The Rejection of Peace
Turkeys war against its Kurdish population in its current
iteration is as much about Erdogan and the Turkish power structures
consolidating and maintaining their power as is their crackdown against
journalism. It has not been waged as a
war to protect Turkish civilians from Kurdish insurgents but instead as a means
to “protect” the oppressive power hierarchies that exist which seek to maintain
the disparate position of the political-economic elite. Instead of listening to the legitimate
grievances of the Kurdish population, Erdogan and the AKP have chosen a
strategy of violence, terrorism, and xenophobia in order to degrade the growing
political power of the Kurds and to consolidate their rule and the continuation
of their criminal policies.
The pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP) and the
Kurdish military wing Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) have not been demanding
independence, instead they have been calling for autonomy. This in the face of Turkey’s political
establishment historically treating the Kurds as second class citizens and
denying them the right to be educated using their native language. In response they have organized societal
institutions in a radically different manner than the Turkish state,
prioritizing the ideal of local, non-hierarchical forms of direct
democracy. In their view, as Professor
of Economics at the University of Greenwich Mehmet
Ugur explains, this is because “the nation state is now considered an
anachronistic institution; and local democracy (including recognition and
representation of distinct identities) has been embraced as a solution not only
for the Kurdish question but also for democratisation in Turkey, Iraq and
Syria.”
The Turkish government was never serious about officially
devolving meaningful power for the Kurds to exercise over their locality, and
has balked on agreeing to any kind of political peace negotiation. This is due in part to the ideological
currents running through the political establishment that as well permeate
elite sectors of business and other societal institutions.
This very nationalistic way of thinking sees the unilateral designs
of the winning electoral party as encompassing ‘the national will,’ and thus
equates dissent against them with ‘treason.’
Professor Ugur further
explains: “The national will is expressed through elections that the party
wins through multi-party competitions… All other parties and civil-society
organisations critical of the majority party can be demonised as collaborators
of internal and external forces bent on preventing the nation from expressing
its will. That is why AKP rhetoric has been based on ‘national will’ rather
than democracy. That is also why AKP practice has been geared towards removal
of legal, administrative and civil-societal checks and balances that could
prevent the government from exercising absolutist majority rule. That is also
why the AKP elite has gradually but increasingly deployed state power to equate
dissent with treason.”
In the logic of the AKP, “institutional checks and balances
are dysfunctional because they make the exercise of the ‘national will’
cumbersome.”
This way of thinking has a historical basis, which sees
Turkey’s history in the context of 3 sets of beliefs: “(i) the Turks have
established sixteen states, fifteen of which collapsed and the last one (the
Republic of Turkey) must not face the same fate; (ii) the state is a father
figure and the first duty of its sons (daughters are excluded explicitly or
implicitly) is to obey the father’s authority; and (iii) the Turkish state is
surrounded by all sort of enemies who work with internal collaborators to
destabilise the country and prevent it from fulfilling its full potential.”
Because of this, a relationship of patronage between
business and state has emerged in which business
interests and state-subservience co-exist: “Organised interests in Turkey
(business organisations, their lobby groups, bosses of co-opted trades unions,
most university rectors, the religious establishment, etc.) have read this
script correctly. They presented their specific interests as true reflections
of the national interest, which the Turkish state served in return for
continued loyalty. That is why both sides have always been in tune when it
comes to suppressing any opposition that questions the de jure or de facto
rules of the game.”
Not surprising then is the Turkish governments unwillingness
to devolve autonomy powers to the Kurds.
Indeed, it was Turkey that withdrew from a mostly farcical peace process
just after the Kurdish HDP dealt
a huge blow to Erdogan’s AK Party in the June 2015 elections.
As the pro-Kurdish HDP gained enough votes to cross the
threshold to enter parliament their victory forced the AKP to form a coalition
government instead of exercising majority rule.
Their success was a sign of growing political influence as well as a
symbol of the growing sympathy towards the Kurdish cause that had been building
within the country. Rising Kurdish
political influence coupled with a threat to Erdogan’s own power was the
driving impetus for Turkey to reignite a violent conflict with the Kurds.
The attacks against the Kurds were never a necessary
exercise of state power, nor were they a reaction to a legitimate security
threat. Instead, like most groups stuck
under the thumb of a much stronger and oppressive power, there has been a clear
consensus for peace and resolution through political negotiation among a wide
range of the Kurdish population. That is
why it was the Kurds who supported the peace process and it was Turkey who rejected
it.
The Dolmabahce Agreement was a political framework for
resolving the Kurdish issue that was negotiated in February 2015 between the
HDP and the Turkish government. Its aim
was to create a long-term roadmap for peace, and for a short time it appeared
highly promising. On February 28th,
2015 Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Interior, and three
deputies of the HDP announced the agreement in a joint-statement at Istanbul’s
Dolmabahce Palace. However, following
the HDP victory and the AKP defeat in the July elections, Erdogan backtracked
and rejected the deal.
When rejecting the Agreement, Erdogan argued that it was
invalid because
it did not originate in parliament, and such an agreement only has
legitimacy through congressional authority.
Therefore he told reporters on July 17th that he did not “recognize
the phrase ‘Dolmabahce Agreement,’” and effectively buried the deal. The underlying reason was thus apparent: the
inroads the HDP achieved within parliament increased their prospects of being
able to use their rising political influence to push for peace through official
parliamentary channels. This, combined
with the agreed-upon roadmap for peace that Dolmabahce represented, made the
possibility of a peaceful settlement all too probable, and Erdogan had no
intentions of sharing power.
The strategy was to reject negotiations and use violence and
war to both attack the Kurds militarily while as well rallying votes throughout
the country by exploiting nationalistic and xenophobic sentiments, thereby
regaining a parliamentary majority. A
state of fear brought on by violence and conflict, coupled with the
scapegoating of the problem on Kurdish ‘terrorists’, was used to rally the
public under the AKP banner of “security” and “stability.”
As Professor
Ugur explains it, “The political objective was to ensure the continuity of
AKP rule, preferably with a large majority required to change the constitution
and institute Mr Erdogan as a president with no checks and balances… Given
these liabilities and the risk of failure to win a majority in the snap
elections in November, the AKP government has initiated the process of
state-orchestrated violence,” against the Kurds.
The strategy proved highly successful.
Strategy of Tension, Violence, and Aftermath
When ISIS began assaulting the Kurdish town of Kobani in
2014 Kurdish militias rose up to defend it, yet Turkey and Erdogan were
silent.
When the town looked poised to be defeated, Erdogan’s
position of abandonment was made clear when he simply concluded of the
situation that “Kobani
is about to fall.”
It was clear that he saw the ISIS attack as an opportunity
rather than a threat. The likely chance
of being barbarically subjugated by ISIS was used to leverage demands from the
Kurds.
When the leader of the Kurdish PYD came to Turkish military
intelligence to plead for aid, he was told he would only
receive it if the Kurds surrendered: they were told they needed to give up
their claim for self-determination, give up the localities they governed, and
agree to a Turkish buffer zone in Syria.
The Kurds refused.
However, it is not as if Turkey had simply been sitting on
the sidelines while refusing to intervene: they had been intimately involved in
supporting the Islamic State, most ostensibly by securing their free passage
into Syria through the Turkish border but as well through direct contact with
ISIS members, coordinating arms transports, providing them a safe haven inside
Turkish territory, and by transporting their fighters across the border into
the warzone. Reports would later surface
that they were hospitalizing
wounded ISIS fighters, and that sarin precursors were smuggled into
ISIS-held areas with the help of Turkish authorities. (See part
1) Just days prior to these events Vice
President Biden told Harvard University students that it was the Turks,
Saudis, and the UAE who had “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens,
thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad except
that the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the
extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”
Turkey was using the threat posed by the terrorist proxies
they had fomented to force the Kurds to capitulate, and absent that capitulation
would gladly see Kurdish towns overrun by their ISIS allies.
As the ISIS proxies assaulted the Kurdish village, Turkish
aircraft used the opportunity to
bomb Kurdish positions inside Turkey for the first time in two years. Yet an ISIS victory in Kobani would have been
a humiliating defeat for the newly formed “anti-ISIS” coalition, and would have
routed a key potential ally in the region for the Americans. Therefore, under heavy pressure from the US,
Erdogan finally allowed a contingent of Iraqi Peshmerga fighters to cross into
Kobani from Turkish territory, and with further support from the US air force
the Kurds were able to repel the ISIS attack.
Yet come June 2015, directly after the AKP’s electoral
defeat, car bombs exploded at the Kobani border and convoys of cars carrying up
to 40 ISIS fighters again attacked the Kurdish village simultaneously from
three sides.
Kurdish witnesses said that the
jihadis crossed into the city from the Turkish border, “If they entered
from the Syrian side, they would have first come up many more important targets
related to the YPG (the Kurdish militia), such as the main headquarters
building where there are tens of fighters and leaders, or the local
administration HQ,” a Kurdish activist said.
He noted that it was extremely
unlikely they would have been able to pass by these obstacles unnoticed,
and therefore the attack must have originated from Turkey.
If not in some way orchestrated or tacitly supported by
Turkey, the attacks then represent a generous gift to Erdogan from old allies.
The situation escalated in July when a suicide bombing, of
which ISIS claimed responsibility for, killed 32 and wounded another 104 in the
Turkish town of Suruc. The victims were
pro-Kurdish university-aged students who were holding a press conference on
their planned trip to help reconstruct Kobani.
It was theorized that the attacks could have been in retaliation for increasing
measures that Turkey had been taking to clamp down on the jihadis. Yet if so, how would attacking Turkey’s main
domestic enemies constitute a retaliation?
Furthermore, the clamp down was only symbolic, used to portray the image
that Turkey was getting tough on ISIS while not taking any substantial steps
against them. Following the events, in
an interview with a Turkish journalist an ISIS commander denied
there being any conflict with Turkey.
The Kurdish PKK for their part blamed the Turkish
authorities and accused them of collusion with ISIS. In response they claimed
responsibility for the killing of two Turkish police officers they said
were responsible for the attacks. Given
the fact that just a year ago secret
audio recordings were leaked of Turkey’s prime minister and the head of the
secret service planning a false flag attack against Turkey as a pretext to invade
Syria, there is a high probability that Turkey was in some way complicit.
Further supporting this is the fact that the attacks were
then utilized as the pretext for Turkey to enter into the “anti-ISIS”
coalition, a guise used to initiate a war against the Kurds.
In the days that followed Turkey agreed to a deal with the
US allowing them to use their Incirlik air base to fly bombing missions against
the Islamic State. The ostensible
terms of the deal were that Turkey would let the US use their base, and
Turkey would itself enter the fight against ISIS. However, the actual terms were likely that
the US had agreed in some form to Turkey’s longstanding demands to set up a
“no-fly zone” inside Syria, which in practice was a plan to annex Syrian land
and to attack Syria’s air-defenses. Also
very likely was that the US agreed to sell out the Kurds by acquiescing to the
fact that Turkey’s attacks against ISIS would in actuality just be a cover for
waging a war against them.
With the deal firmly in place the Turkish air force thus “initiated
the process of state-orchestrated violence” by launching airstrikes against the
Kurds and ISIS, except those against ISIS were only symbolic.
The operation began on July 24th, yet after July
25th airstrikes were only continued against the Kurds, including
those in Iraq and Syria. In conjunction
a large-scale domestic operation billed as an “anti-terror” crackdown was
initiated. Under the guise of going
after ISIS Turkish police conducted massive raids against the Kurds and
arrested over 1,000 people it labelled as terrorists. According to one HDP member, of those
arrested 80% were Kurdish.
Following this Turkey continued to relentlessly and
murderously attack Kurdish villages.
They have imposed arbitrary, round-the-clock curfews of entire
neighborhoods which the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights describes
as a “massive restriction of some of the most fundamental human rights of a
huge population” that does not “satisfy the criteria of proportionality and
necessity in a democratic society.” The
assault includes artillery shelling in densely populated civilian areas,
disconnection of water and electricity to entire towns, denying the victims
access to medical treatment, preventing burials, and abusive and
disproportionate force against any and all peaceful protests that dissent
against the atrocities. Turkish military
operations “had
killed hundreds of civilians, displaced hundreds of thousands and caused
massive destruction in residential areas.”
The irony of all of this should not be lost: Turkey has been supporting the ISIS terror
organization which has repeatedly attacked his domestic enemy, the Kurds. Turkey has then used the terrorists as a
justification to wage his own war against the Kurds, while further
exploiting the terrorism and the instability as a means to gain political power
for himself and his party.
On October 10, 2015 Turkey witnessed the
deadliest terror attack ever in the country's modern history, carried out
by two suspected Islamic State suicide bombers.
The attack effectively shepherded Erdogan and the AKP back into a
parliamentary victory. In the climate of
fear that followed, couple with the violence and chaos from the war with the
Kurds, Erdogan’s AKP made a resounding comeback in the elections the following
month in November.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, Erdogan’s AKP “regained sole control of Parliament as millions of voters who had been disillusioned with the party returned in force.” “Pro-Kurdish parties lost significant ground” as “the AKP’s rise drained votes from the… HDP.” Erdogan would now have “a clear mandate to press ahead with the military campaign against Kurdish separatists.”
The remarkable turnaround came “amid a deteriorating
security situation that had made terrorism a top concern for voters. In the
weeks leading up to the vote, Turkish televisions were filled with grim images
of deadly attacks carried out by suspected Islamic State bombers, military
crackdowns on Kurdish cities, and funerals for Turkish security officers killed
by Kurdish fighters.
“The dangers culminated in a devastating Oct. 10 attack by
two suspected Islamic State suicide bombers who killed more than 100 people at
a peace rally in Turkey’s capital. The bombing, which some called “Turkey’s
9/11,” was the country’s deadliest terrorist attack, and it cemented fears that
the increasingly polarized country was facing unchecked instability.”
Erdogan and the AKP then won voters over with "its message
that one-party rule was the only way to fight a two-front war with Islamic
State extremists and Kurdish militants.”
The message resonated “not only with nationalists who backed Mr.
Erdogan’s decision to renew the country’s fight with the outlawed… PKK, but
also with Kurdish residents rattled by renewed violence that had consumed their
communities.”
Erdogan, while cynically supported the most extreme forms of
terrorism in an attempt to overthrow the Syrian government, has utilized those
same terrorists as a pretext to wage a full scale war against the Kurds, using
the situation to degrade Kurdish influence and capitalize on a state of fear
and war for political gain, championing himself as the answer to ‘Kurdish
terrorism’ while it was his policies that reignited the violence. Following a defeat in parliament at the hands
of the Kurds, while simultaneously facing a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish
issue, the orchestration of state-violence was commenced. Further aided by some of the country’s
deadliest terrorism, committed by a group that Erdogan supports, the desired
outcome was realized.
“The election results show that the politics of fear and
division worked,” said David L. Phillips, a former State Department adviser who
now serves as director of the Peace-Building and Rights Program at Columbia
University.”
The strategy of tension had succeeded.
