THE UNITED STATES SHOULD BE SQUEEZING TURKEY, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
By Christopher Hitchens

Divide and Conquer

Posted Monday, Oct. 29, 2007, at 11:36 AM ET

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 Ocalan,
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.