Alternatives International

The Kurdish Moment: Opportunity and Peril

Conn Hallinan — 2013-09-01T20:35:25Z

Turmoil in Iraq and Syria, along with political developments in Turkey, has created unprecedented opportunity for the Middle East's long-suffering Kurds.

For almost a century, the Kurds—one of the world's largest ethnic groups without its own state—have been deceived and double-crossed, their language and culture suppressed, their villages burned and bombed, and their people scattered. But because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Syrian civil war, and Turkish politics, they have been suddenly transformed from pawn to major player in a pivotal part of the Middle East.

The Kurds—who speak a language distantly related to Farsi, the dominant language of Iran—straddle the borders of northeastern Syria, northern Iraq, and western Iran, and constitute a local majority in parts of eastern and southern Turkey. At between 25 and 30 million strong, they have long yearned to establish their own state. Now, with their traditional foes weakened by invasion, civil war, and political discord, the Kurds are suddenly in the catbird's seat.

But in the Middle East that can be a very tricky place to dwell.

The Kurds' current ascent began when the U.S. established a no-fly zone over northern Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War. When the Americans invaded and overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iraqi Kurds saw their opportunity: they seized three oil-rich northern provinces, set up a parliament, established a capital at Erbil, and mobilized their formidable militia, the Peshmerga. Over the past decade, the Kurdish region has gone from one of the poorest regions in Iraq to one of the most affluent, fueled in the main by energy sales to Turkey and Iran.

It is an astounding turn of fate.

Twenty-nine years ago the Turkish government was burning Kurdish villages and scattering refugees throughout the region. Some 45,000 people—mostly Kurds— lost their lives in that long-running conflict. Today, Turkey is negotiating with its traditional nemesis, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and trying to cut a peace deal that would deliver Kurdish support to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's push to amend Turkey's constitution and give himself another decade in power.

In 1988, Saddam Hussein dropped poison gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing between 3,000 and 5,000 people. Today, the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki may be outraged by the Kurds' seizure of oil assets, but the Baghdad regime is so preoccupied by a sectarian-led bombing campaign against Shiite communities that it is in no position to do more than protest. Last November, the Maliki government backed away from a potential showdown with the Peshmerga in the northern town of Tuz Khurmatu.

Fifty years ago the Syrian government stripped citizenship rights from 20 percent of its Kurdish minority—Kurds make up about 10 percent of that country's population—creating between 300,000 and 500,000 stateless people. Today, Syria's Kurdish regions are largely independent because the Damascus regime, locked in a life and death struggle with foreign and domestic insurgents, has abandoned the northern and eastern parts of the country.

Only in Iran are Kurds in much the same situation they were a decade ago, but with Tehran's energy focused on its worsening economic situation and avoiding a confrontation with the United States over its nuclear program, that too could change.

Fragile Opportunities

In short, are the Kurds' stars finally coming into alignment?

Maybe and maybe not. The Kurds' current opportunities are fragile, relying on the transitory needs or current disarray of their traditional foes, the central governments of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

Turkey is a case in point.

Erdogan needs the votes of Kurdish parliamentarians to put a new constitution up for a referendum in time for the 2014 elections. Ending the conflict with the Kurds could also boost Turkey's application for European Union membership and burnish Ankara's regional leadership credentials. The latter have been tarnished by Erdogan's recent missteps, including his unpopular support for the Syrian insurgents and his increasingly authoritarianinternal policies.

Most Kurds would like to end the fighting as well, but that will require concessions by the Erdogan government on the issues of parliamentary representation and the right of Kurds to educate their children in their own language.

But Erdogan has balked at these two demands, and the Kurds are growing impatient. PKK leader Cemil Bayik recently warned that “September 1 is the deadline” for a deal and a failure to reach an agreement by then “will be understood that the aim [of the Turkish government] is not a solution.” Given the long history of animosity, it would not take much to unravel peace talks between the two parties.

Syria's Kurds have threaded a hazardous path between their desire for autonomy—some would like full independence—and not taking sides in the current civil war. Indeed, thefighting going on in northern and eastern Syria is not between the insurgents and the Assad government, but between the Kurdish Democratic Union and the combined forces of the extremist al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, both of which are affiliated with al-Qaeda.

Most of Syria's oil reserves are in the Kurdish region and control of them would provide a financial base for whatever side emerges victorious.

The Assad regime may have abandoned the north, but Damascus recently has made headway against the insurgency, gains greatly aided by infighting among the opposition. So far the war is a stalemate, but it might not stay that way forever. Even Syrians opposed to the Assad government are tired of the fighting, and most have no love for the sectarian groups that have increasingly taken over the war against the Damascus regime. In short, the current autonomy of Syria's Kurds may be a fleeting thing.

Of course, it is possible that the Syrian Kurds might cut a deal with Assad: help drive the insurgents out of the area—maybe in alliance with the Iraqi Kurds—in exchange for greater autonomy. That would enrage both the Turks and the Maliki government, but it is not clear either could do much about it.

Erdogan's support for the Syrian insurgents is widely unpopular in Turkey, and any direct intervention by the Turks to block autonomy for Syria's Kurds would put Ankara in the middle of a civil war. With an election looming next year, that is not a move Erdogan wants to make. As for Iraq, thanks to the U.S.-led dismantling of Saddam Hussein's army, Baghdad doesn't have the capabilities to take on the Peshmerga at this point.

What will finally emerge is hard to predict, except that a return to the past seems unlikely. Iraq's Kurds can only be dislodged by a major invasion from Turkey in cooperation with the Baghdad government. Given that Kurdish oil and gas are increasingly important to the Turkish economy, and that any invasion would be costly, why would Ankara do that?

And cooperation between Baghdad and Ankara has been soured by Turkey's willingness to ignore Baghdad's protests over its exploitation of Kurdish-controlled (but Iraqi-owned) oil and Turkish support for the Sunni extremists trying to overthrow Assad. Those same extremists are massacring Shiite supporters of the Maliki government in Basra, Baghdad, and Karbala.

Turkey's Kurds—between 20 and 25 million, the largest Kurdish concentration in the world—are on a knife's edge. There is little doubt that the average Turkish Kurd wants the long-running conflict to end, as do the Turks as well. But Erdogan is dragging his feet on the key peace issues, and the PKK may decide it is time to pick up the gun again and return to the old Kurdish adage: trust only the mountains.

Simple Solutions

The solution to all this is not all that difficult.

For Turkey, granting Kurdish language rights and cultural autonomy, and reducing the minimum percentage of votes to serve in the Turkish parliament from its current 10 percent, would probably do the job.

For Syria, the formula for peace would be much the same, with the added move of restoring citizenship to almost half a million now stateless Kurds. But that is only likely to happen after a ceasefire and a political settlement of the civil war.

The Iraqi government will have to bite the bullet, recognize that an autonomous Kurdish area is a reality, and work out a deal to share oil and gas revenue.

As long as Iran is faced with an attack by the United States or Israel, its Kurds will be out in the cold. Washington and its allies should keep in mind that sanctions and threats of war make any peaceful resolution of long-standing grievances for Iran's minorities—which also include Azeris, Baluchs, and Arabs—impossible. If the United States is truly concerned about minorities in Iran, it should find a way to negotiate with Tehran over its nuclear program.

But the Iranian government, too, would do well to seriously engage with its Kurdish population. Autonomy for the Kurds is out of the bag and not about to go back in, regardless of what the final outcomes in Syria and Turkey are. Sooner or later, Iran will have to confront the same decision that governments in Damascus, Ankara, and Baghdad now face: recognition and autonomy, or war and instability.

Source: http://fpif.org/the-kurdish-moment-opportunity-and-peril/

The Algebra of Occupation

Conn Hallinan — 2008-01-06T20:24:03Z

In 1805, the French army out maneuvered, outsmarted, and outfought
the combined armies of Russia and Austria at Austerlitz. Three years
later it would flounder against a rag-tag collection of Spanish
guerrillas.

In 1967, it took six days for the Israeli army to smash Egypt,
Jordan, and Syria and seize the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the
Sinai Peninsula. In 2006, a Shiite militia fought the mightiest army
in the Middle East to a bloody standstill in Lebanon.

In 1991, it took four days of ground combat for the United States to
crush Saddam Hussein's army in the Gulf War. U.S. losses were 148
dead and 647 wounded. After more than five years of war in Iraq, U.S.
losses are approaching 4,000, with over 50,000 wounded; 2007 is
already the deadliest year of the war for the United States.

In each case, a great army won a decisive victory only to see that
victory canceled out by what T.E. Lawrence once called the “algebra
of occupation.” Writing about the British occupation of Iraq
following the Ottoman Empire's collapse in World War I, Lawrence put
his finger on the formula that has doomed virtually every military
force that has tried to quell a restive population.

Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk has cited Lawrence to this
effect: “Rebellion must have an unassailable base…it must have a
sophisticated alien enemy, in the form a disciplined army of
occupation too small to dominate the whole area effectively from
fortified posts. It must have a friendly population, not actively
friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel
movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 percent active in
a striking force, and 98 percent passive sympathy. Granted mobility,
security…time and doctrine…victory will rest with the insurgents, for
the algebraical factors are in the end decisive.”

Failures of Occupation

There is an inexorable trajectory to this process. An army vanquishes
another army, only to find that wars don't always end when generals
surrender and capitals fall. When a few locals take up arms because
they object to being occupied by “aliens,” the occupiers act like
armies, which are designed to kill people, not to win their hearts
and minds.

So the occupiers break down doors and search for weapons, terrorizing
and humiliating people in the process. They call in air strikes,
which kill innocent bystanders. They choke off commerce and impose
curfews to teach the locals a lesson, lessons that are never learned.
For over 800 years the English beat, imprisoned, transported, shot,
and hung hundreds of thousands of Irish, and it made the natives not
the slightest bit quieter or more respectful. Indeed it made them
quite the opposite.

In this process of trying to get the occupied to accept defeat, a
certain corruption of spirit begins to seep into the soul of an army,
transforming it from a war-fighting machine into a kind of monster.

Listen to some of these voices.

Reporter Chris Hedges, who talked with solders, officers, and medical
personnel in Iraq, said his interviews “revealed disturbing patterns
of behavior by American troops: innocents terrorized during midnight
raids, civilian cars fired upon when they got too close to supply
columns. The campaign against a mostly invisible enemy, many veterans
said, has given rise to a culture of fear and even hatred among U.S.
forces, many of whom, losing ground and beleaguered, have, in effect,
declared war on all Iraqis.” Sgt. Camilo Mejia told Hedges that, as
far as the deaths of Iraqis at checkpoints, “This sort of killing of
civilians has long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment.”

Except among the survivors and relatives, of course, who now know who
their enemy is. “Our children are being killed. Our homes are being
destroyed. We are bombed. What should we do?” asks Abdul Qader, who
lost seven family members in a June 29 U.S. air strike that killed 60
people in southern Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

“The Americans are killing and destroying a village just in pursuit
of one person [Osama bin-Ladin],” one man told The New York Times.
“So now we have understood that the Americans are a curse on us, and
they are here just to destroy Afghanistan.”

Israeli psychologist Nofer Ishai-Karen and psychology professor Joel
Elitzur interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers who served in the Occupied
Territories. They found that the soldiers routinely engaged in
murder, assault, threats and humiliation, and many of them enjoyed it.

“The truth is that I love this mess—I enjoy it. It is like being on
drugs,” one soldier told them. Another said, “What is great is that
you don't have to follow any law or rule. You feel you are the law,
you decide. Once you go into the Occupied Territories, you are God.”

One soldier told a story about seeing a four-year-old boy playing in
the sand in his front yard during a curfew in Rafah. The soldier says
his officer “grabbed the boy. He broke his hand here at the wrist,
broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times,
and left. We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock…
the next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers
are already starting to do the same thing.”

A few hours with the works of Goya will give one an idea of how the
French army behaved in Spain.

Against All Enemies

An occupation is not a war against an army, it is a war against all.
There are no front lines and no distinguishing uniforms, only an
ambush or a roadside bomb that strikes without warning.

And when one does, a veteran told Hedges, “people just open up.” A
roadside bomb in 2005 set off a massacre by U.S. Marines in Haditha
that killed 24 civilians. On March 4, 2007, following a suicide bomb,
Marines in Afghanistan went on a rampage that killed 12 civilians.
Occupation is only possible if the occupied are reduced to a category
that places them outside the boundaries of a shared humanity So the
Iraqis becomes “Hajji,” just as two generations ago the Vietnamese
became “Slopes.” The Israeli right routinely refers to the
Palestinians as “cockroaches.”

Soon, everyone becomes an enemy.

When U.S. helicopter gun ships killed 16 people October 23 in a small
northern Iraqi village near Tikrit, military officials said the dead
were insurgents, because many of them were “military-age males,” a
category that embraces about one-third of the population.

Not many “hearts and minds” were won this past October near Tikrit.

What Soldiers Do

But “winning over the population,” continues to be the illusion of
every occupier. Testifying before Congress, U.S. Defense Secretary
Robert Gates said, “Army soldiers can expect to be tasked with
reviving public services, rebuilding infrastructure, and promoting
good government.”

And then there is the real world.

A survey conducted by the Office of the Surgeon General of the U.S.
Army Medical Command found that only 38% of Marines and 47% of Army
soldiers thought civilians should be treated with dignity. Some 55%
of Army soldiers and 40% of Marines said they would report the
killing of innocent civilians.

A recent ABC/BBC poll found that 78% of Iraqis say things are going
badly for the country as a whole, 47% support immediate U.S. troop
withdrawal while 79% oppose the presence of coalition forces, and 57%
support violence against coalition forces.

Those are the “algebraical factors” of occupation, and as Lawrence
concludes, “against them perfections of means and spirit struggle
quite in vain.”

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.