Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is to visit Washington for a meeting with President Bush on November 5. Until he returns to Ankara, the Turks will refrain from a cross-border incursion into northern Iraq to attack the bases there of the PKK, a Marxist Kurdish-nationalist group that is waging a terrorist war against them. But this is likely to offer only a short respite. There are approximately 100,000 Turkish troops stationed on the Turkey–Iraq border. An Iraqi delegation (still in Ankara) has offered proposals to curb the PKK, but the Turks describe these ideas as inadequate and too “long term.” Talks are still continuing. But Turkish public opinion and senior military officers, both angered by the deaths of Turkish soldiers, are demanding intervention. So unless the U.S. president is able to broker some compromise, the Turks will invade in less than two weeks.
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In doing so, they may overturn the stability and prosperity of the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq — and risk intensifying the instability of the rest of Iraq and the problems facing U.S. forces there. It is a can of scorpions.
How did matters reach this stage? And what can be done to avert a descent into further Middle Eastern chaos? A little recent history may explain things. Until 1998, Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the PKK, was given sanctuary by the Syrian government. After conventional diplomatic pressure failed to change this, the Turkish government moved large numbers of troops to the border and threatened to invade. Syria promptly expelled Ocalan. But not to Turkey. A succession of European states to which Ocalan fled refused to extradite him because Turkey then retained the death penalty. He was eventually captured in Kenya, tried in Turkey, and sentenced first to death, then to life imprisonment. (Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2002.) Ocalan in captivity has urged a democratic reconciliation between Turks and Kurds and proposed various fanciful political structures to achieve this.
Ocalan’s capture and apparent conversion hit the PKK hard. It was already losing the war to Turkey’s harsh but effective counterinsurgency campaign. It began issuing regular calls for a ceasefire. At the same time Turkey began relaxing its domestic restraints on Kurdish nationalism. Several Kurdish nationalists entered parliament in the recent elections. Ankara had reason to hope that its “Kurdish problem” was on the way to a political solution.
