There is a good reason why members of the PKK, the Kurdish Workers’ Party, are fighting the Turkish government. As an ethnic minority of 20 percent of Turkey’s population, they want legal recognition of their rights to equality and self-determination.
For over 1,000 years, the Kurds--at least 25 million today--have lived in the mountainous territory straddling four nation states: about 12 million in southeastern Turkey, 6 million in northwestern Iran, 6 million in northeastern Iraq, and 2 million in northeastern Syria. Turks and Arabs dislike Kurds who have their own language and are not--and do not want to be--Turks or Arabs. The Shiite Iranians resent Kurds because they are Sunnites.
For centuries, the countries occupying the Kurds’ territories have been tacitly colluding to keep them from attaining nationhood. At the Paris conference in 1919, Kurds spokesmen asked the United States for an autonomous state of their own. They would point to President Wilson’s famous demand: "Self-determination is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their own peril." All the Kurds got, however, was hypocritical assurances of sympathy. So they revolted, time and again.
In the 1960s, Iraq's Kurds demonstrated for a unified and autonomous Kurdistan, with the city of Arbil (or Irbil) as its capital. After prolonged combat with government troops, they were promised local self-government;
but the rulers in Baghdad always refused them the genuine independence they demanded.
Between 1984 and 1999, the Turkish military and the PKK engaged in open warfare. Kurdish villages in southeastern Turkey were destroyed and depopulated. Tens of thousands fled to defensible towns, to cities in western Turkey, and even to Western Europe. Whenever uprisings of Kurds were crushed, particularly in Turkey and Iraq, thousands of them got killed. In 1993 alone, 4,200 people were slain while stubbornly resisting Turkish oppression. When Saddam Hussein used poison gas against them, 5,000 died in a single assault.
So desperate have the Kurdish activists grown at times that terror became their main weapon. On June 24, 1994, PKK rebels dramatically highlighted the Kurdish plight by raiding Turkish diplomatic and consular missions in some 25 western European cities.
The Turkish government does not want to recognize the existence of the Kurdish minority. Former Prime Minister Yildirim Akbulut made that very clear: "There are no Kurds in Turkey. The people who live in Turkey are Turks." Hence, the government routinely dismisses the Kurdish human rights movement as a terrorist conspiracy. Both the U.S. and the European Union not only failed to denounce Turkey’s denial of Kurdish rights; they also appeased the Turkish nationalists by branding the PKK a terrorist organization.
Keenly aware of the unabated Kurdish discontent, the Turkish government recently permitted Kurds to offer courses in their own language, but only in private schools. Kurdish remains a forbidden tongue in public schools, on television and radio. Only Turkish may be spoken at meetings and rallies.
Kurds are not permitted to give their children Kurdish names. Lawyers are not permitted to talk Kurdish with jailed clients who cannot speak Turkish. Violations are punishable by imprisonment and fines. Scores of journalists have been prosecuted and some imprisoned for their articles on the plight of the Turkish Kurds.
For American policymakers, the Kurdish people are apparently too far away and too unimportant to be of sufficient "national interest.” Kurds have no influential constituency or well-heeled lobby in America. In fact, the State Department considers the PKK a terrible nuisance to our Turkish allies, just like the Palestinians and the Syrians are a terrible nuisance to Israel, the Basques to Spain, the Chechen to Russia, and the Tibetans to China.
When oppressed people violently resist, we now routinely categorize them as terrorists. By that standard, Paul Revere was certainly also a terrorist. |