Invisible Nation
Page 38
"The regime does things in reverse; instead they arrested me," said Toloui.
On August i five policemen and three policewomen arrived at her home in Sanandaj and took her in. Toloui spent sixty-six days under constant interrogation, at least seventeen of them in solitary confinement under a light that was never turned off. When she refused to sign a confession that she was a leader of the protests, her interrogator beat her ferociously and raped her. Still Toloui refused to make any confessions, and kept insisting they bring her a lawyer. When the authorities threatened to bring her children to the prison and burn them alive, she relented and signed whatever form they gave her. Upon her release, Toloui collected her children and fled across the border to Turkey, and eventually to asylum in the United States. In Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2006, she made one simple point at a conference on Kurdistan on Capitol Hill.
"We want exactly what the Iraqi Kurds have achieved—at least, if not more," Toloui told the crowd assembled in the U.S. Senate Dirksen Building.
WHILE IRAN AND Syria woke up to the problem state next door in 2003, Turkey had already been obsessed with it for a decade. More than ever, Turkey found itself pulled between the realities of the two continents it bridges. In December of that year, as Turkish-American relations sat in a trough, the European Union finally gave Turkey a date to start accession talks. The news gave hope to Turkish secularists and modernists, confirming what they had been working toward: the golden promise of membership in the European Union. For the Kurds in Turkey and in Iraq, this was a godsend. One clear condition for joining the E.U. was that Turkey improve the state's treatment of Turkey's estimated fourteen million Kurds. Any large military incursion into Iraq would scuttle Turkey's chances for sure.
Despite twenty years of war in the Turkish southeast, the Kurds living there did not immediately look across with yearning to Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkish Kurds speak a different dialect from their kin in Iraq, and even with no investment or economic aid coming from Ankara, the depressed Turkish Kurds remain decades ahead in terms of development. For a brief while after the encouraging news from Brussels, the Turkish government seemed to lighten up about the Kurdish issue, relaxing regulation of Kurdish language and culture. cafés in the city of Diyarbakir suddenly featured Kurdish musicians singing rebel songs that would have previously brought police knocking the door down. Kurds across the southeast, and the mothers of Turkish soldiers sent to war there, breathed a sigh of relief, but two important actors didn't seem to like the tranquility—Turkey's Kurdish rebels and the Turkish army.
With the American-assisted capture of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1999, Turkey seemed to have broken the rebels.* The guerrillas unilaterally declared a cease-fire and retreated, many of them taking shelter in Iraq's Qandil Mountains—one of Jalal Talabani's old hideouts from Saddam and familiar terrain to the PKK since the 1980s. Pro-PKK politicians in Turkish Kurdistan remained popular, but for the PKK fighters the future looked bleak. They would never be an acknowledged political party, and Turkey's offers of amnesty never convincingly included them.
A few months after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the PKK seemed even more bewildered, waiting to figure out what this strange new Middle Eastern order would bring. Near the Iraqi town of Makhmur, a small Kurdish enclave that had been outside the Kurdish safe zone on the road between Erbil and Mosul, a refugee camp as large as the town itself made home for about ten thousand Kurds from Turkey, part of the exodus that fled Turkey's twenty-year war with the PKK. Almost all the families in Makhmur left Turkey after an incident in 1994 when the Turkish air force bombed their villages. Both the Turkish state and the PKK fought dirty during the war, which claimed the lives of more than thirty thousand people, most of them Kurdish civilians caught in the cross fire in southeastern Turkey.
But there was no doubt about the allegiance of the Kurdish refugees in Makhmur—they had PKK flags and pictures of Abdullah Öcalan hung in nearly every house. One man showed me his paralyzed left arm, the result, he said, of being kept in a tank of freezing water while under interrogation in a Turkish prison. None of the refugees believed the Turkish offers of amnesty if they returned, although in all likelihood the PKK rebels don't really want the civilians at Makhmur to return to Turkey—they make a good symbol and a bargaining chip for the guerrillas.
In October 2003 I took a drive toward the Qandil Mountains, and found myself passing something of an international border. North of the PUK-controlled city of Ranya, I traveled through a PUK checkpoint, through some no-man's-land, and up to a hilltop radio checkpoint manned by PKK soldiers—passing from the de facto state of Iraqi Kurdistan to the rebel-held enclave of Ocalanistan. The PKK rebels had a small museum and cemetery there, honoring martyrs in their wars against Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds. There were also some fresh graves from clashes with Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
A PKK spokesman who went by the name "Habun" walked me in from the station a few hours into the mountains to a camp of PKK volunteers, many of them girls barely out of their teens. They dressed in drab fatigues and led an austere existence—cigarettes were the only vice I saw, with alcohol and sexual activity prohibited. Habun introduced me to a gamut of pan-Kurdish volunteers; recently, he said, many were coming across from Iran. They all spoke about freedom and cultural rights, much like the students at Sulimaniya University. The PKK still campaigned for Kurdish rights in all four of the Kurdistans, they said, but they seemed equally or more interested in winning improved living conditions for "the leader" Abdullah Öcalan in his island prison. Habun took me later that day to another camp deeper in the mountains, where the leader's brother Osman Öcalan gave a long lecture on the mission of the PKK, hoping that the United States would weigh upon Turkey to negotiate a meaningful amnesty.
"The U.S. should force Turkey to make a solution," he said. "The U.S. intervention is justified for Iraqis to live free. The desire for the Kurds to live free is just as legitimate." Öcalan said he expected the Americans to soon realize that the PKK was a much greater force for democracy than the government of Turkey. But he didn't sound very convinced himself, and his followers had been hard at work blasting deep bomb shelters into the cliffs around Qandil, deep enough to withstand attacks from American bunker-buster bombs, which they feared might soon fall on Qandil.
"The main point is to prevent the beginning of the war. War will not solve the problems, but Turkey has to give up its problematic policies," Öcalan said, standing beneath a billboard-size portrait of his brother Abdullah painted on the rocks halfway up the mountainside. The next day I walked back out, passing the joyful young recruits as they hand-carried lumber and supplies into the mountains.
On June i, 2004, the PKK ended its five-year cease-fire. Secretly, some members of the Turkish army couldn't have been happier. The Turkish military always considered itself the true guardian of Ataturk's dream of a secular state, but international pressure had more recently pushed them to tone down their influence in government. The rise of a pro-Islamist party, the AK, also worried them. Another military crisis would bring them again to the center of power.
Despite the fiery rhetoric, the PKK took a while to rekindle the war from the Qandil base. The violence didn't start until 2005, when small bombs and booby traps were aimed at Turkish soldiers. In late 2005, elements within the Turkish military tried to fan the flames. On November 9, in the Kurdish town of Semdinli, near the PKK's hottest front where the borders of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq meet, a man threw two grenades into a bookstore and ran. One customer was killed. The shop's owner, Se-feri Yilmaz, who had spent fifteen years in prison for pro-Kurdish activities, was unhurt in the explosion, and along with some townspeople was able to apprehend the attacker and two men waiting in a getaway car. A Turkish court later identified the attacker and the driver as government intelligence officers; the third man was an ex-PKK informer. The car was loaded with weapons. A senior Turkish general, Year Büyükanit, later commented that he knew the attacker and that he was "a good fellow."
The following year Büyükanit was promoted from commandant of the army to commander of all Turkish Armed Forces.15
The smoldering conflict helped create a perfect storm of Turkish, Kurdish, and American antagonism, which looked ready to burst in the summer of 2006. The PKK killed Turkish soldiers at a slow but determined pace, peaking with the deaths of eighteen soldiers in combat during the month of July. At the same time, Israel launched its cross-border raid into Lebanon against the militant Shi'ite group Hezbollah, a terrible blunder in everyone's estimation—except the Turks'. As Washington nodded its approval of the Israeli strike in self-defense, the Turkish public angrily took up the slogan "Why Lebanon and not Qandil?"
If America was unwilling to help the Turks against the PKK in 2003, by 2006 America was almost incapable. The U.S. military already labored under the strain of regular troop rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan and hardly wanted to open another front in the only peaceful corner of their occupation. Washington sent a former Air Force general, Joseph Ralston, as the "Special Presidential Envoy to Turkey for Countering the PKK." The Turks knew Ralston from his time as supreme allied commander of NATO, but Turkish-American relations still swirled in a pool of distrust. Upon Ralston's arrival, Ankara quickly figured out that his main goal was to prevent the Turks from making any major cross-border raids into Iraq. The local press started to label Ralston as the American envoy to the PKK. Turkey's upcoming general elections threw more fuel on the fire, as did the attitude of Iraqi Kurds.
From within the safety of Iraq, the Kurdish leadership gave Ankara a hearty Bronx cheer. Hiding behind the apron of the American military occupation, the Kurds felt no need to pander to Turkey and left the camp in Qandil alone, though its location remained an open secret. The Kurdish regional prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, lectured the Turks from Erbil.
"They cannot solve the PKK problem through military means. In the mid-nineties we carried out joint military operations with Turkey," Nechirvan said. He paused and quickly added, "It will never happen again, but what was the result? Nothing. We have to help the PKK and Turkey understand that."
When I asked KDP security chief Masrour Barzani if he would arrest the PKK's leadership even if he stumbled upon them in his garden, he immediately answered no. Talabani, as president, spoke less stridently, but still proposed negotiation, chiding the PKK leaders that the age of guerrilla war had passed. "We have advised them to end the armed struggle," Talabani said. "This is not the era of Mao or Che Guevara. It's a new world—globalization is not permitting armed struggle to be successful."
Barzani and Talabani succeeded in pressuring the PKK into calling a cease-fire in October 2006, but this did nothing to stem the Turkish anger. Meanwhile, the guerrillas had reorganized yet again. Their effective leader, Murat Karayilan, explained that they now sought a confederation of autonomous Kurdistans in Turkey, Syria, and Iran—all based exactly upon the system enjoyed by the Kurds of Iraq.16 "Turkey wants us to put our weapons down. They want disarmament for us; they are not satisfied with cease-fire. But if that's what they want, let's have dialogue about a democratic solution for our people and we are ready to put down our weapons," said Karayilan, on the day he declared yet another end to the fighting.
Karayilan explained that the movement now had political wings in each of the four countries. The Iranian members of the PKK had split off completely to form their own armed wing, the Free Life in Kurdistan Party (PJAK). Karayilan suggested that if the CIA wanted to use PJAK to destabilize Iran, it would be a splendid idea. The split seemed almost tailor-made, allowing the Turkish rebels to try for a settlement while letting their Iranian cohorts fight on. The possibility of American support for the anti-Iranian portion of the PKK seemed more plausible as time passed and the U.S. government dragged its feet about classifying PJAK as an official "foreign terrorist organization," though it had previously denounced the PKK by any of its fronts or pseudonyms.* The Turks rejected the cease-fire out of hand within hours of the PICK announcement, saying they would not negotiate with terrorists. It seemed as accurate to say they wouldn't negotiate with Kurds.
The Turkish government repeatedly refused to discuss the PKK matter directly with Barzani as the president of the Kurdish region. Increasingly for Turkish politicians and the public alike, the issue of the PKK concealed an even greater threat: the rise of Kurdistan. While Iraqi Kurds remained invisible to most Americans and Europeans, the Turkish public watched their every move and decried how some Iraqi Kurds referred to their region as "southern Kurdistan," implying that northern Kurdistan—or southeastern Turkey—would also soon join the game. It escaped no one that when the Iraqi Kurds arrested a pro-PKK politician, he was released only days later. Turks continued to believe that America had a secret plan to found a Kurdish nation on their doorstep, and eventually inside their door.
One former Turkish Air Force officer explained it bluntly. "The main problem is how they use their oil," said Mesut Hakki Ca?in, now a professor of international relations at Istanbul's Yeditepe University. "Within ten years the Kurds will have an army and air force, just like Israel, and they will be demanding Turkish territory."17
The long-term fear was not so unreasonable. Over the decades, Kurds in Turkey might decide they could never have their cultural rights there, and a Kurdish state in Iraq might well have designs on the rest of the Kurdish-speaking region. It was the American angle that really had Ca?in spooked. He had spent twenty minutes explaining how much he liked the United States and valued his time there on a military exchange in Kansas. Real hurt mixed with the anger in Ca?jn's face when he said, his voice rising in pitch, "The U.S. says, 'Don't worry,' but now we have a confidence problem with the U.S. Do you want the Turks as allies or as enemies?"
By spring 2007, the Lebanon example had reared its head again. Even the Israeli government had concluded that its incursion had shown the trouble with fighting asymmetric wars, in which a huge, powerful army is embarrassed by a smaller elusive foe using guerrilla tactics. American officials cautioned the Turks that they might have the same problem in any operation across the border into Iraq. Washington also pushed the Iraqi Kurds to refrain from further Turk-baiting, but in April 2007 a months old interview with Masoud Barzani sent the Turks around the bend. Commenting on the future referendum on Kirkuk, Barzani said: "Turkey is not allowed to intervene in the Kirkuk issue and if it does, we will interfere in Diyarbakir and other cities in Turkey."18 He later toned down the rhetoric, but the damage had been done, and the Turkish military massed a hundred thousand troops along the border.
In the United States, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice both resorted to warning the Turks publicly not to invade Iraqi Kurdistan, which implied that they thought the private diplomatic channels were not getting the message through. The tension ramped up and up until the July 22 elections, when the ruling AK Party won a much stronger mandate, with support not just from its religious base but also from secularists, liberals, and even Kurdish nationalists, tired of their entrenched politicians taking them for granted. The clear loser was the Turkish military. The day after the vote, the saber rattling looked to have been a preelection charade. An aide to the newly confident Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an told the Guardian newspaper, "There's been 26 cross-border operations in 30 years. If Turkey had the feeling that a 27th would put an end to the PKK, it would not blink."19
Despite the setback, the Turkish military wasn't going to share its power easily and it got some unexpected help—from the PKK. In the months after the elections the rebels staged several raids from across the Iraqi border, killing dozens of Turkish soldiers. Turkish public opinion stirred itself into a frenzy, with every party competing to outdo the other with bellicose anti-Kurdish rhetoric. Scrambling for cover, Prime Minister Erdo?an pushed a measure through parliament on October 17, authorizing military intervention into Northern Iraq, and the language left unclear if the incursion would be limited to the PKK. While the Iraqi Kurds protested that the
y had nothing to do with the guerrillas, the PKK kept poking Turkey, clearly hoping to draw the army into the quagmire of Iraq. In one ambush on October 21, near the Turkish town of Daglica, the guerrillas killed twelve soldiers and took another eight prisoner.
The Turkish military never officially admitted that the soldiers had been captured, and when Kurdish politicians from Turkey flew to Erbil, where the KRG helped facilitate the prisoners' release, nationalist politicians didn't bother to celebrate. Instead they lashed out at the Kurds in Iraq, the Kurds in the Turkish parliament, and even Kurds in the Turkish army (some of the captured soldiers were of Kurdish origin, and that seemed enough to imply that they must have gone along willingly—all eight soldiers were charged with neglect of their duty). It was a tricky paradox for the Turks to handle: they wanted to hold the Kurdistan Regional Government responsible for the actions of the PKK, all the while trying to deny that such an entity existed. When Erdo?an tried to open up a back-channel negotiation with KRG prime minister Nechirvan Barzani, the Turkish military made it public and ruined the chance.20
PKK guerrillas maintained that they had only been acting in self-defense and were ready to observe their cease-fire from the previous October. According to a high-ranking member of the PKK, they had exercised this self-defense 485 times during the year, sometimes quite deep into Turkish territory.21 As usual, interviews with PKK officials were a bit stilted. More to the point was a casual encounter with some rebels near the Turkish border.
"Why does everyone call us terrorists?" was the first thing a Kalashnikov-toting guerrilla asked. He then added, "We have a right to defend our nationality. The Turkish government for years has given the Kurds no rights, no schools, no language. We have a right to live in freedom like the Kurds of Iraq."22