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Kurds: No Friends But The Mountains
By Eric Margolis
Toronto Star,
Feb. 21, 1999
ZURICH - `We have no friends but the mountains.' So say
Kurds, a people whose long agony and national tragedy
are only now coming to be known by the outside world.
Last week, in a stranger than fiction scenario,
charismatic Kurdish rebel leader, Abdullah Ocalan, was
kidnapped by Turkish commandos in Nairobi, Kenya, of all
places, where he had been hiding in the Greek Embassy,
and flown back to Turkey to stand trial for his life.
The leader of the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party, or
PKK, is Turkey's public enemy number one.
Turkey had no intelligence capability in East Africa.
Ocalan was clearly tracked and shadowed by US
intelligence and, very likely, Israeli intelligence.
Both services have important posts in Nairobi, and work
closely to monitor East Africa. Israel, Turkey's new
strategic ally, provides Ankara with substantial
anti-guerrilla training, equipment, and interrogation
techniques. The US supplies Turkey's 525,000-man army
with weapons, including armor and helicopters used to
fight PKK guerrillas in eastern Anatolia.
Greece was enormously - and rightly - embarrassed by
revelations it had been hiding Ocalan at its Nairobi
embassy. Three senior Greek government ministers
resigned. Ocalan and the PKK are branded `terrorists' by
NATO, of which Greece is a member. In fact, Greece has
long secretly armed and financed the PKK to bedevil old
foe Turkey. So have Armenian groups. Greece also
covertly aids Serbia, in direct violation of a NATO
boycott. When Ocalan was seized, he was carrying a Greek
Cypriot diplomatic passport.
I've followed the Kurdish question for decades, and
covered the 15-year old guerrilla war between the PKK
and Turkey in bleak eastern Anatolia. This complex,
tragic drama leaves me torn, and sympathetic to both
sides. There are 25-30 million Kurds, spread across five
nations, but most numerous in Turkey and Iraq, where
they account for 20% and 23%, respectively, of the
population. The world's second largest tribal society
after Pathans, Kurds are of ancient Indo-European
origin, with distinct society, customs, and language.
Yet these admirable, courageous highlanders have never
had their own nation.
President George Bush's foolish decision not to allow
Saddam Hussein to pull out of Kuwait in 1991, the
ensuing Gulf War, and creation of a US-protected
mini-Kurdish state in northern Iraq, let the Kurdish
genii out if its bottle - as this column repeatedly
predicted it would back in 1990. The result has been
massive upsurge of Kurdish nationalism that destabilized
Iraq and Turkey, the latter a close US ally. While war
bands, or `Pesh mergas' of `good,' US- backed Kurds
battled Saddam, `bad' Kurds fought Turkey. But then
Turkey battled `good' Kurds in northern Iraq, and so on.
The legitimate desire of the long-suffering Kurds to
have their own nation conflicts head-on with the fact
they live in well-established nations who, while they
grant varying degrees of autonomy to Kurds, will never
voluntarily give up territory, some of it rich in oil,
to a new Kurd state. Kurds, for their part, have been
unable to produce a common leadership or policy; like
all mountain peoples, they spend as much time battling
rival tribes as their lowland foes.
Kurds deserve better than PKK leader Ocalan, originally
funded and armed by the Soviet Union. He is a ruthless,
Kurdish Stalin, who terrorized his foes, and
exterminated all rivals within the party. PKK guerillas
slaughtered large numbers - up to 30,000 - civilians,
many of them Kurds who would no cooperate with PKK
extremists. Any PKK members who `deviated' were
summarily shot.
As I saw when covering the dirty war in easstern
Anatolia, the fierce Turkish Army was equally brutal
battling the PKK. Guerrilla wars fought in the midst of
civilian populations are always bloody, savage affairs.
Supporters of Kurdish independence - or greater autonomy
- have been frequently murdered by Turkish security
agents, and by gangsters, working for the Turkish
government. Torture of arrested Kurdish suspects is
common.
Ocalan's dramatic capture and trial in Turkey will focus
world attention on the neglected Kurdish question. His
trial and probable subsequent hanging will only further
inflame Kurdish nationalist passions, and make it even
less likely Turkey will ever be admitted, as it so
ardently desires, to membership in the European Union.
Ocalan has also become a new hero and martyr of Europe's
left. When Ocalan sought refuge in Italy, he was allowed
to stay for a time, then depart in spite of German
arrest warrants by Italy's communist-led government -
which, ironically, cheered the detention by Britain of
Chile's Sen. Pinochet on charges of human rights
violations.
Interestingly, Turkey has cynically sided with NATO in
attempting to deny Albanians of Kosova their legitimate
right to self-determination because Ankara fears its
Kurds will seize such a precedent to press for their own
independence. This past weekend, at so-called `peace'
talks in France, Albanians, like Kurds, are once again
being sold out by the Great Powers, who are trying to
force Albanian Kosovars to accept bogus `autonomy' that
keeps Kosova under brutal Serb rule.
PKK has been decapitated. Turkey has won a major victory
and even managed to humiliate the Greeks. This triumph
will embolden Turkey's real rulers, the military, to
press the war against the Kurds. The day after Ocalan's
arrest, Turkish troops once again invaded northern Iraq
to fight Kurdish separatists. But Kurds are legendary
fighters; they will battle on.
Copyright: Eric Margolis, 1999
