The Comment Factory

There has been a lot of crowing about Recip Erdogan’s performance at the Davos Summit when he stormed out of his panel discussion with Israeli President Shimon Peres. Erdogan had taken umbrage at the tone of Peres’s defense of Israel’s two-week long assault on Gaza and the moderators apparent bias against the Turkish premier.

As Erdogan came home to Turkey the airport was surrounded by elated supporters who denounced Israel’s assault, waved Palestinian flags and told their PM, “Turkey is proud of you”. Erdogan’s stand against this vile war criminal Peres – who is strangely upheld as some sort of peacemaker in certain psychotic circles – was welcome and Turkey should be proud, but only for a moment.

For Erdogan had told Peres that, “When it comes to killing, you know very well how to kill,” which is true, but how many of those supporters outside the airport are aware that the Turkish premier also knows very well how to kill. On 17th January this year Hurriyet, the popular daily newspaper in Turkey, reported that in 2008 the Turkish military had killed 696 “outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK militants” in 2008. That’s just over half the number of people Israel killed in its ostensible war on Hamas, but only a moral retard will hold up such figures as a testament to Turkish humanity.

Like Israel’s invocation of Hamas in their defense of their attack on Gazan society, so Turkey have used the PKK as an excuse to attack Kurdish civil society. The PKK had started their (often brutal) terrorism campaign in 1984 with the aim of creating an independent Kurdistan (their goal has now softened to a just autonomy within Turkey).

In reaction to this campaign, the 1990s under the leadership of Ozal and Demirel saw massive atrocities and depopulation of the south-east of Turkey in a “war on terror” by the government ostensibly aimed at the PKK, but which largely didn’t discriminate between combatants and civilians who often lived in the same villages, like Gaza. And again like in Gaza, civilians were targeted as thousands of villages were destroyed and, although estimates vary, 30,000 is the figure that is usually quoted by aid agencies for Kurdish dead during this assault. Like the West Bank, Diyabakir and other centers of Kurdish populations became riven with secret Turkish police, and check-points dotted the area.

And like Israel, this was all done with US arms, which skyrocketed towards the end of the Clinton administration. Under Erdogan the attitude towards the Kurds has softened somewhat, with the first Kurdish-language media channel recently opening (it was previously illegal to broadcast in Kurdish), but under Erdogan Turkey has repeatedly made incursions into northern Iraq to “target the PKK” which inhabits the mountains there, alongside the local Kurds at the bottom of the peaks.

Hoshyar Zebari, Iraqi foreign minister, who is a Kurd, said of the prospective Turkish incursions back in 2007:

“This would be a unilateral decision and that’s why people are resisting that.That’s why the whole government of Iraq and the whole people of Iraq are united really not to see their sovereignty, their territorial integrity undermined by a friendly neighbouring country.”

But like Gaza, northern Iraq has absolutely no sovereignty and can be attacked at will by the Turks. In December 2007 a Turkish bombing campaign apparently killed 7 people, including a woman, while the UN said it made 2,000 people refugees. Another incursion two months later in February 2009, according to the Turkish military, killed 240 “militants”, while 27 troops died.

The Kurdish Regional Government, or KRG, has been one of the few success stories of the US/UK invasion, and this has scared the Turkish government who, like Israel with Palestine, does not want to see an independent Kurdish state coming to fruition in the area of northern Iraq as it might embolden Kurdish nationalists in south-east Turkey. Since the country was founded by its venerated leader Kemal Ataturk, the Turks have refused to accept the Kurds as a separate ethnicity with their own distinct language and culture, much like Israel has tried to denigrate and destroy the remnants of Palestinian civil society and culture.

The parallels between the national narratives of Israel and Turkey are striking, the former founded in 1948, the latter in 1923. In Turkey’s case, the Palestinians are the Kurds, Hamas are the PKK, and the West Bank is south-east Turkey. Maybe this is why Turkey and Israel have had such a strong bond through the second half of the twentieth century, traditionally their governments have sympathized with each other as they carry out massive atrocities as centurions of the US empire in the Middle East. So while Erdogan was right to take on criminals like Shimon Peres maybe he should take a quick look in the mirror and stop his own illegal incursions into sovereign countries to kill “militants” and civilians alike.