OpEd News
April 12 2009
President Obama Misses Fundamental Kurdish Issues in Turkey
by Matoska
The recent visit of President Obama to Turkey and his speech to the
Turkish parliament needs a response from American supporters of
Kurdish parties and the Kurdish national movement within Turkey. When
the President met with the Democratic Society Party (DTP) and other
opposition parties, he got quite a different appraisal of Turkey’s
actions towards Kurds. Not mentioned in President Obama’s remarks are
the 250,000 Turkish troops deployed on the border of the Kurdish
Autonomous Region. Not mentioned in President Obama’s remarks is the
arrest of Turkish Col. Cemal Temizoz for crimes against Kurdish
peoples in the 1990s. While President Obama declared the continued
U.S. support for the Turkish war against the PKK, thousands of Kurds
demonstrated on the anniversary of Abdullah Ocalan’s birthday and two
more people were killed by the Turkish military.
It is curious why President Obama chooses a militaristic, secular
government to address the issue of the compatibility of the United
States Government with Islam. Does he want to promote the AK’s
policies of desecularization of Turkish society? Is he aware of how US
weapons supplied to Turkey were used against Kurds, a predominately
Islamic population? It’s as if someone failed to brief him that the
U.S. government was the source of weapons for the massive Turkish
military attacks on the Kurdish national movement.
The flag of Turkey and the flag of the Kurdish nation
Neither did President Obama mention the Kurds as a people worthy of
international recognition after meeting with the DTP. " Ahmet Türk,
leader of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party, or DTP, said
U.S. President Barack Obama advised his party that "violence or armed
struggle will not solve the Kurdish problem." "I told him that we also
denounce the violence. But I informed him that more than 17,000 extra
judicial killings have happened in [southeastern Anatolia] over the
years," the leader of the pro-Kurdish party said." While President
Obama’s statement briefly mentioned the impact of Turkish special
courts, he omitted the forced relocations of 150,000 from 850 villages
and the deaths of 40,000 people. Not mentioned by President Obama was
the fact that between 1994 and 2003, Turkey took delivery of more than
$6.8 billion in U.S. weaponry and services. And nowhere did President
Obama commit to the implementation of Article 140 of the Iraqi
Constitution to hold the Kirkuk referendum without Turkish
interference.
His statement read: "As president, and as a NATO ally, I pledge that
you will have our support against the terrorist activities of the PKK
or anyone else." Likewise, Abdullah Gul in an interview on Rudaw.net
declared Turkey’s intent to use any tactic to defeat the "terrorist
organizations".euronews: "One new question is the Kurdish issue in the
north of Iraq. Is Turkey prepared to give any ground over
that?"Abdullah Gul: "To be able eradicate terrorist organisations you
have to apply sophisticated programmes and plans ..and Turkey does
that. Sometimes we do it in a public way.. sometimes behind the
scenes."
In this context, the Kurdish international conference in Erbil takes
on a new significance. As the concept of a conference moves towards
reality, the entire purpose of it is being changed. The issue of
Kurdish unity is being changed to why the PKK must be dismantled. Some
blogs have gone as far as to call it a disarmament conference. Leyla
Zana put the issue succinctly at a Newroz rally: "Kurds are not in
love with guns. Do not hurt us, we have been hurt enough […]. Kurds
will organise a conference among themselves and create their own
model. Kurds have three large parties: the PKK, the KDP and the KYB
(the latter two being the Kurdish Democratic Party led by Barzani, and
the Kurdistan Patriotic Union led by Talabani)."
President Obama failed to present the inequities of the Turkish
Constitution in the context of the national, cultural and political
rights of Kurds. The PKK arose from the history of Turkey’s denial of
rights to Kurds and continued because of Turkey’s reliance on American
weaponry to suppress the Kurdish uprising. But President Obama could
not make the minimal concession of recognizing the Kurds as a people,
not to mention the potentially politically explosive alternative of
acknowledging their history as a nation. Instead, President Obama used
the expression " the Kurdish population here inside Turkey". In a like
manner, President Obama could not bring himself to mention the word
"genocide" regarding the actions of the Ottoman Empire against
Armenians preferring to refer to them as "the terrible events of
1915".
It is ironic that President Obama chose Turkey to declare: "There’s an
old Turkish proverb: ‘You cannot put out fire with flames.’" It is
obviously a proverb that the Turkish government, not to mention the US
government, needs to be reminded of.
I am a Green Party member who lives in San Francisco. I have been
active in water planning in the Middle Rio Grande region of New
Mexico. I write political articles on the need for third parties, the
contemporary failures of public education…
sident-Obama-Misses-Fun-by-Matoska-090407-646.html
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
