PKK “Stalinist cult organization”
by Scoop Shachtman, 29 October 2007
Many of us who are ardent supporters of Kurdish rights and aspirations have the gravest reservations about the so-called Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. This is a Stalinist cult organization, roughly akin to a Middle Eastern Shining Path group. (Its story, and the story of its bizarre leader Abdullah Öcalan, are well told in Aliza Marcus’ new book Blood And Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence.) The attempt of this thuggish faction to exploit the new zone of freedom in Iraqi Kurdistan is highly irresponsible and plays directly into the hands of those forces in the Turkish military who want to resurrect Kemalist chauvinism as a weapon against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, which it sees as soft on Kurdish demands.
Christopher Hitchens. His bottom line on Turkey:
we do a favor to the democratization and modernization of that country by insisting that it get its troops out of Cyprus, pull its forces back from the border with Iraq, face the historic truth about Armenia, and in other ways cease to act as if the Ottoman system were still in operation.
Monday 29 October 2007 at 23:41
An old Hitchens piece of relevance (more from me the morra –probably)
Talking Turkey
An ally we’re better off without.
By Christopher Hitchens
Updated Tuesday, March 4, 2003, at 5:50 PM ET
The slander of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition, and of their friends, as little better than puppets of the Bush administration is an idea that is half-alive in the minds of those who are knowingly trying to buy “more time” for Saddam Hussein. Every now and then, one gets a sneer about it. So, it’s good to step aside from the everyday arguments with the regime preservers and point out that proxies and mercenaries seldom express themselves as forcefully and publicly as the Iraqi opposition has been doing recently.
The first point of disagreement—about the role of American officers in the aftermath—is a matter of principle but still somewhat contingent since nobody can know in advance what conditions will be in the post-Baathist republic. Many of the supplies required for rebuilding may be deliverable, for example, only by military transports. Nonetheless, a strong presumption has been established against any uniformed tutelage; the Iraqi National Congress, the Shiite forces, and the Kurds have united forcefully on the issue of self-government.
A second point of dissent hardly admits of any negotiation at all. Turkey has no rights in any part of Iraq, and least of all does it have any right to involve itself in the Kurdish areas, emancipated for a dozen years from Saddam’s rule, which adjoin its own borders. The Bush administration has been entirely too lenient with Ankara, not just on this point but on many related ones.
1) Kurdistan itself. It has taken decades for the Turkish state even to acknowledge that another people with a distinct language and culture lives within its borders. It’s sadly true that a Kurdish rebellion in southeastern Turkey was led by a “Shining Path”-type leader named Abdullah Ocalan (believe me: I interviewed him in Lebanon and found a Kurdish Pol Pot), but this in itself expresses the desperate conditions that obtain. Under steady civilian pressure from within and without, Turkish authorities are now prepared to concede on the Kurdish right to exist—principally because the European Union has insisted on the point. The time for Washington to make a statement about Kurdish rights in Turkey would be right about now. (We have only been waiting since Woodrow Wilson first murmured on the same point.)
2) Cyprus. If any regime in the world has collected a bigger sheaf of resolutions condemning its international behavior than the Iraqi one, it must be the Turks (followed perhaps by the Israelis).
Since 1974, Turkey has patrolled a line of forcible partition drawn by its own troops—the first occupation of the territory of another European state since 1945. It has expelled almost one-third of the original Greek inhabitants and further violated international law by importing settlers and colonists from the Anatolian mainland. It has been condemned for murder, rape, and theft by innumerable European court rulings. So abysmal are conditions in its sweatshop colony in northern Cyprus, policed by the notorious thug and proxy Rauf Denktash, that the majority of Turkish Cypriots have recently joined vast demonstrations calling for an end to his rule and a federal brotherhood with their Greek co-citizens. Turkey could not hang on to Cyprus for a day without vast tranches of American military aid that shield it from the real cost of the annexation. This aid should be cut off without any further shameful delay: It makes the United States an accomplice in a gross violation of international law and human rights.
3) Armenia. The destruction and dispossession of the Armenian people, in the first ethnocide of the 20th century, is not the responsibility of Turkey’s present-day elected government. Nonetheless, the Turkish authorities continue to deny historical responsibility and even to deny that the massacres occurred at all. Repeated proposals in the U.S. Senate to observe a day for Armenian-Americans (bravely sponsored for years by former Sen. Robert Dole) have been defeated by an alliance of defense contractors owed money by Turkey and an Israeli lobby that desires to avoid offending a “Muslim” ally. It is improbable that Turkey would cease its heavy consumption of American aid if the resolution passed: It is intolerable that aid should be granted as a collusion in such a denial.
A footnote: The Ottoman Empire employed many Kurdish mercenaries as shock troops in the killing of Armenians. I have interviewed Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and heard him offer an apology on the record for this blot: Kurds do not confess to crimes that they have not committed. Thus the moral element in one instance is, as one might expect, inseparably linked to the moral case in another.
It may now be argued that, in order to shorten the period of hostilities with Saddam Hussein and minimize casualties, the Iraqi border should be secured from all directions. But the Turks do not propose to help guarantee this border or to protect those who live within it. Rather, they propose to cross the frontier for no better reason than to aggrandize themselves and to prolong the subjection of their own Kurdish population. This doesn’t just disgrace the regime-change strategy. It actually destabilizes it. And it’s humiliating to see the president begging and bribing the Turks to do the wrong thing and to see them in return reject his offer. He should take their ugly egotism and selfishness as a compliment to his policy, cut off their aid, leave them to put their own case to the European Union, and tell them to get out of Cyprus into the bargain. Then we could be surer that we were really “remaking” the region.
Monday 29 October 2007 at 23:52
Much and all as I have reservations about the PKK, they are the expression of a genuine social movement–hardly surprising considering the unconscionable way Kurds have been fucked over by Turkish fascists and sold out by the ‘International Community’. Abdullah Öcalan is an arsehole–despite the day he got me off work in 1999–but he has, for whatever reason, been advocating a political resolution to the conflict since 2000. Hitchens is correct to point out the reactionary character of the Kemalist forces–and they are shitting themselves at the prospect of a viable Kurdish state. I support–unconditionally–as I have for three decades, the right of the Kurdish people to self-determination.
Tuesday 30 October 2007 at 0:02
I don’t see the rationale of why the headline of this post is in anyway relevant to the actual point of Hitchens’article’.
The point of Hitchens’piece is to tell the Turkish Islamiste-lite fuckwits to fuck off and the military junta-ists in the Turkish state to fuck off as well.
“When Kurds smell success, Turks go for guns”
http://www.puk.org/web/htm/news/nws/news071011.html
Tuesday 30 October 2007 at 0:11
Ooops — forgot to mention.
Victory to the the Kurdish people! A lasting and crushing defeat to their enemies! Fuck the Turks and fuck the Yanks.
Instead of selling weapons to Saudi fuckwits we should be giving, gratis, weapons to the Kurds.
Tuesday 30 October 2007 at 0:29
The rationale of the headline does not need to be relevant to the central point of Hitchens’ article. It is of relevance to those who would use support of the Kurds to allege an inconsistency of intellectual approach.
Tuesday 30 October 2007 at 0:33
Will, if it’s race war between Kurds and Turks you want then
a)
the name of the website needs a change
b)
Your position is essentially the same as the MHP ( Turkey’s facist party) and the loonier elemnts of the Turkish military
C)
Given the balance of forces involved, the last man standing in such a conflict won’t be a Kurd
Tuesday 30 October 2007 at 0:35
And this is supposed to be the echo chamber?
Tuesday 30 October 2007 at 0:36
“The rationale of the headline does not need to be relevant to the central point of Hitchens’ article”
Yes it fucking does.
“It is of relevance to those who would use support of the Kurds to allege an inconsistency of intellectual approach.”
Well they can fuck off as well. Why are you bothered about dickheads and fuckwits?
Tuesday 30 October 2007 at 0:37
Ignoring the sillier bits … Given the balance of forces involved, the last man standing in such a conflict won’t be a Kurd
Which is a good reason to give up and wait for death.
Tuesday 30 October 2007 at 0:46
Eamonn McDonagh:
Why do you think that national boundaries are sacrosanct? You can fuck off as well.
Up The kurds! Up the PKK as well. Anything to fuck you decentists off. I fucking despise the cretinistic shitheads that like to stand on the sidelines. Pathetically ignorant fyools. Scum and filth. Kurdish self determination! Fuck the Turks and the Yanks!
Tuesday 30 October 2007 at 4:06
E McD: Given the balance of forces involved, the last man standing in such a conflict won’t be a Kurd
Hakmao: Which is a good reason to give up and wait for death.[?]
No. It is an invitation to get better forces. The only proven way to do this is to arm up with a standing professional army in a secure nation state (or autonomous federal region) and for the first time in 500 fucking years the Kurds can actually do this. All this requires is some time (5 - 10 years?) and a modicum of security.
They have got the territory and if the Americans stick around they will have the time, but if some dipshit, stupid, dropkick, luminostic path, terrorists set up camps in that territory and chuck bombs at the regions second meatiest army (who also happen to be allied to the Yanks) they ain’t gonna have security (and the whole shitstorm might even cause the Yanks to leave sooner). And that will be a shame, imagine waiting 500 years for a realistic chance only for scummy little terrorists to lose it by shooting off their pathetic little loads way too soon.
Just think, 10 years from now the autonomous federal region of Iraq could have jet fighters and missiles and tank brigades and a real chance… so close.
Will: Up The kurds! Up the PKK as well. Anything to fuck you decentists off. I fucking despise the cretinistic shitheads that like to stand on the sidelines. Pathetically ignorant fyools. Scum and filth. Kurdish self determination! Fuck the Turks and the Yanks!
Up the Kurds! The best option they’ve got is to wipe the PKK out. The PKK are (at best) yesterdays heroes, they are now a liability and a danger to the Kurdish state. Abdullah Öcalan needs to meet an icepick.
Tuesday 30 October 2007 at 9:25
Your position is essentially the same as the MHP ( Turkey’s facist party)
Political support for self-determination is not the same as racist hysteria about ethnic uprisings. Equating the two is lazy and dishonest.
Tuesday 30 October 2007 at 10:48
Will and Hak (the advance guard) have it right (again).
All the other contributors to this blog should be sacked/purged/surgically removed.
Remember comrades - the popular front is not a tactic but the greatest crime!
Tuesday 30 October 2007 at 21:29
Why do you think that national boundaries are sacrosanct?
When they are guarded by large modern aggressive military forces.
Wednesday 31 October 2007 at 0:35
“Instead of selling weapons to Saudi fuckwits we should be giving, gratis, weapons to the Kurds.”
No, no we shouldn’t. We should lean on the Turks politically to allow for self determination (in the same way all the EU countries need a referendum to deal with the constitution), support Kurdish democrats and recognise the nees for them to have a home (I think rather than just recognizing countries we should recognize causes for self determination too to imbue them with a degree of legality).
Attempting to help the Kurds kill won’t help anyone: they’ll never throw the Turks out except by guerilla warfare and even then what is needed is for a failure of political will in Turkey. Otherwise they can stay forever and there is nothing anyone can do.
We should of course let the Saudis buy our stuff. We make money and they have less to spend on A-Q.