Turkey and the Kurds

Anyone who bothered to notice understood that the Bush administration's plan to re-make Iraq was destined, for better or worse, to put the explosive question of Kurdish political independence or autonomy high on the region's agenda. Just after Andrew Butters filed his piece from Erbil, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, Turkey's chief of staff, was blunt about Ankara's continuing concerns about Iraqi Kurdistan and its support for Turkey's Kurdish rebels. "Should there be an operation into northern Iraq?" he asked at a news conference this week. "If I look at it from an exclusively military point of view, yes, there should be. Would it be profitable? Yes, it would." He noted, however, that any Turkish invasion of Iraq would be a political rather than solely a military decision.

To get his expert take, I checked in with Jon Randal, author of the superb 1997 book, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan. His e-mail:

To the north of the Sunni-Shia vicous killing fields of Arab Iraq, two political time bombs are ticking away needlessly, but relentlessly. The chances of explosion before 2007 is out are not negligible.

One fuse leads to the Iraqi Kurds and their determination by year's end to hold a referendum on incorporating Kirkuk, Iraq's first, but rapidly depleting oilfields which Kurds sometimes claim is their "Jerusalem." For the Kurds, recovering Kirkuk is making up for decades of Saddam Hussein's repression and dispossession.

The other fuse leads to the radical nationalist politics of Turkey, which next month elects a president, then in November a new parliament. Such is the nationalist fervor of Turkish politics that politicians and generals feel free to warn the Iraqi Kurds to forego their claims on Kirkuk--or face the consequences.

Turkish nationalists hold the Iraqi Kurds responsible for not controlling their unwanted guests--several thousand fighters of the Kurdistan Workers Party who the Turkish army has been unable to bring to heel in Iraq or Turkey in a sporadic, now 23-year-old war.

Such is Iraqi Kurds' exasperation over what they consider Turkish dictation in Iraqi sovereign affairs that Massoud Barzani, the president of the Iraqi Kurdish regional government, has pointed out that he, too, can interfere in Turkish affairs. He specifically has mentioned causing trouble among Turkey's restless Kurds who amount to 20 percent of the population.

Turkey's dilemma is compounded by a rear-guard action by its long all powerful military to wrest back those bits of power ceded over the last few years as the price for applying for eventual, but increasinly faroff, membership in the European Union.

The immediate flash point in Turkey itself focuses on the election of a new Turkish president by the national assembly controlled by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the popular Prime Minister and leader of the mildly Islamist AK party. Erdogan probably commands enough votes, but risks upsetting the entrenched secular bureacracy, and more especially the army which has conducted three coups in less than a half century.

The Chief of the Turkish General Staff and the outgoing President mutter barely coded warnings against what they denounce as the encroachment of the AK's brand of political Islam. Even if the presidential hurdle is negotiated, Kirkuk and the PKK remain as rallying cries for Turkish nationalists, a notably outspoken bunch.

In theory, the United States has considerable influence with the Turks, a NATO ally for half a century, and with the Iraqi Kurds, Washington's only real friends in Iraq. But the Bush administration's assets wane by the hour and appeals for right reason may not carry the day.

Oddly, both Iraqi Kurds and Turkey have much in common. They both are secular in outlook. Iraqi Kurdistan is dependent on Turkey as its window on the outside world. Both could gain greatly by cooperating as a firewall against the religious-based violence in Arab Iraq.

Instead, the rhetoric waxes ever shriller. Turkey threatens to invade Iraq to stop Kurdish irredentism deemed a dangerous encouragement to its own Kurds. But in light of the plight of the American military in Iraq, such a decision could cost the Turkish army dearly. More likely, Turkey could close down the only border crossing with Iraq which crosses Kurdish territory. There is renewed talk of building diversionary crossings along Turkey's border with Syria.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo