In this earlier post, I touched on Kurdish nationalism. But I haven’t really weighed in on the issue of “Greater Kurdistan,” i.e., the idea of sovereignty for a Kurdish nation straddling parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. In short, it’s not going to happen. And it seems to me that the violent and authoritarian outlook of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is prolonging and worsening the suffering of the Kurds.
One day in Suli we stopped into the local office of the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party (PCDK), which has close ties to the PKK. No one was available to speak with us officially, but we asked one of the guys about a banner on the wall that featured the face of a young woman. He explained that this woman had burned herself alive in honor of Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK’s imprisoned leader. In this report from the PCDK’s third Common Congress, Dr. Faik Gulphi is quoted as saying: “We take philosophy [sic] of Abdullah Öcalan as a core. To attend to Mr. ocalan [sic] is a duty of every Kurd.”
This is not a level-headed bunch. But I say this while acknowledging Turkey’s gross and longstanding repression of the Kurds, as well as its utter lack of restraint in battling the PKK. As my colleague Yigal Schleifer reports here, Turkey’s latest actions have only increased support for Öcalan and his martyrdom cult. Meanwhile, Kurdish nationalists insist that we “update our brains” and accept their most hardline terminology as our own (go here to read about the successful Kurdistan-related “Google bomb”).
There’s little recognition among PKK sympathizers that Turkey is never going to cede territory. The Kurdish struggle must therefore retain the moral high ground, pushing for cultural and political rights in realistic terms that might actually shame Turkey into doing the right thing. For as long as the PKK sets off its bombs, Turkey will be able to dismiss the Kurdish struggle as terrorism and nothing more. (There’s an imperfect parallel here to the situation in Nepal, not to mention Israel/Palestine.)
Sarkis Pogossian puts this in a wider context:
The vying claims of Eastern Anatolia and Greater Kurdistan alike–Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian‚ Iranian, Arab–could help tilt the balance towards a devastating war that would draw in the neighboring powers and potentially engulf both the Middle East and Caucasus. Or, if the various ethnicities of this region can work out some kind of decentralized pluralistic federalism that respects cultural rights and survival for all–and take the radical demand of extending this ethic in defiance of state borders–it could provide a model of autonomous co-existence for a dangerously polarizing, highly geo-strategic part of the world.
Regarding Iraqi Kurdistan, it’s conceivable for the region to secede and declare independence if Iraq becomes a failed state. I might cautiously support this, although there would be serious ripple effects. But whatever transpires, I can’t see the maximalist ideology of Greater Kurdistan doing much to smooth the situation.
[Go here to read the concluding post in my Iraqi Kurdistan series.]
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