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The Middle East: The Boiling Cauldron, A New Flash Point |
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Saturday, 27 October 2007 |
In my July 17, 2007 posting to this blog titled “The Middle East: A Boiling Cauldron”, I tried to elucidate on the seriousness and volatility of the situation in this extremely vital part of the world which is also very unstable and explosive concentrating on three countries in the region that are seething with conflict violence and polarization: Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. The situation in the holy Land is still highly inflamed threatening the emergence of two mini Palestinian states, one faction of them Fattah are talking to the Americans and the Israelis before the meeting next month in Annapolis, which is rejected by Hamas. The Lebanese are still haggling over the election of a new president who should be acceptable to all factions in that badly torn country, an exercise which should have been completed by the 23rd of this month but has been postponed to November 12. The failure to elect a head of state with such credentials threatens the emergence of two competing presidents and two governments with very serious and nightmarish consequences. The third member of this triad Iraq is still in a very bad shape every thing there is worse than it was few weeks ago, Iraq is disintegrating and decaying the people are impoverished and insecure and are fleeing the land in the tens of thousands every month, but as if all that was not enough the border area between turkey and Iraq which has been the site of a very long conflict between the Turks and the PKK suddenly exploded creating another very serious flash point in a highly explosive cauldron.
The Kurdistan Workers Party Kareem Kurdistan or PKK is an armed militant group founded by Abdullah Ojalan in 1974 and led by him until his capture in 1999, the group’s ideology was founded on a mixture of Kurdish nationalism and revolutionary Marxist Leninism and was formally named the Kurdistan workers party in 1984. The PKK's dream has been to create an independent socialist Kurdish state in a territory which it claims as Kurdistan an area that comprises parts of south-eastern Turkey north-eastern Iraq, north-eastern Syria and north-western Iran; It is an ethnic secessionist organization that uses force and the threat of force against both civilian and military targets for the purpose of achieving its political goal, in the early 1990s they moved beyond rural based insurgent activities to include urban terrorism More than 30,000 people have been killed in this conflict since 1984. Ojalan was captured in Kenya in early 1999 was handed over to the Turkish authorities, he was tried by the Turkish state security court and was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Ojalan announced from prison a peace initiative and asked his followers to refrain from violence and requesting dialogue with Ankara on Kurdish issues. At a PKK congress in January 2000 members supported him and claimed that the group from then on would use only political means to achieve their goal.
In June 2004, a hard line faction was already in control of the organization renounced the self-imposed cease-fire and resumed targeting Turkish security forces and villagers who opposed them. The group conducted attacks on Turkish diplomatic and commercial facilities in dozens of west European cities in 1993 and again in the spring of 1995. In an attempt to damage the Turkish tourist industry they bombed tourist's sites and hotels and kidnapped foreign tourists. The Turkish authorities accuse the PKK of bombing dozens of sites throughout Istanbul but also in resort areas on turkey's western coast where foreign tourists were killed amongst others. There were also dozens of military clashes between Turkish security forces and the militant elements of the PKK. The militant activities of this organization has claimed at least a 30,000 deaths, its cadre is thought to be between 4,000 to 5,000. For sometime during the last two years they have been relatively quiet and relatively inactive until the last week of last September.
During the last week of last September a high level Iraqi delegation arrived in Turkey without the knowledge or the participation of their partners the Kurds in the so called Iraqi national unity government. At the end of the visit they signed with the Turks an accord that was printed in a very vague language but the essence of it was in fact a carte blanche allowing the Turkish military to chase the rebels into Iraqi territory. A favor the Turks made use of immediately when the military started to bombard Iraqi villages on the border creating a great havoc and destruction forcing their inhabitants to flee to safer areas inside Iraqi Kurdistan. This was reciprocated by the PKK who ambushed a civilian vehicle and killed its occupants and followed that by attacking military convoys the next two days, all of that enraged the Turks and inflamed the situation so badly. The Turks started to talk about the need to go after the rebels as deep inside Iraq as was necessary so the government went to their parliament seeking authority for as many incursions inside Iraq as was necessary a motion which was approved almost unanimously only 19 Turkish lawmakers out of 550 disagreed. The real shock happened when an ambush by the Kurdish militants on Sunday, October 21 left at least 12 Turkish dead and scores of injured caused a very serious escalation of the situation and threatened an immediate invasion of the north of Iraq were they blame the Iraqi Kurdish authority of harboring and supporting the rebels, enter the American Secretary of State.
Condoleezza Rice personally intervened talking to the Turkish prime minister, she urged him to delay the decision to send his troops across the border for few days and allow time to try and resolve the crisis a situation which was reiterated by her spokesman at the state dept, who said in our view there are better ways to deal with this issue, he said we have already opened a diplomatic campaign to persuade Turkey not to invade northern Iraq. The Americans had very large stakes in the situation, they are on very good terms with the two sides, both Turkey and Iraq are regarded as very strong allies they have very important military facilities in southern and east southern parts of Turkey like the Injerlik base and in fact more 70% of the air cargo sent to their military into Iraq goes through that region denying that airspace to the Americans would be disastrous at a time when the United States is up to her shoulders with the problems which followed the recent war.
The Americans have always had very good relations with the Iraqi Kurds after all it was they the Americans who saved them from the onslaught by saddam Hussein which followed their ill fated uprising after Saddam's expulsion from Kuwait and also with the Turks. Both the Turks and the Kurds are highly emotional and not the best in the art of diplomacy and compromise which does not augur very well for the future. The United States has already lost a lot of its leverage with Turkey because of a pending congressional vote on a resolution branding the 195-17 Ottoman massacres of Armenians as genocide a tag Turkey has consistently rejected and has threatened unspecified reprisals against the United States.
I am finishing this letter on the morning of Wednesday, October 24, the situation is still unresolved, a very fragile standoff. The Turks have deployed about a 100,000 troops with a large number of military vehicles with heavy artillery and ammunition on Monday October 22. The Iraqi prime minister promised next day that he is going to close the Turkish scenarists offices and chase them from the territory he controls! The Iraqi Kurds are trying their best with the PKK whilst the Americans have been caught in the middle and calling for restraint as if with their current problems in Iraq they needed another potentially very dangerous flash point.
Najeeb Hanoudi
Amman/Jordan
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
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