Little noticed by an American public already overwhelmed by the complexities of a never-ending war in Iraq, on February 22, Turkish military forces invaded the most stable part of Iraq—its northern, US-created autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkey’s stated intention: to eradicate the so-called “terrorist” forces of Turkey’s homegrown Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). Previously invaded on at least two dozen occasions—1995 and 1997 operations involved as many as 30,000 and 50,000 troops respectively—northern Iraq is no stranger to Turkish military incursions. They began in the mid 1980s in response to PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan’s decision to turn political activism into a Marxist-inspired guerilla war in an attempt to counter Turkey’s massive cultural repression of its Kurdish population.
Aimed at creating an independent “Kurdish state within Turkey” for Turkey’s 15 million (plus or minus a few million, depending on the source) Kurds, the PKK’s fight turned a large part of southeastern Turkey—home to a majority of Turkey’s Kurdish population—into a warzone during the 1980s and ’90s. As the Turkish military flooded the rural southeast, destroying villages, and forcing hundreds of thousands of Kurds to urban areas, the force of the war died down. According to a 2005 Human Rights Watch report, there remain 378,000 internally displaced people—mainly Kurds—in Turkey. PKK fighters, which include many of the dislocated who have no alternative but to keep up the fight, continue to make deadly strikes within Turkey. They then flee across the Turkish-Iraqi border to camps located in the hinterlands of Qandil Mountain on Iraq’s border with Iran, part of a range that reaches north to the Turkish border. Estimates vary, but it has been reported that between 35,000 and 40,000 people—most of them Kurds—have been killed since the PKK began its fight for independence in 1984. Before his capture in 1999, Ocalan claimed he wanted to revert the PKK’s focus away from military and back to political activism.
As with most international conflicts, there is more than meets the eye in this most recent Turkish incursion—the first since the US ousted Saddam Hussein and took responsibility for the security of Iraq. While it can be said that PKK actions incited this latest foray, the question of ownership of Iraq’s third largest city of Kirkuk looms large in the minds not just of Iraqi Kurds, but of just about everyone else in the region, including Shiite factional leaders Moqtada al Sadr and Ayad Allawi, not to mention Iran and Syria. Since 2003, Kurds have been attempting to reclaim the oil-rich city that underwent a forced “Arabisation” program under Saddam’s regime. Turkey, as well as Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni Arabs, fear that Kurdish control of Kirkuk—its surrounding territory accounts for 40 percent of Iraq’s oil production and 70 percent of its natural gas production—will lead to an independent Kurdish state. Adding to concerns is the fact that the Kurdistan Regional Government has begun to act independently, signing oil exploration contracts with international entities. December’s constitutionally mandated referendum, predicted to cede the control of Kirkuk to the semiautonomous government of Kurdistan, suffered a last minute six-month delay, much to the ire of Iraqi Kurds, whose leaders, as early as 2005, began to incorporate thousands of Kurdish militia members into the Iraqi military with the assumed intention of eventually taking control of Kirkuk and securing the borders of an independent Kurdistan.
There is also the issue of Turkey’s European Union accession, and the internal political sparring between Turkey’s moderate Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Turkey’s secular guardians, the military. Erdogan’s 2003 election campaign pledged to address the concerns of EU accession critics who, among other grievances, continue to cite Turkey’s poor human rights record and its lack of civilian control over its military as stumbling blocks to EU membership. Since sweeping the elections, not only has Erdogan been supportive of expanding Kurdish rights, he is reportedly the first Turkish leader to admit that Turkey has made “mistakes” in dealing with its Kurdish population. While endearing him to more pious Islamist Kurds, who have added to his electoral base, Erdogan’s courting of Turkey’s Kurds has irritated the watchful eye of Turkey’s military—already alarmed by his Islamist agenda in an avowedly secular society.
In a September 12, 2007 article for Time, former CIA agent Robert Baer hinted at the possibility of yet another coup taking place in Turkey, where, since 1960, the Turkish military has staged four “soft” coups against civilian governments. Baer stated that since Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party swept last summer’s parliamentary elections, “the Turkish generals have been casting around for an excuse to take power.” Senior Editor Lorna Tychostup spoke with Baer by phone from Pakistan about Iraq, the Turkish incursion, and all things Kurdish. Baer’s latest book, The Devil You Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower, will be published in September by Crown.
In your Time magazine article, you raised some very interesting points regarding Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. What do you think was behind this latest Turkish incursion of Kurdistan in February?
The Turks, first of all, are tired of having their soldiers killed. They had specifically raised this issue before we invaded Iraq. That is, what [is the US] going to do to [prevent Turkish people from being killed]. The White House said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll keep a lid on Iraq.” Obviously, we didn’t. We couldn’t. We completely mislead the Turks. So Turkey had to go into a country we’re nominally in charge of to clean it up, just as the Iranians might one day do.
“Clean up” the PKK?
Yes, the PKK.
Where does Kirkuk stand in all of this?
The Kurds in Northern Iraq want Kirkuk. They want the one million barrels a day of oil. They keep on pushing for a referendum. They want a couple of other fields as well. Simply, that’s the only thing that will sustain a Kurdish government or region. They’re afraid the Shiites will steal all the oil if they don’t seize Kirkuk.
Zalmay Khalilzad had come up with an oil-sharing plan immediately before he left his position as US ambassador to Iraq, where distribution of the oil would be based on population. Each governorate would be free to contract with oil companies and all profits would go to Baghdad to be divvied up among the governorates based on population figures. With no census taken in recent years in Iraq, from what I understand, the numbers of those who voted in Iraq’s first election were going to be used to determine this distribution of oil profits. The Sunnis put up a fuss. Obviously, they would not be appropriately represented because a majority of them did not vote, or chose not to vote.
Yeah, I know the plan. It’s never going to happen.
Why?
Because the Shiites are never going to agree. They have been oppressed since 680 AD and they’ve been completely cut out of Iraq’s wealth since that day. They may agree to anything, but they are going to completely cheat on the oil, whether they agree to a profit-sharing plan or not. I mean, it’s all a nice dream. Right now the Iranians and the Shiites are stealing hundreds of thousands of barrels a day, which is in nobody’s plan. They are just doing it.
Where are they stealing the oil from?
They are stealing the oil from Basra, through the main terminals. They are tapping the pipelines. So the Shiites may say this is a good idea—sharing it—but that’s not the way they are acting. There is no one Shiite group in charge. The whole understanding of Iraq was destroyed with the state in [the invasion of] March 2003. It’s gone and the Iraqis will never agree to live in the same country under the same constitution. It will never happen. We can dream on for a hundred years. McCain says, “Stay a hundred years.” Fine. They still will never want to live together.
One would argue that to some degree they were living together before 2003.
That’s because Saddam forced them to live together. He would put people in acid baths if they revolted. It was a system based on total, complete repression; they didn’t willingly live together.
My experience in Iraq, from speaking to Sunni and Shiite people who lived across the street from each other, was that this schism wasn’t really an issue until the invasion of Iraq by the Coalition forces. In Baghdad and in certain areas, people got along. There was intermarriage between Sunni and Shiite.
Well, yeah, I know. But, see, that was the bourgeoisie who were intermarrying—the secular Iraqis. But secular Iraq is going away faster than we can even keep track of. You will never get the Sadrists in Sadr City to accept Sunni into Sadr City. The division, even before Samarra, was too deep between the Sunnis and the Shiites.
So you would envision a three-state solution?
Yeah, but it’s going to be messy. Nothing is going to be complete. You’ve got a country with two million internal refugees. They are running from something. They are not running from Americans. They are running from Sunni, and from Shiite and vice versa. An ecumenical, secular Iraq is done for and finished.
That’s a pretty intense assessment. I’d like to get to the issue of Kurdistan. Kurdistan has been a beacon of calm. I was there this summer. It is certainly nothing like the rest of Iraq. It was very safe; there was no visible presence of American soldiers. The Peshmerga provide security—
That’s because there is virtually no intermixing. If you go to Erbil, if there are any Shiites there, or Sunni Arabs, their numbers are so insignificant that they don’t really matter even as a minority. Since 1991, Kurdistan has had the chance to coalesce into a sort of country—a de facto country. It’s much easier to unify the Kurds—the KDP and PUK [Kurdistan’s leading political parties]—than it is to unify the rest of Iraq. There’s a solution you can come up with, getting the Kurds to agree to a constitution of some sort and sharing the wealth. That’s very feasible, but of course it would be outside the boundary. The Kurds don’t want to be part of Iraq again.
The Kurds want their independence. They want to be a separate state.
That’s what I said.
Well, there’s a bit of a semantic difference. The Kurds have always wanted their independence since post-WWI, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and they were promised a separate state via the Treaty of Sevres. When Ataturk wrested Turkish independence from the Allied forces and disposed of the Sultan, he demanded and got a new treaty. It incorporated the Kurdish population into what we know today as Turkey. Ataturk worked to diminish and eradicate their culture under a banner of Turkish nationalism—“One country one Turk, We’re all Turks.” Ever since, the Kurds have always wanted their independence. This is what the PKK has violently been trying to bring about. The referendum for Kirkuk was supposed to take place in December. It was canceled. You wrote about the potential of some kind of incursion back in September when Turkey was beating war drums. I’m just wondering, is it truly the PKK that Turkey is after? Or is it this fear of separatism that is driving them and, more importantly, a desire to control Kirkuk?
I think the Turks don’t want either one. They don’t want a Kurdish nation because a Kurdish nation will always be a source of instability for Turkey. They don’t want de facto or de jure Kurdish state in Iraq. It undermines their legitimacy over their own country. It would be a bad example for their Kurds who would say, “Well if the Iraqi Kurds got a Kurdish state, why can’t we?”
And the Kurds couldn’t have an independent state without the economic flow from Kirkuk?
They could, but they have irredentist claims to Kirkuk. They really believe it’s theirs. Well, I don’t know if they really believe it, but they say it’s theirs. And they claim that there are more Kurds in Kirkuk than Arabs. So they say, “Lets do a referendum. We’re going to win the referendum. We’re going to get the oil. We’ll ship it out to Turkey, or to Jordan, or wherever and we become a viable state.” That, in itself, upsets [Turkey]. But, more immediately, what is upsetting them is this constant warfare on their border.
And within Turkey proper.
Yes, the violence goes everywhere. And so are the Iranians. The PJAK [in late April] said, “We’re going to start an offensive against Tehran.” PJAK is based in Northern Iraq. And the Iranians look at PJAK as part of the PKK. I mean they call it the PKK but it doesn’t matter what it is, that’s what they call it. The Iranians and Turks actually met on Monday to discuss what to do about the Kurdish problem. The Iranian delegation flew to Ankara to discuss what to do about the PKK and the PJAK. [Editor’s note: According to its website, PJAK stands for the Free Life Party of Kurdistan, and is “in constant battle for the unity and freedom of the Iranian peoples” and supportive of “democratic values, to achieve a radical type of democracy and to be able to launch a system of democratic confederacy in eastern Kurdistan.” As the PKK’s Iranian Kurdish allies, wrote James Brandon, who is currently a senior research fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion in London, PJAK is “potentially one of Washington’s strongest hands against Iran if used in conjunction with nascent Azeri and Arab separatist movements. For these reasons, Ankara is unlikely to force the United States to choose between an increasing Islamic and Iran-allied Turkey and the secular Kurds.”]
I don’t want to belabor the Kirkuk issue, but one of my NYU professors, Jarret Brachman, the director of research at the United States West Point Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center, mentioned last semester that military sources have said the fight for Kirkuk would be “to the death.” Turkey was included in this calculation. Turkey cites the fact of their Turkomen “brothers” living in Kirkuk as a reason for their concern. And they talk about the PKK. But in reality, there is a big trade issue that includes oil; there is the US relationship with Turkey, a NATO ally, and the need on the part of the US to use Turkish territory as a staging ground for oil and military supplies entering Iraq. Trade volume between Iraq and Turkey is expected to exceed $10 billion per year in 2009. How does Turkey’s EU accession fit into all of this?
That’s the problem for Turkey. They can’t simply go into Diyarbakir and start killing Kurds randomly because they’ll never make it into the EU. They have to walk a fine line. On the other hand, if it comes down to joining the EU or the breaking up of Turkey, they will stop the breaking up of Turkey.
It has been reported that Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has been negotiating with the PKK and the Kurdish population within Turkey. You alluded to this in your Time article. You suggested another military coup was in the air in Turkey, citing the fact that the Turkish armed forces chief, General Yasar Buyukanit, did not attend the swearing-in ceremony of President Abdullah Gul as one sign of this. Can you explain?
If the civilian government does not do something but go along with the military, and the situation gets worse, the Turkish military would declare martial law and suspend civilian government. Right now, Erdogan is basically okaying the attacks. The military is going to Erdogan and saying, “This is what we have to do.” And Erdogan is saying, “Yes, sir,” and saluting.
Yes, but previous to this incursion Erdogan was talking to the PKK in Turkey. They represent an Islamist electorate base for him. The EU made it clear, effectively telling Erdogan, “If you want entry to the EU, you’ve got to work out your issues with the Kurds. You can’t keep suppressing them. You have to address their grievances, allow them a level of freedom that they are not being allowed now.” Erdogan was talking with the Kurds. He was in negotiation with them. Based on what you said in the article, the military is opposed to this, his using his Islamist position—
Well, the Turkish military thinks he is being naive. I was in northern Iraq in 1995. The PKK ambushed a Turkish Red Cross van, which was really TNIO—Turkish intelligence—and killed four of them. So, the Turkish military is not too excited about this. It will give [Erdogan’s government] a certain rope to go deal with the Kurds, to stop the Kurds from fighting. But, at the end of the day, the military wants a free hand to go into northern Iraq. When it comes to Kurdistan and the Iraqi Kurds, the Turkish military calls the shots. And if the civilian government, if Erdogan were to oppose them, they would simply declare martial law.
You mentioned there is a coup brewing.
It was. I haven’t followed it recently, but there was a series of…The military was unhappy about the elections. Now, where they actually have the nerve to go over the line, you’re going to have to wait for something to provoke this, something more to happen. It has been fairly quiet.
You also mentioned in the piece that there had been some support in Washington to have Ayad Allawi replace Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. I was in northern Iraq this summer in a room of Sunni and Shiite men from Baghdad [central] and southern Iraq watching TV. Iranian President Ahmadinejad was hosting Maliki and there they stood holding hands. Outraged, the men began shouting, “This is a sign that Iran owns us.” One turned to me, saying, “Why doesn’t your government remove Maliki? Why don’t they replace him and make someone like Ayad Allawi President? It doesn’t have to be him, but someone who will kill equally. Not kill because you are Sunni or Shiite, but because you are breaking the law.”
There has been an active attempt to get rid of Maliki on the part of many people in the Iraqi government—all sorts of ministers and the people who are pro-American have really tried. But they simply don’t have the votes. Then you have the whole problem of Moqtada al Sadr. You have Maliki fighting Moqtada al Sadr and then fighting the Shiite groups in Basra. New issues keep on coming up. There are still [a lot of] people in Washington who would like to put Ayad Allawi in because he is well liked. But he has no positive base in Iraq. [American Ambassador Ryan] Crocker is reluctant to go in and say, “Well, alright, you guys can put in Allawi.”
Some Middle East experts have suggested Moqtada al Sadr would be a good replacement for Maliki as prime minister of Iraq.
I think if Moqtada had enough votes he would just vote the US out [of Iraq]. He’s very much disliked by the Shiite bourgeoisie, he’s mistrusted by Sistani. [Once] in power, he would definitely attempt a social revolution. Maliki is basically an elitist. He was educated DAWA, he followed Mohammed Bakr Sadr. He comes from a different class of Shiite. So these people, and SCIRI, are trying to hold onto an old order. The oldest order is Allawi’s—Westernized, on Western payrolls, he is looked at as an agent of the British, sometimes of the Americans. He doesn’t stand a chance in a chaotic Iraq of having a popular base. Then you’ve got the older guys like Dr. Ibrahim al-Jaffari and Maliki who are feeling the pressure from Sadr. It’s a struggle of who is going to rule the country. I think that Sadr would probably kick us out if he became prime minister. In as much as he could force the vote and get people to follow him. [Editor’s note: Prime Minister Maliki’s conservative political party, DAWA, or the Islamic Call Party, was formerly a militant Shiite Islamist group. DAWA shares the majority of seats in the Iraqi parliament with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, SIIC, formerly known as SCIRI, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.]
Some sources explained to me that the recent fighting going on in Basra was more political party battling. Where Maliki was going in to try and weaken Moqtada’s base, or eliminate it, thus giving his DAWA party more clout in the south in the next general election. What do you think about that?
If you are Shiite and you want a beating economic heart in Iraq, it’s the south, it’s Basra, and it’s the oil. So if Maliki ever hopes to extend his writ, he’s got to take Basra. He’s got to take it from Fadhila, and you’ve got hundreds of groups there—we don’t even know who they are. He needs to go there and own that city. Obviously, he couldn’t do it. He didn’t have the army to do it. Iraq is a mess. I will not be surprised if we stayed there for a hundred years. But it would be a very unfortunate experience for this country. [Editor’s note: Fadhila, also known as the Islamic Virtue Party, is supported mostly by poor Shiites in the south and is considered one of many rivals to Moqtada al Sadr’s powerbase.]
In your Time article you also say that the irony is that the liberation of Iraq is undermining democracy in the region, not planting it. Could you give some examples?
Basically, anytime there is chaos in the region it gives central governments the justification for repressing rights. You’ve got Iran, which since the invasion has become more conservative. There are more people going to jail, their religious [faction] is stronger. You’ve got Bahrain cracking down on their Shiites. You’ve got the Kuwaitis fighting every day in Kuwait one way or another, where the royal family [is trying] to suppress any dissent. Just like in this country, any time you have warfare or chaos, civil rights go out the window. It’s a human law and I don’t know of any place where it hasn’t [been that way], from the Spartans to the Greeks. Once you have this gaping wound on the borders of Iran and Turkey, and Syria even, in Kuwait, in Bahrain, and even Saudi Arabia, you have a tendency of people to not tolerate dissent and the drift toward democracy.
Do you have anything you want to add on the situation?
Look at it this way. PJAK is saying, “We are going to war with Tehran very soon.” Now, whether they are or not doesn’t matter. But if you are in Tehran, you’re going to say, “Wait a minute. The Americans are supposed to be putting a lid on [Iraq] and turning it into a civilized nation. And yet you’ve got an admitted terrorist group ready to attack us.” And this will just keep on going to this edge of regional conflict. And if you get Turkey and Iran going into Iraq, let’s say, in some combined operation—this is a total speculation, I don’t know anything about this—what’s the world going to see? You’ve got Iran potentially invading Iraq, which they are capable of doing. All that needs to happen is for PJAK to set up a couple of car bombs in Tehran and the Iranians will go into [northern Iraq]. And then what do we do? We can’t send soldiers into the north to control them. The mountains are too high. Logistically, it’s impossible, we don’t have enough troops.
From what I gleaned from Turkish newspapers, people in Turkey were shocked their military went into northern Iraq—in February, no less, when weather conditions in the mountains are not optimal for operations—and then left a week later. It’s very difficult territory to be fighting in to begin with, despite the fact they reportedly had anywhere from thousands to a hundred thousand troops on the border. It seemed to me Turkey wasn’t that successful.
They can’t be. You can’t find those people [the PKK] in those mountains. They come across the border in small groups, they attack, and then they disappear into the villages. They are obviously protected by the Kurds there. The Turks are faced with the choice of these cosmetic incursions to make people feel better, or to go in in force. But, then, you are at war with Iraqi Kurds. Turkey is between a rock and a hard place.
We can call the PKK a terrorist organization. Other people might say that they are freedom fighters, because they want—
Yeah, yeah, I won’t go near that. That’s a definition that—
The Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world that does not have its own state. Even though they continue to perpetrate violence, the PKK stance has changed from saying, “We want an independent state,” to “Well, its not so much that we want an independent state, but we want freedom within Turkey to speak our language, to have Kurdish programs on TV, to have basic human rights,” which they are not getting. And Erdogan’s government does seem to me to be trying to make some movement to address these grievances, the Turkish military says, “No. We are one Turkey. We are all Turks. Assimilate or die.” The figures range, depending on what publication you read, that 30,000 to 40,000 people have died in this Turkish-Kurdish fighting over the last 30 years, most of them have Kurds. Do you see as a resolution in this region?
I don’t know if there is a resolution.
Don’t you think that addressing the human rights concerns—
The problem is that Kurds aren’t Turks. They’re Indo-Europeans. They speak a different language, their grammatical structure is different, and they look different. And they just don’t want to live with Turks. How do you address this? I don’t ever foresee the Kurds being treated equally in Turkey. It’s a nice dream, but it’s not for now. So I don’t have a solution. I just deal with problems.
This article appears in May 2008.
