Divide and Conquer

The United States should be squeezing Turkey, not the other way around

Fighting words: A Wartime Lexicon

Slate.com
Monday, October 29, 2007

By Christopher Hitchens

In the past century, the principal victims of genocide or attempted
genocide have been, or at least have prominently included, the
Armenians, the Jews, and the Kurds. During most of the month of October,
events and politicians both conspired to set these three peoples at one
another’s throats. What is there to be learned from this fiasco for
humanity?

To recapitulate: At the very suggestion that the U.S. House of
Representatives might finally pass a long-proposed resolution
recognizing the 1915 massacres in Armenia as a planned act of "race
murder" (that was U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s term for it at a
time when the word genocide had not yet been coined), the Turkish
authorities redoubled their threat to invade the autonomous Kurdish-run
provinces of northern Iraq. And many American Jews found themselves
divided between their sympathy for the oppressed and the slaughtered and
their commitment to the state interest of Israel, which maintains a
strategic partnership with Turkey, and in particular with Turkey’s
highly politicized armed forces.

To illuminate this depressing picture, one might begin by offering a few
distinctions. In 1991, in northern Iraq, where you could still see and
smell the gassed and poisoned towns and villages of Kurdistan, I heard
Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan say that Kurds ought
to apologize to the Armenians for the role they had played as enforcers
for the Ottomans during the time of the genocide. Talabani, who has
often repeated that statement, is now president of Iraq. (I would regard
his unforced statement as evidence in itself, by the way, in that proud
peoples do not generally offer to apologize for revolting crimes that
they did not, in fact, commit.) So, of course, it was upon him, both as
an Iraqi and as a Kurd, that Turkish guns and missiles were trained last
month.

And here, a further distinction: Many of us who are ardent supporters of
Kurdish rights and aspirations have the gravest reservations about the
so-called Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. This is a Stalinist cult
organization, roughly akin to a Middle Eastern Shining Path group. (Its
story, and the story of its bizarre leader Abdullah Öcalan, are well
told in Aliza Marcus’ new book Blood And Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish
Fight for Independence.) The attempt of this thuggish faction to exploit
the new zone of freedom in Iraqi Kurdistan is highly irresponsible and
plays directly into the hands of those forces in the Turkish military
who want to resurrect Kemalist chauvinism as a weapon against Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, which it sees as soft on
Kurdish demands. There’s a paradox here, in that the uniformed satraps
who claim to defend Turkish secularism are often more reactionary than
the recently re-elected and broadly Islamist Justice and Development
Party. The generals vetoed a meeting earlier this year between Abdullah
Gul – now president of Turkey and then foreign minister – and the Kurdish
Regional Government in Iraq. This alone shows that they are using the
border question and the PKK as a wedge issue for domestic politics.

This is enough complexity to be going on with, but Congress and the
executive branch have been handling it with appalling amateurishness.
The Armenian resolution is an old story. I can remember when it was
sponsored by Sen. Robert Dole and stonewalled by President Bill Clinton.
What a shame that we didn’t get it firmly on the record decades ago. But
now a House and a White House that can barely bring themselves to utter
the word Kurdish are both acting as if nothing mattered except Turkish
amour-propre. And, as a consequence, the United States and its friends
are being squeezed by Ankara instead of – to put it shortly – the other way
around. This is disgracefully undignified.

In 2003, the Turkish authorities, who had been parasitic on American and
NATO support for several decades, refused to allow our bases in Turkey
to be employed for a "northern front" in the removal of Saddam Hussein
unless their own forces were allowed to follow us into Iraqi Kurdistan.
The Bush administration quite rightly refused this bargain. The damage
done by Turkey’s subsequent fit of pique was enormous – nobody ever
mentions it, but if the coalition had come at Baghdad from two
directions, a number of Sunni areas would have got the point (of
irreversible regime change) a lot sooner than they did. The rogue PKK
presence was not then a hot issue; Turkey simply wished to pre-empt the
emergence of any form of Iraqi Kurdish self-government that could be an
incitement or encouragement to its own huge Kurdish minority.

So, let us be clear on a few things. The European Union, to which Turkey
has applied for membership with warm American support, has insisted on
recognition of Kurdish language rights and political rights within
Turkey. We can hardly ask for less. If the Turks wish to continue lying
officially about what happened to the Armenians, then we cannot be
expected to oblige them by doing the same (and should certainly resent
and repudiate any threats against ourselves or our allies that would
ensue from our Congress affirming the truth). Then there remains the
question of Cyprus, where Turkey maintains an occupation force that has
repeatedly been condemned by a thesaurus of U.N. resolutions ever since
1974. It is not our conduct that should be modified by Turkey’s
arrogance; we do a favor to the democratization and modernization of
that country by insisting that it get its troops out of Cyprus, pull its
forces back from the border with Iraq, face the historic truth about
Armenia, and in other ways cease to act as if the Ottoman system were
still in operation.

*****

In Slate two weeks ago, I mentioned that security for Ayaan Hirsi Ali
might have to be paid for partly by private subscription. Here are the
details for all who may wish to contribute to this eminently deserving
cause. Checks should be made payable to the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security
Trust and sent to the same trust in care of Bank of Georgetown, 1054
31st St., NW, Suite 18, Washington, D.C. 20007. The trust’s tax
identification number is 75-6826872. Those who prefer wire transfer
should use account number 1010054748 and bank routing number 054001712.
This appeal is a test of our seriousness in the face of theocracy and
its assassins.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

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