• Erdogan creates an opportunity -   Henri J. Barkey

• Will the PKK renounce violence? -   Soner Cagaptay

• Armed confrontation not likely -   Khaled Salih

Turkey is no exception when it comes to terrorism
 Mensur Akgun

Any fight against terrorism requires international solidarity. Without the support of at least friendly governments, even the mightiest countries suffer from the consequences of terrorism. The lack of universal consensus on the definition of terrorism, the existence of sponsor governments, hidden agendas, parochial interests, but most of all the difficulty of distinguishing the action from the cause--exacerbate the suffering.

Turkey certainly is no exception; almost 40,000 people died during the "reign of terror" period between 1983 and 1999. However, during this period many of Turkey's closest allies chose to ignore the existence of PKK terrorism, arguing that Turkey was then undemocratic and was undermining Kurdish individual and group rights. Some even supported the PKK and provided refuge to Abdullah Ocalan, the then leader of the organization, after he was expelled from Syria upon Turkey's demand.

Mensur Akgun is the foreign policy director of TESEV, the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation. He is associate professor of political science at Kultur University, Istanbul, and columnist for the daily Referant.

A few months ago, the former Turkish prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, stunned observers when he remarked that six years after the capture of PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) leader Abdullah Ocalan, he still did not really know why it was that the United States had delivered him to the Turkish authorities in Kenya. Considering Washington's unwavering support for Turkey's anti-PKK campaign, Ecevit's comments were mostly interpreted as the ruminations of an ailing and defeated nationalist politician.

This past week, however, Aytac Yalman, a recently retired Land Forces commander known for his hardline views on relations with the US and on Kurdish issues, stepped up to the plate to provide Ecevit with an answer. Accordingly, the real reason why the US had engineered Ocalan's delivery was part of a larger master plan that aimed to remove him as a potential rival to the two Iraqi Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. With Ocalan eliminated, reasoned Yalman, the two Kurdish leaders' room to maneuver would substantially be enhanced, as would their dependency on Washington.

While many columnists ridiculed both Ecevit and Yalman, the fact of the matter is that these two were giving expression to a deep sense of insecurity many Turks, especially nationalists, feel at the onslaught of change in their neighborhood and at home. Change at home is being driven by EU-induced reforms and the prospect of EU accession negotiations. The war in Iraq, which was opposed by many in Turkey and semi-publicly by Yalman in his capacity as Land Forces commander, has upended many of Turkey's regional calculations. As the constitutional process in Iraq comes to fruition, the future there still remains very much in doubt. The only sure development is at the very least the emergence of a robust Kurdish autonomous or federal entity or perhaps even an independent Kurdish state.

Turkey has always feared the contagion effect from Iraqi Kurds. Therefore, both outcomes are perceived as potentially destabilizing by Ankara. After all, a PKK-led Turkish Kurdish insurgency that lasted well over a decade only ended with Ocalan's 1999 capture. The PKK, which had gone into hibernation since, has now abandoned its self-imposed unilateral ceasefire. The renewed violence, associated with better and deadlier tactics perhaps learned from anti-American Iraqi insurgents, is renewing fears that the insurgency is making a comeback.

Complicating matters is the fact that a significant segment of the PKK fighting force is ensconced in northern Iraq. The fact that the US military, as the occupying force in Iraq, has not done away with an organization the US government calls terrorist has been particularly galling to Turks. The US military in Iraq has, understandably, been unwilling to divert troops to fight the PKK from the current effort to combat the insurgency. Northern Iraq has been relatively calm and not in need of a US presence as local Kurdish forces have been delegated the job of maintaining security. The PKK presence is clearly not a priority.

This US unwillingness has been at the heart of accusations in the Turkish media and elsewhere that Washington is at best dismissive of its erstwhile ally in Ankara or at worst is in bed with Kurdish groups who want to carve out an ethnic homeland in the Middle East. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, the US has a serious credibility problem. Sooner or later it will have to act against the PKK, especially if the latter persists with its military campaign, or risk a major crisis with Turkey. The Turkish government has come under increasing pressure from domestic civilian and military circles to intervene where it can in northern Iraq. Should the PKK, for instance, inadvertently or deliberately cause large numbers of casualties in a terrorist incident, the Turkish government will feel obliged to demonstrate that it can act to protect its citizens by mounting a cross-border operation. This could potentially entail a clash with Iraqi Kurds and undermine the stability of the one region in Iraq that Washington has so far taken for granted.

This said, the Turkish official position until recently, that the country had no Kurdish problem of its own but only one of terrorism, had not won Ankara much respect in Europe or America. This past week, however, Recep Tayyip Erdogan became the first Turkish prime minister to journey into Turkey's Kurdish heartland to pronounce that Turkey had a "Kurdish problem" that needed attention. His decision to tackle this issue head on has caused consternation among Turkish hardliners and conservatives. As much as Erdogan made his pronouncement with an eye on the upcoming start of EU accession negotiations, it remains a risky move in view of the rising PKK violence and political worries over northern Iraq.

Erdogan has raised the ante for himself by creating expectations among Kurds--such expectations have been dashed many times by Turkish politicians in the recent past--while turning the tables on the PKK. This has created an opportunity for the US to engage in a three-way diplomatic initiative that would include Turks, Americans and Iraqis (especially Iraqi Kurds) to come up with a game plan to eliminate the PKK presence in northern Iraq.- Published 25/8/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org

Henri J. Barkey is a non-resident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and professor of international relations at Lehigh University.

If the US-Turkish relationship is the single most important unintended victim of the Iraq war, then disarming the PKK is a sure way of restoring the partnership to good health. The PKK presence in northern Iraq has thus far escaped US occupation untouched, and the organization has relaunched attacks inside Turkey. Stopping the PKK now will ensure that Iraq-related issues do not damage the US-Turkish relationship further. Indeed, this is the common logic in Washington and Ankara. The question is how to do it.

Neither the US military nor the Iraqi Kurds are willing to act against the PKK, with the former choosing to focus its energies on the insurgency and the latter viewing PKK members as fellow Kurds to be sheltered. Could the PKK come to peace of its own accord? In the wake of recent European Union reforms in Turkey--Kurds can now study Kurdish and listen to news in their own language--one would expect that the PKK might hear the voice of reason. Not a chance. Here's why.

The PKK is steeped in a culture of violence and will not commit itself to peace. Since its inception in the late 1970s, the organization has both endorsed and perpetuated this culture, which was already prevalent among the rural, mostly tribal Sunni Kurdish population in southeastern Turkey. A sociologist friend of mine who does research on the PKK's recruiting ability once noted that transitioning into the organization is not such a big deal for most new members hailing from this population, since "they come from a culture of wife beaters." If violence is an accepted method of resolving social problems, then it becomes acceptable to kill civilians to settle a political score. Accordingly, the PKK has used every imaginable form of violence to terrorize Turkey, such as slaughtering the entire population of a village unsympathetic to its cause in order to coerce nearby villages into submission.

Growing up in Turkey, I was struck by a string of "realist" films in the 1970s that depicted the horrible conditions landless peasants endured under brutal landowners, known as agas. It was not until I traveled around Turkey in the 1980s that I realized such dilemmas pertained only to the rural Sunni Kurdish areas of the country. Not surprisingly, the PKK has drawn backing for its violent campaign from the very protagonists of my childhood films. Today, support for the pro-PKK Democratic Peoples Party (DEHAP) is strongest in the aga-run villages of southeastern Turkey, and weaker in the region's towns. Meanwhile, the party's popularity barely crosses the one percent mark in large cities in Europeanized western Turkey, such as Istanbul and Izmir, where around half of the country's Kurds live.

That is why the PKK strives to ensure that modernization does not wipe away the remains of the tribal structures in southeastern Turkey. For example, the organization has worked to sabotage the Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP), which aims to erect massive irrigation structures across the region's impoverished and parched landscape. GAP would usher in a new, water-based and cash-loaded economy in southeastern Turkey, weakening the grip of tribal culture over the rural Kurds. Accordingly, the PKK actively worked against the project during the 1980s and 1990s, with a helping hand from Syria, which had its own reasons to impede GAP.

The PKK has not changed much since then. It still fights modernization. The group's new target is Turkey's EU entry process. To this end, the PKK has increased its attacks. The organization wants to derail Turkey's EU accession by pulling the country into a maelstrom of violence. What is more, once again reminiscent of the past, the organization's death squads have assassinated a number of non-PKK Kurdish activists in Turkey and northern Iraq in recent months. Indeed, the group's recently declared 30-day ceasefire means very little--the PKK will not abandon terrorism of its own volition. Only with resolute action will Turkey defeat PKK terror. In this regard, both the new Iraqi government and the Iraqi Kurds have a responsibility to act against the PKK--the former to demonstrate its sovereignty against a foreign terror group on its soil, the latter to prove their sincerity in the global war on terror.

Ankara will need help from Europe and the United States as well. The Europeans are already under the spotlight; many of the PKK's front organizations--including its media arms, such as Roj TV in Denmark--enjoy safe haven inside Europe. Meanwhile, with the PKK headquartered in northern Iraq, further terrorist attacks inside Turkey will inevitably lead many Turks to blame Washington for the organization's campaign of violence, exacerbating the strains in US-Turkish ties. Recent bilateral meetings are an optimistic sign that Washington and Ankara are aware of the gravity of this issue.

The PKK poses the greatest threat to the US-Turkish relationship. Hoping that the group will magically renounce violence is naive. Countering such violence with a resolute stance is the way to defeat it.- Published 25/8/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org

Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of "Islam, Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who Is a Turk?"

In recent months, military confrontation with Kurdish armed groups in Turkey has raised the fear among Kurds in Turkey and Iran that the negative experience of the 1990s might repeat itself. Gradual reforms in Turkey might be slowed down, the military crackdown on armed groups might intensify, and the Turkish military presence in Kurdistan in Turkey might increase. In this regard, Kurds in Iraq have also expressed anxiety over possible Turkish military intrusion into the self-ruling entity of Kurdistan in Iraq (Kurdistan Regional Government, KRG), under the pretext of curbing PKK forces.

Different sources have given different figures on the PKK presence in KRG areas, but it is widely believed that there are some 3,000 PKK guerrillas in the remote areas near the Iraq-Iran-Turkey border (locally called the triangle areas). In the 1990s, PKK forces in the KRG areas posed a direct or indirect military threat to Kurdish forces and authority, but that does not seem to be the case anymore, except for their ability to collect taxes and food in remote villages.

However, in the last few years the PKK (whether under old or new names) has created political difficulties for the KRG and in Kurdistan in Iran by establishing new political parties that compete with existing political forces. In Iraq (outside the KRG controlled area) the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party (PCDK) and in Iran the Kurdistan Renaissance Party (KJP) are known to be PKK-linked and are locally viewed as "troublemakers". While the PCDK did not gain any substantial number of votes in the January elections in the KRG areas and in Iraq, the KJP is accused of encouraging confrontation between protesters and Iranian security forces in several Kurdish cities, leading to arrests and casualties.

Recent PKK military activities inside Turkey have also raised the question of the timing and aim of such confrontations while Turkey is increasingly involved in negotiations with the European Union. One interpretation I have heard repeated in Kurdistan is that, whether intentionally or not, these activities would serve the Turkish military in Turkey, partly by providing grounds for maintaining a military presence in Kurdistan in Turkey and partly by helping the Turkish military argue for its prominence in politics and independence regarding budgetary issues.

These renewed military activities would have additional ramifications as well. In addition to limiting the debate over ways to combat terrorism, the economic deprivation of Kurdistan in Turkey would be allowed to continue, peaceful political dialogue and confidence-building would suffer substantially, other Kurdish political organizations would have little if any chance to create a wider democratic space, no general amnesty would be allowed in Turkey for former guerrilla soldiers, and reconstruction of demolished villages would be in doubt.

In KRG areas, renewed PKK military activities are seen in a different context. While the Kurds in Iraq are working hard to secure their region and struggle in the constitutional negotiations to ensure a fair and just share in a reconstructed Iraq, the Turkish military could exploit PKK military activities to intervene in the KRG areas with the pretext of fighting the PKK, despite the fact that the PKK based in the KRG areas are not used for military attacks inside Turkey. Many commentators and politicians are openly suspicious about the Turkish aim of resuming confrontations.

Yet it seems highly unlikely the Turkish military would embark on a military adventure in KRG areas, despite the Turkish military presence (approx. 1,000 troops) since the mid-1990s in four villages in Kurdistan in Iraq. First, it would be unwise for Turkey to open a new military front with the KRG while the country is struggling with the EU to find a political solution for the Cyprus issue. Second, any military attack inside KRG territory would mean the immediate halt of accession negotiations with the EU. Third, in reality Turkey has developed strong economic interests inside Kurdistan in Iraq. Turkish firms and businesses are visible in many places in the major cities of Dohuk, Erbil and Sulaimani. Cross-border commercial activities are beneficial for both sides.

Then too, the US presence in Iraq is in itself a deterrent to any Turkish military adventure there. Kurdistan is the only area where US and multinational forces do not need to fight, and opening a new military front against the PKK to appease Turkey is not an option for the time being. Politically, it would be difficult for American politicians to defend the right of the Kurds in Iraq, yet help the Turkish military enter Kurdistan, despite the fact that the PKK is regarded as a terrorist organization by the US. This would destabilize the only secure and stable region in Iraq. Indeed, it would be difficult for European and American politicians to propose peaceful solutions for the Kurdish issue in Iraq while supporting a military option for the Kurdish issue in Turkey.- Published 25/8/2005 (c) bitterlemons-international.org

Khaled Salih is an independent analyst and consultant based in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq. He is former senior advisor to the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government.