Kurdistan Calling: the Turkish-Kurdish Conflict

BLOOD AND BELIEF:

The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence

By ALIZA MARCUS

New York University, $35.00 cloth, ISBN 978-0-8147-5711 6

2006

[originally published in The Bloomsbury Review]

For Americans, the Kurds may be simply one more “faraway people about whom we know little” and couldn’t care less. It is quite likely though that the “world’s largest stateless people,” as the author calls them, will, as the years go by, become a lot better known to us through the Iraq War. Whether we like it or not, we are involved in the destinies of this mysterious group whose calamity of being stateless no one can explain quickly and whose claim for statehood no one besides the Kurds seems to support with any vigor. For these reasons, reliable information about the no-longer-obscure Kurds and their problems should be a valuable commodity, especially to those who care about the implications of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Hence the value now of Alisa Marcus’ Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence.

Submerged as the Kurds are in the politics of four different countries (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran) and with Iraq undergoing violent transformation, Kurdish claims to our attention are indirect, depending on how they affect other issues that are more mainstream. The most notorious incident involving Kurds, of course, was Saddam Hussein’s massacre of thousands of Kurdish villagers by poison gas at Halabja in 1988. This event loomed large for Americans only when it was used to stir up support for the second Iraq War.

Still, many wonder: Is an independent Kurdish state (“Kurdistan”) desirable or possible? And will the Kurdish ministate in Iraq with its proclaimed capital city Kirkuk turn into such an entity? The problem with Marcus’ book is that if this is the only book you read about the Kurdish situation, you still will not have answers to these important questions. Nor does she provide much historical or cultural background of the Kurds before the outbreak of the events she describes. (Indeed this omission may be because this topic is as complex as present-day Kurdish politics.) Many readers would no doubt like to have, in an introduction to the subject, more than the storyline of one political party. The author’s self-imposed limitation to the PKK (or Kurdistan Workers’ Party), could make her vulnerable to the charge of bias.

Except in the most formal sense, however, this suspicion of bias is not justified. The picture of the PKK that emerges from @2Blood and Belief@1, though not particularly attractive, is that of a dedicated guerrilla group, which despite its blemishes has forged a kind of legitimacy in the face of official Turkish resistance to what are widely seen as justified Kurdish grievances—and as the only Kurdish group to pose an effective counterforce to the Turkish state. The PKK has also has a nonmilitary wing in the form of a series of legal political parties with representatives in parliament, but these have been subjected to repression and censorship at all stages.

In this account, the Turkish government is seen as not in control of the Turkish military, which calls the shots in its position as the guardian of the “secular state” and is deeply hostile to any non-Turkish configuration. The Turkish political establishment as a whole seems strangely blind to the most basic Kurdish demands for cultural autonomy (such as speaking and teaching the Kurdish language) and recognition of Kurdish identity. Its simplistic view is that “all people living in Turkey are Turks.”

According to Marcus, the problem is that Turkey, although it has made many gestures toward reform and recognition of Kurdish demands (Kurdish language broadcasts, for example) has in fact permitted very little real progress, and that mainly to appease European critics who could block Turkey’s entrance into the EU.

The story goes something like this: The PKK, starting in the early 1970s as a Marxist revolutionary party, grew enormously for about a decade nourished by real grievances, popular support in the Turkish southeast, and the government’s military blunders. Then in the mid 1990s, a new right-wing government in Ankara counterattacked the guerrillas effectively, and in a massive violation of human rights, evacuated some 2,000 villages in the Kurdish southeast along with an estimated 1 million Kurdish inhabitants. The PKK declined for the next decade, and, according to the author, never recovered its original strength--but wasn’t eliminated either. Marcus also details the bizarre career of the PKK’s personality-cult-afflicted leader Abdullah Ocalan who led the PKK from a base in Syria until expelled and captured by Turkish agents in 1999. Though he renounced his PKK ideals, and was imprisoned for life, he has maintained a tight and, yes, Svengali-like control of the group.

The main shock one gets from this book is the dubious nature of Turkey’s supposedly democratic political process in hock to a powerful military, which in the end has a lot more blood on its hands than do those of its tenacious opponents. One wonders how the Kemalist doctrines of a modern secular republic ever became so narrow in scope and so atavistically monocultural. One also feels gloomy about Turkey’s prospects for entry into the EU.

Marcus’ dispassionate recounting of events is impressive in its factual, documented style and avoidance of partisan shrillness. While never condoning any of the PKK’s excesses, she points out its one achievement: to have “put the Kurdish problem on the agenda in Turkey and in front of the world.”

Now with the success of the Kurds in northern Iraq as the focus of Kurdish ambitions, you would think there would be more options for Turkish Kurds and the PKK, which is still their chief political representative. But of course, the usual double-edged sword is in place: The U.S. intervention that benefits the Iraqi Kurds hinders the cause of their brethren just across the border (or close to it).

To the extent that the U.S. espouses self-determination and multiculturalism, it should do more to support these peoples. Yet the U.S. to appease Turkey is obliged to regard the PKK as a “terrorist” group, as is the EU. So Turkey’s Kurds may have to envy the lot of their Iraqi brothers a while longer.

Americans, whether opponents of the Iraq War or neo-isolationists, need to consider that one of the war’s outstanding successes is the creation of the Kurdish ministate.

I doubt, however, we’ll hear much in the coming months from our presidential candidates on this issue.

REVIEWER: James H. Dalglish