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Rocking the Steady: Iraqi Kurdistan |
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The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) has condemned Turkey’s recent air strikes in Iraqi Kurdistan, calling it “a flagrant violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.” As Alex T. noted in a recent post, the violence also risks yet further destabilization in Iraq, and does so in a region that has until now been an exception to the country’s rule of violence and chaos.
In a interview conducted shortly before the recent developments, NYU Professor of Middle Eastern Studies Ahmed Ferhadi, himself an Iraqi Kurd, spoke of the peaceful situation previously seen in the region.
When Ferhadi traveled to his homeland in the summer of 2007, he “found things to be normal.” He described midnight scenes from his trip: people traveling freely without fear, leisurely congregating in public spaces to enjoy the summer nights.
He overheard conversations in Kurdish, Turkish, Persian and Arabic — an indication of the region’s draw. Not only are displaced Iraqis attracted by the stability and prosperity, he explained, but foreigners are coming to find work too.
“The economy is booming,” Ferhadi said, largely a result of Turkey’s economic investment in the region. He believed this investment would act as a deterrent to Turkish military action in the region, a view echoed in a Nov. 6 New York Times article. Unfortunately, that deterrent was not enough, and the long-steady region has been shaken.
To find the roots of this recently threatened peace, one must look back to the days following the Gulf War, after Kuwait’s liberation.
At that time, former president George H.W. Bush urged “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”
Shias rose up in the South, Kurds in the North, and when the heavy hand of Saddam Hussein put them down, they received no assistance from the U.S. government.
“They were slaughtered,†said Ferhadi.
After the slaughter, an estimated 1.5 million Kurds fled Iraq to Turkey and Iran, raising concerns in the latter two countries. The problems this caused with Iran didn’t distress the U.S. government, Ferhadi said, “but with Turkey as a strong ally and a member of NATO, they [the U.S.] had to do something.â€Â
Collaborative operations between the U.S., England, France and the Dutch eventually forced Saddam Hussein to withdraw his army and his administration from the region. Kurdish refugees began to return, and in 1992 parliamentary and presidential elections were held for the new Kurdistan Regional Government.
Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the KRG has enjoyed relative autonomy, overseeing the country’s most stable region. In the wake of the air strikes, however, that status may change.
The PKK has vowed retaliation for the attacks. If such retaliations do occur, Turkey will no doubt respond with more cross-border strikes, and the nightmare in Iraq will intensify.
That the United States would sit by in silent complicity as Turkey rocks the most consistently stable region of Iraq is inexcusable, and is yet one more failure from our post 9/11 government.
What’s more interesting is why the Kurdish government hasn’t done more to curtail the rebels. As you say, Kurdistan is the most stable place in Iraq. It has begun to revive its economy, draw foreign investments, and resemble a functioning state. When this kind of stuff happens, governments are usually loathe to interrupt the process with something as disruptive as international warfare. It seems the Kurdish government would have every reason to bargain with Turkey and its rebel factions to keep the growth going.
The Turkish government has no desire to bargain with the Kurds in Iraq. The autonomy they see there is dangerous for them, encouraging their own Kurdish population (a severely repressed one) to dream of freedom.
The PKK’s recent violence (on the heels of a long ceasefire) is troubling, but many would argue is not the main reason for the Turkish incursion into the area. When I was speaking with Professor Ferhadi, he interpreted it as an excuse to repress the Kurds. Take that how you will, but the onus for working against such an incursion rested with the United States, who balked at checking a NATO ally.
The Iraqi government, and by extension the regional government in Iraqi Kurdistan, didn’t know about the strikes until after the fact, and so had no chance of negotiating. The US did.
The Kurds only knew that the Turkish army was amassed and waiting for them across the border, the strong arm of a government that has repressed their Kurdish population throughout the nation’s existence. Even if the PKK were disbanded the Kurds would still feel threatened, and rightly so.
The Iraqi Kurds were not, as Mr Ferhadi alleges, “slaughtered” after Operation Desert Storm. In fact, the U.S. (and several European allies) undertook a large humanitarian relief operation, called Operation Provide Comfort. The latter stages of this operation included the deployment of roughly one U.S. Army division to the Kurdish provinces in Iraq, in order to provide security. The first chapter of Thomas Ricks’ book ‘Fiasco’ details how this operation not only served as a precedent for H.W. Bush’s intervention in Somalia, but also led to Paul Wolfowitz’s idea of establishing ethnic havens inside Iraq, sort of a de facto partition. As a result of Provide Comfort, the U.S. demonstrated that it–not the Baathist government under Saddam Hussein–was responsible for the security of the Iraqi Kurdish provinces, thus paving the way for these provinces’ autonomy.
Now that the Iraqi Kurds have it, by and large, they’re not going to risk it. The Kurdistan Regional Government seems to have abandoned dreams of becoming a Kurdish home state, although its component parties (the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and the Kurdish Democratic Party) never really have. They can’t be more open to deliberation with the Turks because they’re not recognized as an official governmental body with any kind of sovereignty, and they can’t crack down on the PKK because they don’t want to incite a PKK backlash.
And if Turkey’s action is compared to the anti-PKK campaigns it undertook in the mid-1990s, this recent action can’t be seen as anything other than “limited”. If Turkey wanted the PKK done and gone, they could do it, despite the human and fiscal costs of doing so. But they do not want a regional war with Kurdish nationalism the central issue, and they do not want to destabilize the KRG (and the Turkish-Iraqi border along with it). Again, they could easily do these things if that was their policy. But they’re not, so it isn’t. Turkey’s actions indicate that its primary objective is to prevent any further radicalization of the Kurdish population in Turkey. And for its part, the U.S. would rather not decide between its NATO ally (Turkey) and the ethnic minority it has sponsored since 1992 (the Kurds and KRG). America needs Turkey to keep its border with Iraq open so that supplies and development aid can pour through; it needs the KRG to keep a lid on Kurdish militancy in the northern provinces. The KRG’s peshmerga, recall, are perhaps the most efficient indigenous fighting force in Iraq.
So, there is a delicate balance to be struck here, and Turkey clearly does not want to upset it. If they did, they wouldn’t have consulted the U.S. at all in the matter. So I strongly discount the potential for wider conflict to emerge from this, and I am very skeptical of any ulterior motives on the part of any actor involved here.
I think I agree with your outline of the situation. What I’m concerned with, and what I believe the author here is concerned with, is escalation. Right now, things are limited. Both sides are trying to appear tough or save face, or protect very narrow interests in this delicate balance. The loose element here might be the PKK. I’m sure they realize they can be wiped out by Turkey if it came to that, but I’m not convinced that matters to them.
Basically, if people’s hands get forced in the region, things go downhill very quickly. It’s our job, as occupiers, to at least try to limit bloodshed and push people away from the brink.