COMMENTARY: IS U.S. GOING FROM ENABLER TO PARTICIPANT IN KURDISH GENOCIDE?
By Nicholas Patler
HNN Huntingtonnews.net
olumns/071203-patler-columnskurdish.html
Dec 3 2007
USA
In a recent White House meeting with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip
Erdogan, President George W. Bush promised U.S. military force to
fight the Kurdistan Workers Party, better known as the notorious PKK.
The PKK, a militant faction from the Kurdish part of Turkey located
in its impoverished southeast region, has been using the mountains
of northern Iraq to launch raids into their homeland, which has for
years endured political and military repression at the hands of Ankara.
After the latest attack last month that left twelve Turkish soldiers
dead, the Erdogan government has been threatening to chase down the PKK
by launching a military operation across the Turkish border into Iraqi
territory, sending Washington into a desperate scramble to prevent any
more warring factions from spilling into their Mesopotamian pot-o-mess,
which is already boiling over.
President Bush’s commitment to using military force against this
most recent "enemy of America," as he calls the PKK, adds a deadly
twist to previous U.S. policy supporting Turkey. Before this, the
American government just provided Turkey with the most advanced
military weaponry and training on the planet, including missiles,
bombs and tanks.
Indeed, Turkey is one of the largest recipients of U.S. military
assistance in the world, as revealed annually in the "Section 655"
reports published online by the Pentagon and State Department, using
a vast array of American made lethal toys, along with death tactics
learned from special operations forces, to commit genocide against
their Kurdish minority as Washington looks the other way.
Evidently, maintaining Turkey as a strategic U.S. airbase has been
worth the price of hundreds of thousands of murdered, displaced
and jailed Kurds and the destruction of thousands of their villages
and hamlets.
Yet as disturbing as this is, using American firepower to battle it
out with the PKK, relying on skewed Turkish intelligence to finger
"hideouts" and chasing guerilla troops throughout the Kurdish regions
of Iraq and Turkey will easily spill over into more violence and
oppression against innocent Kurdish communities.
Instead of placing the gun in the hands of the perpetrator as we have
done for years, the U.S. may very well be pulling the trigger as
war-weary troops storm villages and homes in search of these newly
branded "terrorists" and U.S. missiles obliterate PKK strongholds
that turn out to be Kurdish farming communities. And this will no
doubt embolden the Turkish military to step up its ongoing campaign
of genocide in the relatively sealed off Kurdish region.
The ill-fated message we have been sending to Ankara is the same one we
sent to Baghdad in the 1980s: as long as you appease U.S. interests,
we will not only turn a blind eye to your terror against the Kurds,
but we will give you money, weapons, diplomatic support and now direct
U.S. military force. We certainly know what Saddam Hussein did with
our help to the Kurds in Halabja and other areas of northern Iraq.
Of course, "with our help" is still censored-Collin Powell made sure
of that when he ripped out 8,500 pages of the U.N. Iraqi weapons
report before it went public back in 2002. But at least the killing
and disappearance of Kurds in northern Iraq slowly made it through
a blockhead press whereas the Turkish oppression of the Kurds,
documented for years, is still squelched by much of the mainstream
media in the U.S.
If all this was not bad enough, President Bush has also added an
unequivocal warning to his commitment to flush out the PKK. This
one is aimed at the U.S. Congress: do not even think of passing an
impending resolution recognizing the genocide of the Armenians at
the hands of the Turkish government during WWI.
This is not only a double whammy in sacrificing both the Kurds and
Armenians for U.S. interests in Turkey and Iraq, but, ironically,
it brings us back to where it all began. The immoral aspect of our
contemporary foreign policy was built upon the murdered corpses
and skeletons of the Armenians in the post-WWI period. Rather than
holding Turkey accountable for "crimes against humanity," where it
is estimated that over one million Armenians perished from massacres
or starvation and disease as a result of forced deportations, the
U.S. sheltered a genocidal government and muted the cries of its
victims for justice to get its foot in the Turkish oilfields.
And as we were maneuvering our way into the land of blood oil,
Turkey brazenly massacred over a hundred thousand Greeks in Smyrna
literally right in front of our eyes, destroying everything except
the Standard Oil Compound (A few years before that, they had murdered
and displaced 700,000 Greeks in the Black Sea city of Pontus, as they
would later do to the forgotten Assyrians in the Syrian province of
Hatay Alexandetta).
This set a significant moral precedent for the rest of the century in
which the thirst for global resources and power would take precedence
over any genuine concern for the peoples living in the lands we
coveted. Sadly, here at the beginning of the twenty-first century,
we still so desperately covet that Turkish real estate, that we are
willing to ignore the plight of the Kurds, wipe out a militant group
that is simply an extreme manifestation of Turkish abuse and American
neglect, and act as guardians to the enduring legacy of Turkish denial
of the Armenian genocide.
Staunton, Va. author Nicholas Patler is a biographer and historian.
On this site last April, David M. Kinchen of HNN reviewed his "Jim
Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation
in the Early Twentieth Century," republished earlier this year in a
quality paperback edition by the University of Colorado Press.