Middle East - Anthony Ham [41]
Kurds in Turkey
Turkey’s sparsely populated eastern and southeastern regions are home to perhaps seven million Kurds, while seven million more live elsewhere in the country, more or less integrated into mainstream Turkish society. Relations between Turks and Kurds soured after the formation of the republic, in which Atatürk’s reforms left little room for anything other than Turkishness. Unlike the Christians, Jews and Armenians, the Kurds were not guaranteed rights as a minority group under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne, which effectively created modern Turkey. Indeed, until relatively recently the Turkish government refused to even recognise the existence of the Kurds, insisting they be called ‘Mountain Turks’.
Since 1984, when Abdullah Öcalan formed the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a separatist conflict raged in Turkey’s Kurdish areas, prompting Turkey’s government to declare a permanent state of emergency. After 15 years and the deaths of some 30,000 people, Abdullah Öcalan was captured in 1999. The insurgency died out.
In 2002, the Turkish government finally gave some ground on the issue of Kurdish rights, approving broadcasts in Kurdish and giving the go-ahead for Kurdish to be taught in language schools. Emergency rule was lifted in the southeast. The government started compensating villagers displaced in the troubles and a conference entitled ‘The Kurdish Question in Turkey: Ways for a Democratic Settlement’ was held in İstanbul in 2006. Life for Kurds in the southeast has since become considerably easier: the press of harsh military rule and censorship has largely been lifted, and optimism has been fuelled by the outlook of accession with the EU. Although low-level fighting has resumed after the ceasefire was broken in 2004, few expect a return to the dark days of the 1980s.
Kurds in Iraq
Iraq is home to over four million Kurds, who live in the northern provinces of the country. The 1961 Kurdish campaign to secure independence from Iraq laid the foundations for an uneasy relationship between the Kurds and the Iraqi state. Cycles of conflict and détente have consistently characterised the relationship ever since. After the 1991 Gulf War, when an estimated two million Kurds fled across the mountains to Turkey and Iran, the Kurdish Autonomous Region was set up in northern Iraq under UN protection. Although ongoing Iraqi incursions and the bitter rivalry between the region’s two main parties – the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) – frequently threatened the north, Kurdish Iraq became a model for a future federal Iraqi system.
After the fall of Saddam, there were fears that the Kurds would take the opportunity and go their own way. However, after the Kurds won 17% of the vote in the 2005 elections, Kurdish leaders restated their commitment to a federal but unified Iraq and have, along with Shiite leaders, been at the forefront of moves to build a democratic and plural Iraq. Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, was Iraq’s president at the time of writing.
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The Lebanese Civil War rumbled on until 1990, but even when peace came, Israel controlled the south and Syria’s 30,000 troops in Lebanon had become the kingmakers in the fractured Lebanese polity. In the fifteen years of war, more than a million Lebanese are believed to have died.
Down in the Palestinian Territories, violence flared in 1987 in what became known as the ‘first intifada’ (the grass roots Palestinian uprising). Weary of ineffectual Palestinian politicians having achieved nothing of value for their people in the four decades since Israeli independence,