Bleeding Edge

Turkey’s dictator Mr Erdogan, has swept asunder many years of progress toward friendly relations with the Kurdish powder-keg that is silently burning inside his own country’s territory, and in one fell swoop, he has trashed all international norms, along with any notion of real or imagined nationhood.

Yet he did this with the full complicity of the United States of America and of it’s leader Mr Donald Trump who seems to be hellbent in assisting Mr Assad and Mr Putin reclaim their full control over Syria and also unleashing the ISIS terrorists all over again to conspire and terrorize in a new terror campaign, against the World.

Of course unbeknownst to both idiots, they have done a great disservice to their own people and are acting at their own peril, because when they show such disdain for Syria’s borders — they are bound to feel the same in their own country’s porous and pliable borders, sooner rather than later…

As for the notion that there is no alternative to the Turkish invasion, bloody incursion, and Turkish support for the ISIS insurrection inside Syria — Mr Erdogan is found to be lying through his teeth.

And because his lies are further countered by the fact that real negotiations between Turkey & the Kurdish representatives of PKK, that started in 2012, were so successful, that they led to a permanent ceasefire, open trade, and a boosting of all efforts to secure a permanent peace, and a full resolution of all issues and divisions between the two sides — he is also found to be a real idiot.

Because he could have reaped the benefit of Peace, since indeed, the talks were so successful that they even prompted the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan to publish a letter endorsing the ceasefire, the disarmament, and the withdrawal of PKK fighters, and even a general call for an end to the insurgency. As a matter of fact, based on the perceived success of the talks, even PKK’s captured leader Mr Ocalan, had predicted that 2013 would be the year in which the Turkish Kurdish issues would be resolved peacefully.

Additionally, the PKK’s military leader, Cemil Bayik, told the BBC three years later, that “we don’t want to separate from Turkey and set up our own state. Instead, we want to live within the borders of Turkey on our own land freely.”

These talks however, broke down in 2015 against the backdrop of the Syrian war and the rise of PKK as an ally of the United States in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS) whose defeat was credited largely to the PKK’s Syrian affiliate, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) working hard for the liberation of the Kurdish territories in Syria.

Turkey instead of cheering the defeat of ISIS, became belligerent, and bitterly opposed to the US-YPG alliance, and demanded that the PKK halt its resumption of attacks on ISIS targets and disarms its fighters fully, prior to any furtherance of the Talks, or even engaging in negotiations for talks…

Turkey responded to the breakdown and resumption of violence with a brutal crackdown in the southeast of the country and on the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party – the HDP, and it follows through on that campaign of terror in it’s wholesale drive into Syria.

Nonetheless, in a statement issued from prison earlier this year that envisioned an understanding between Turkey and Syrian Kurdish forces believed to be aligned with the PKK, Mr Ocalan declared that “we believe, with regard to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the problems in Syria should be resolved within the framework of the unity of Syria, based on constitutional guarantees and local democratic perspectives. In this regard, it should be sensitive to Turkey’s concerns.”

Turkey’s emergence as one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s foremost investors and trading partners in exchange for Iraqi Kurdish acquiescence in Turkish countering the PKK’s presence in the region could have provided inspiration for a US-sponsored safe zone in northern Syria that Washington and Ankara had contemplated.

The Turkish-Kurdish understanding that enabled Turkey to allow an armed Iraqi Kurdish force to transit Turkish territory in 2014 to help prevent the Islamic State from conquering the Syrian city of Kobani, has now evaporated.

A safe zone would have helped “realign the relationship between Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its Syrian offshoot, however the safe-zone arrangements as envisioned by drawing down the YPG presence along the border, as a good starting point for reining-in the PKK, improving US ties with Ankara, and helping avoid a hugely destructive Turkish intervention in Syria, is now lost as an opportunity that could have created the beginnings of a sustainable solution that would have benefitted Turkey as well as the Kurds…

Naturally now, Turkey, like much of the previous Middle Eastern dictators, like Saddam Hussein who was hanged with a noose around his head — is discovering that what goes around, comes around.

And this immutable law of karma, is now taking massive effect, because President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to have grossly miscalculated the fallout of what may prove to be a foolhardy intervention in Syria, but because he neglected alternative options that could have strengthened Turkey’s position without sparking the ire of much of the international community, inciting the most virulent back-clash from the Kurds both inside and outside Turkey, but also because he threw a lit fuse, inside the tinder box named Middle East, where the black powder is kept close to the fire…

But God works in mysterious ways and he blinds those he is willing to “lose” and this is proven to be a strategic error of Mr Erdogan, which is rooted in a policy of decades of denial of Kurdish identity and suppression of Kurdish cultural and political rights that was more likely than not, to fuel conflict rather than encourage societal cohesion in Turkey and in Syria, Iraq and even Iran.

This terrible policy, midwifed the birth in the 1970s to militant groups like the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which only dropped its full demand for Kurdish independence in the last few years, after the capture and life imprisonment of its leader Mr Ocalan.

The PKK is unfortunately, the Kurdish group that has waged a low intensity insurgency that has cost tens of thousands of lives has been declared a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, and that is now going to re-emerge as the strongest terror organization in the Middle East after the defeat of ISIS and its caliphate, and we will have Mr Erdogan to thank for that, because the Turkish official state’s refusal to acknowledge the rights of the Kurds, who are believed to account upwards of 27% of the country’s population, trace their roots to the carving of modern Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire by its modern founder, Mustafa Kemal, widely known as Ataturk — Father of the Turks.

It is entrenched in Mr Kemal’s declaration in a speech in 1923 to celebrate Turkish independence of “how happy is the one who calls himself a Turk” an effort to forge a national identity out of a disparate and yet intolerant of minorities country, that was originally an ethnic mosaic, and through his pogroms, genocides, and holocausts — he turned it, into an ethnic powder-keg.

Notable are the persecutions and genocides of the Armenians, the Greeks and of the Assyrians around 1915, at the hands of Mr Ataturk’s organized military pogroms of these minorities, resulting in mass genocides performed by his soldiers assisted by bandits and brigands under the oversight of his military by German officers, dictating and at the same time “learning the ropes” for the biggest extermination of a People, that of the Jewish European diaspora a couple of decades later, during the second world war.

Yet, the “how happy is the one who calls himself a Turk” phrase, persisted in the national propaganda, even after Turkey and her allies lost both the First and the Second World War, and still this awful phrase, was incorporated in all of Turkey’s oaths — only to be removed in 2013, at a time of peace talks between Turkey and the PKK by then prime minister, now president Erdogan.

It took the influx of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s and early 1990s as well as the 1991 declaration by the United States, Britain and France of a no-fly zone in northern Iraq that enabled the emergence of an autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region, to spark debate in Turkey about the Kurdish question and prompt the government to refer to Kurds as Kurds, rather than mountain Turks.

Ironically, Turkey’s enduring refusal to acknowledge Kurdish rights and its long neglect of development of the pre-dominantly Kurdish southeast of the country fueled demands for greater rights, rather than majority support for Kurdish secession largely despite the emergence of the PKK

Most Turkish Kurds, who could rise to the highest offices in the land, as long as they identified as Turks rather than Kurds, resembled Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, whose options were more limited even if they endorsed the notion of a Jewish state.

Nonetheless, both minorities favoured an independent state for their brethren on the other side of the border but did not want to surrender the opportunities that either Turkey or Israel offered them.

The existence for close to three decades of a Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq and a 2017 referendum in which an overwhelming majority voted for Iraqi Kurdish independence, bitterly rejected and ultimately nullified by Iraqi, Turkish and Iranian opposition, did little to fundamentally change Turkish Kurdish attitudes, and if their ancient military leader Salahedin is any indication — the Kurds have long memories and even longer strategic plans…

And if the Iraqi Kurds’ referendum briefly soured relations between Turkey and Iraqi-Kurds — it failed to undermine the basic understanding underlying a relationship that could have guided Turkey’s approach towards the Kurds inside Turkey, as well as inside Syria, because dealing with self governed Iraqi Kurds may have been far easier since, they, unlike Turkish Kurds, had not engaged in political violence against Turkey.

Yet now, all bets are off, because of Mr Trump’s and Mr Erdogan’s parallel idiocy.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

Turkey and Kurdistan were both on the mend, and here comes a daft decision and throws it all up in the air. Truly, all of these great opportunities have fallen by the wayside, because of the US President Mr Trump’s decision to withdraw all US troops from Northern Syria.

And this vacuum, gave a seeming license to Mr Erdogan, whose decision to opt for a military solution fits the mould of tyrannical dictators all over the World and its history, but is not anywhere close to a rational or real politic, strategic decision, of a world leader who can look at the rest of the world in the eye, and offer a reasonable claim of Real Leadership.

Mr Erdogan’s reptilian slit of an world-view, is that of a militant islamist “Gaz” looking at the world and his neighbors, through a rather narrow islamist orthodox lens, coupled with a peculiarly Turkish pink prism, and erroneously assuming that his ideas and religion, as well as his national identity, are far superior to that of the conquered people…

And that faulty character seems to fit our own national leader’s character as well. That of the reptilian minded Mr Trump, as well.

Methinks, that in this country, and in the more civilized parts of this world — we call that racism.

At least, this is the proper term used for his actions, beliefs and thoughts — in the more civilized parts of the world…

And that is something worth impeaching right away.