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Modern Turkey emerged nearly a hundred years ago in the context of European efforts to divide the Anatolian peninsula.
This fact leads to both Turkey’s collective paranoia and its xenophobia. His nightmare is a Kurdish division: independence. While the PKK and its affiliates have long since abandoned this goal in favor of local autonomy, The Turkish president’s tendency to incite wars with neighboring states may soon reignite Turkey’s fears of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Turkey’s problem with the Kurdish problem exists almost as much as the Turkish Republic itself: just two years after the founding of Turkey in 1923, the Kurds resurrected Sheikh Saeed’s uprising against the abolition of the caliphate. In 1927, sanhsan Nuri Pasha proclaimed the Republic of Ararat, a small Kurdish state in the Far East of Anatolia along the Iranian and Armenian borders. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the first president of modern Turkey, ordered the destruction of this sub-state entity, according to the American national interest, which has the characteristic title in his article: “A synchronized Kurdish uprising would lead to the partition of Turkey.”
Once again, the Turkish army put down the uprising. In any case, the Kurds could justify their uprisings by specific denunciations beyond mere national identity, but their uprisings only reinforced the Turkish government’s distrust of any free expression of an independent Kurdish identity.
The Turkish government’s dislike of Kurdish identity waned after Ataturk’s death in 1938. Successive Ankara governments have ignored Kurdish-populated areas while modernizing Turkey’s economy. The Turks accepted the Kurds, but only when the Kurds had their national and cultural identity.
In the following decades, Turkey suffered some incidents of political instability due to Kurdish movements, but the Political violence generally took place in the context of extremists on the left and right.. In this context, the future founding member of the Kurdish Workers ‘Party (Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK) Abdullah Öcalan was nurtured. The party worked hard to counter the Kurdish subjugation in the so-called class struggle and formed the PKK to realize its goal. Επίσηcalan officially launched the PKK uprising in 1984, with the aim of suppressing Kurdish (Turkish) opponents.
The United States has offered blind support to Turkey in its fight against the PKK. The PKK was a Marxist group founded during the Cold War. While both the PKK and its supporters in Syria-Middle East continued to grow in population, violent attacks within Turkey continued to increase considerably. Surprisingly, thirteen years passed, in the context of a Clinton-era arms sale, before the State Department formally designated the group as a terrorist entity. It was counterproductive: the fall of the Soviet Union changed the motives and the reality under which the PKK and all Kurdish tribes in the Middle East operated.
Under President Turgut Özal, the Turkish government had initiated reforms with a view to an agreement. Özal’s untimely death thwarted this effort, but Öcalan’s arrest in 1999 forced the group to move in new directions. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself authorized a secret approach in 2012, but eventually broke off the talks when many Kurds in Turkey voted for the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) instead of their own Justice and Development Party (AKP). The Turkey-PKK peace process has had some success in highlighting the efforts of its negotiators: an interim agreement saw the PKK lay down its arms inside Turkey and many fighters moved to Syria.
In recent years, the group’s development has been undermined: the vacuum created by the Syrian civil war has given Syrian Kurds a chance to rule themselves. They achieved some memorable results, while some US think tank analysts continued to “baptize” the organization Marxist. The independent organization of the Kurds can be characterized in many ways, but not as Marxist.
The Kurds have also been a great success for the international community: Kurdish militias have defeated the vast majority of al-Qaeda groups in northeast Syria. They were also needed in the field fight against the Islamic State.
Turkish authorities usually draw moral equivalence between the Islamic State and Kurdish groups, but this is not the case for two reasons: First, there is strong evidence that officials from the Turkish government, the Turkish intelligence service and members of Erdogan’s family have supported and provided assistance to the Islamic State. . Second, after the Turkish government pressured Belgian security to arrest several Kurdish activists on terrorism charges, a Belgian court launched an investigation into the Turkish accusations against the Kurds and concluded that they were unfounded and non-existent. Instead, the court determined that the PKK was simply “a party to a non-international armed conflict.”
How Turkey’s economy is collapsingErdogan has grown increasingly hostile to his neighbors. The bombing of Iraq, especially in the Yazidi Sinjar region, has become commonplace. Turkey has flown Islamic State veterans to Libya, violating the Libyan arms embargo on several occasions. Turkey has justified its invasion of northern and eastern Syria as a safe haven, but in reality, it has become an anti-Kurdish national cleansing zone.
Now Erdogan threatens Greece. “When the time comes to make a decision, and I say this clearly, those who oppose Turkey at the expense of the safety and well-being of its citizens must pay a heavy price.” Erdogan said on September 7. Mesut Hakkı Caşın, a close adviser to Erdoğan, threatened: “Our pilots will soon shoot down five or six of them [ελληνικά πολεμικά αεροσκάφη] and we will start a war. “
Turkey is fortunate that for decades, the only external power to provide significant aid to the PKK was Syria, perhaps with the blessing of the Soviet Union and, after its collapse, Russia. Saudi officials are now openly visiting northern and eastern Syria.
While the U.S. weapons provided to the Syrian Defense Forces are intended for the group’s fight against the Islamic State insurgency, potential Saudi aid to the Kurds would not be so limited. Not even with Egyptian help: Cairo remains convinced that Erdogan’s goal in supporting the Libyan Islamic government is ultimately to help the Muslim Brotherhood and threaten Egyptian security.
The PKK team appears to have turned a new page from its previous goals and attitudes. However, Like many terrorist groups in the past, the PKK also has factions and groups like the Kurdistan Freedom Fighters (TAK), which are not as cautious as Ocalan.
Source: pentapostagma.gr
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