problem, she could have been an Egypt. Instead, she is a Spain--industrialized, literate, and the only place between Athens and Singapore where people actually want to live: Turkey is home to two million refugees, many from Iran.
American hard power is here, in the shape of NATO institutions and the great air base at Incirlik; and the International Monetary Fund has been called upon to support the Turkish currency. But it is the "soft power" that you cannot miss. The Turks have even set up private universities on the American model, far more of them than in Western Europe, and thousands of Turkish students make for the States each year.
So, will the PKK and the troubles in northern Iraq bring this so positive relationship to an end? Probably not. Mr. Erdogan and the Turkish elite understand the value of their alliance with the U.S.--and are unlikely to let the mess of Iraq undo it.
The Turks know Iraq historically and very well. In the days of the Ottoman Empire, three disparate provinces had been ruled from Baghdad, which the Turks had taken in 1638. The empire had originally been Balkan-based, looking to Europe. But the long war with Persia sucked the Turks into the Middle East, and the character of the empire changed.
In the 19th century, following French precepts, the Sultans tried to centralize it, but over Iraq they gave up, and simply did deals with the local powers-that-be, whether the Sunni elite in Baghdad, the Shia (and proto-Iranian) groupings in the south, or various Kurdish tribal chiefs in the mountainous north. One way of controlling them was to set up a "tribal school" in Istanbul, where the sons were educated (they often fought).
One result was that, of all the elements in Iraq, it was the Kurds who were in the end closest to Turkey. After World War I, the British took over Iraq, and there were also shadowy ideas of dividing eastern Turkey between Armenian and Kurdish nation-states. The Kurds, on the whole, opted for Turkey, and contributed much to her war of independence. They were good fighters, which the Armenians, mainly traders, were not, and the Turks won in a remarkable comeback.
At the time, they drew up a "National Pact," and the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq were included as a territorial claim. The British, then occupying Iraq, did not intend to let these oil-rich areas fall into Turkish hands, and manipulated the League of Nations into leaving the Kurdish area in the British-dominated Iraqi colony (or "mandate" as it was known). They then faced a war of all against all, and their chief expert, Lawrence of Arabia, sagely wondered why it was that the British, with 100,000 men, tanks, aircraft and poison gas, could not control a region that the Turks had run with a native army of 14,000 men, executing 90 men per annum. Then, as now.
The Turks' National Pact had much to be said for it, and when the first Iraq War occurred, the then Turkish leader, Turgut Özal (himself half-Kurdish) might even just have annexed Kurdish northern Iraq, if the first Bush administration had been in a creative mode.
Iraq in the end is just another of those artificial, post-1918 creations, like Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia. Kurds, nomadic tribes for the most part, are settled all over the Middle East, even in Afghanistan, but the Kurdish state is really Turkey; and Istanbul, where (after Black Sea migrants) Kurds are the largest group, is the biggest Kurdish city.
These millions of Kurdish migrants are rapidly becoming assimilated, speaking Turkish among themselves, with, in heated moments, some Kurdish words. Some have become very successful indeed; many have intermarried; even Black Sea taxi drivers, fulminating against dirt and thievery, will say that they have several Kurdish friends.
The Istanbul-based Kurds do not vote for a Kurdish nationalist party at all, and just follow the Turkish ones, secularist, religious (they like the present government) or middle-of-the-road. The fact is that most Kurds in Turkey just want their children to go ahead in the national language--the more so as there is not even a single Kurdish language: there are four, or even seven, depending on how you classify dialects.
However, in the southeast of Turkey there is a huge Kurdish problem. The region is far poorer than anywhere else: Hakkari on the Iraqi border has a tenth of the GDP per head of Istanbul, and there is a terrible demographic problem, of endless raggedy children, little girls of four dragging tiny tots of two across motorways. The tots will in some cases grow up to hate the Turkish state, to join the PKK, and to look at northern Iraq as the future Kurdistan.
And there they will encounter some sympathy. Northern Iraq is uneasily settled as a Kurdish entity, as the result of a compromise between the chiefs of two tribal federations, Massoud Barzani on the border, Jalal Talabani to the east, and now, formally, president of Iraq. They have fought, in the recent past, but made up their differences in a flood of dollars (which, incidentally, flow back to Turkey, where the dollar and even the euro have been plunging as a result).
Mr. Barzani's own family has a long history of fighting for Kurdistan, and all Turks think that he is playing politics. He does not like the PKK: let the Turks deal with them. On the other hand, with the PKK out of the picture, he will be the lion of the Kurds, as his father tried (with Soviet help) to be.
Meanwhile, if American-Turkish relations are soured, then so much the better: The Americans in Iraq cannot do without him. There is also huge money to be made out of oil, and out of the smuggling of heroin and hashish, as 500,000 trucks go back and forth every year through Mr. Barzani's fiefdom.
So he plays his game, allowing the PKK to raid southeastern Turkey, in the expectation that the resulting trouble can only bring him profit. Mr. Bush and Mr. Erodgan should make certain he's wrong.
Mr. Stone is a professor of international relations at Bilkent University in Ankara and author of "World War I: A Short History" (Penguin, 2007).
