Fréderike Geerdink
There is busy diplomatic traffic this week between Ankara, Baghdad and Erbil. The Iraqi oil minister was visiting Ankara on Monday to talk with his Turkish counterpart, while Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan was flying in the opposite direction to start his three-day visit to Iraq and the Kurdistan Region. One of the topics on the table is Turkey’s ‘fight against terrorism’. As if defeating the PKK is Turkey’s real goal in Kurdistan and Iraq. Spoiler: it’s not.
The first news about Fidan’s visit is that he asked Baghdad to put the PKK on Iraq’s list of terrorist organisations. But for a change, the ‘fight against terrorism’, as Turkey calls its war against the PKK, is not the most urgent topic on the agenda. Those are oil and water. Since the spring, there is no oil flowing from the Kurdistan Region to Turkey’s Ceyhan harbour anymore. The flow stopped after the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) ruled that Turkey has to pay a large amount of money to Iraq for importing oil from Kurdistan without Baghdad’s consent.
Tigris
All parties involved now want the oil to start flowing again but at the same time want to try to benefit from the situation as much as possible. Turkey wants Baghdad to cancel another case at the ICC, which Baghdad would be willing to agree upon if Turkey is, for starters, increasing the waterflow of the Tigris. Turkey acts as if it has a lot of leverage, but this article clearly explains that the stalemate is eroding this leverage. Baghdad has started to export the oil from Kurdistan via another route and doesn’t need the pipeline to Turkey that much anymore.
Erbil is more desperate: it is losing a lot of money because the oil sales via Turkey without Baghdad’s involvement stopped, and on top of that hasn’t received its full share of Iraq’s national budget for the last two months, making it impossible to pay civil servants’ salaries. But Erbil can’t force Turkey into doing anything whatsoever.
Enter Iran. Iran controls the Iraqi government. If Tehran gave consent to let the oil flow from the Kurdistan Region to Ceyhan again, the problem would be solved. But why would Iran do that? It wants more control over the Kurdistan Region. This is partly because of Kurdish opposition groups from Iran that are based there, but also because it wants to weaken Turkey’s influence. The longer the stalemate over the ICC ruling takes, the further Turkey’s leverage erodes.
Tribal chiefs
In the Ottoman Empire, – forgive me this sudden change of scenery – the Ottoman army didn’t have a presence in most of the Kurdish areas under its control. The Kurdish tribes enjoyed autonomy: in exchange for being exempt from paying taxes and sending their boys to serve in the army, they defended the southeastern borders of the empire. Good for the Kurdish tribal chiefs, but also good for the Ottoman rulers: they didn’t have to keep countless armed tribes under control in rugged lands where they were not very familiar and could trust these clans to defend the mountainous southeastern borders of the empire.
This power balance changed halfway the 19th century. The Ottoman Empire started to weaken. A process of centralisation was initiated to try to turn the tide. Kurdish provinces were violently brought under control, a process that lasted well into the first decades of the Turkish Republic, until the late 1930s. By then, the Turkish army had fully occupied the Kurdish lands within its borders.
Lausanne
Turkey wasn’t eyeing lands across the border yet. But that has changed since Erdoğan has consolidated his rule in Turkey. The Kurds may not be happy with the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, in which Atatürk’s Turkey was formally recognised by the victors of the First World War as the successor of the Ottoman Empire (more background here) but the Turkish state isn’t so happy with the current borders anymore either. It’s regressing to old times. To 1920 to be precise, when the (soon to crumble) Ottoman Parliament declared the ‘National Pact’, in which it claimed several regions in what is now Iraq and Syria, including (but not limited to) the Kurdish regions. They claimed it, and Erdoğan has been claiming it since roughly 2016. When you check the map of the ‘National Pact territory’, you see that all Kurdish lands currently in Turkey, Syria and Iraq are part of it. Also Mosul, Kirkuk and Aleppo are historically Turkish, the Ottomans thought then and Erdoğan thinks now.
Long live the war against the PKK! Sure, it may have started as a war against the PKK after the armed group settled in the mountains alongside the border in the north of Iraq, but over time it has become a great excuse to keep building military bases and expand the de facto occupation. Turkey is continuing the violent occupation of autonomous Kurdish lands that it started one and a half century ago. Framing it as a war against terrorism, effectively shuts the international community up about it. The Kurdistan Regional Government, autonomous is name only, cooperates with Turkey in a desperate effort to hang on to its own power and to contain Iran’s influence. Baghdad will likely not give in to Turkey’s demand to designate the PKK as terrorist.
Mosul
The clan leaders that control the KRG don’t see, or refuse to acknowledge, that they are just pawns in Turkey’s game. They say the PKK has to leave the mountains so that the war on KRG territory can stop. But Turkey is there to stay. Even if the PKK would leave (which it won’t) and even if Turkey militarily defeats PKK (which it won’t), Turkey will not be going anywhere.
I wonder: will either Baghdad or Erbil utter the word ‘occupation’ in their talks with Hakan Fidan? And if Erdoğan travels to Iraq later this year – a date hasn’t been set yet – and visits Mosul as is rumoured that he will, will that be recognised for what it is?
Fréderike Geerdink is an independent journalist. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her acclaimed weekly newsletter Expert Kurdistan.
