Sarah Glynn
Sometimes, it seems that Kurds cannot escape being oppressed. Sometimes that oppressor is themselves Kurdish.
I am not just thinking of Turkey’s Foreign Minister and former intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, who must take the responsibility for many of the underhand attacks implemented against the Kurds over the last decade. There will always be individuals who will side with those who oppress their brothers and sisters. But in the Barzani clan and in their Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which dominates the government of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, we see the destruction of Kurdish hopes by people who claim to be leaders of Kurdish freedom while only pursuing their own power. This has already been clearly argued by Amed Dicle in a Medya News column earlier this week, but it is important and bears repeating.
The original “parcel of rogues” referred to in my title quote were Scottish peers who gave away the independence of their country in exchange for personal wealth in the early eighteenth century. The behaviour of the Barzanis is even less excusable, as they achieved their position through leading the struggle for Kurdish independence in Iraq. Although they now behave like aristocrats, they began life as freedom fighters. However, even during that fight, they didn’t hesitate to undermine other Kurdish freedom fighters if they felt it aided their own cause. Dicle shows that the KDP central committee member who appeared on a recent television show calling on Turkey to use its drones to kill members of the PKK – even in busy tourist areas – also appears in a film recording from the mid 1980s. Then, he was boasting about how the Barzani’s KDP helped Iran’s Islamic Republic to attack the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran, which was leading the Kurdish resistance against Ayatollah Khomeini’s hijacking of the Iranian revolution and his brutal Islamist dictatorship. As Dicle points out, it is not the speaker in these recordings who is important. “These ideas belong directly to Masoud Barzani. Barzani makes Ali Awni say what he does not want to say himself.”
Furthermore, as Kurds everywhere worry that the KDP’s actions will lead to intra-Kurdish war in Iraq, they remember the civil war between the KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in the 1990s. Then, Masoud Barzani called on the support of Saddam Hussein to oust the PUK from Erbil (Hewlêr). Khomeini issued a fatwa against the Kurds, calling them infidels and instigating a massacre that killed at least 10,000 people. In Saddam’s al-Anfal Campaign against the Kurds, which ended only eight years before his alliance with the KDP, Human Rights Watch estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died, and others have put the figure much higher.
It should come as no surprise that a party and family that have come to power through such means have no care for anything other than themselves. This is evident in the corruption that treats the Kurdistan Region’s income as a source of private wealth; in the nepotism and cronyism that treats the party and the region it dominates as a personal fiefdom in which members of the Barzani family take all the most powerful positions and give jobs and contracts to their supporters; in the autocratic oppression of dissent that has seen protestors fired upon and critical journalists imprisoned and tortured; and in relations with Turkey that have seen the Barzanis give away the region’s hard-won autonomy so that they can become pampered vassals of the modern Turkish sultan. To rewrite the words of the Scottish song, they have been bought and sold for Turkish gold.
Hakan Fidan’s visit to Iraq
While this situation is hardly news, it has come to the fore again this week with Hakan Fidan’s visit to Iraq, where he has met with both the Iraqi government in Bagdad, and with the Barzanis in Erbil, and with many other key figures in Iraqi politics along the way. President Erdoğan’s foreign diplomacy makes no attempt to hide its use of threats and coercion, and it is no coincidence that this visit has been preceded by a spate of drone attacks carried out by Turkey on cars travelling in the Kurdistan Region. There were also attacks on Thursday, the day that Fidan came to Erbil. While the Barzanis were welcoming him, four of the region’s citizens lost their lives to Turkish drones. Fidan’s more urbane demeanour, compared to his bombastic predecessor, should not be allowed to obscure the fact that he had been head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation (MİT) from 2010, during which time he bears the responsibility for numerous extra-legal killings and extraordinary renditions, as well as well-evidenced co-operation between Turkey and ISIS.
Turkey’s threats are not only dependant on military force. This week’s talks focused on three subjects – water, oil, and attacking the PKK. Inevitably, all three have been linked so as to increase Turkish leverage. For the KDP, though, no extra pressure appears to be needed for them to treat the PKK as enemies and to assist Turkey’s attacks through intelligence information and through practical back up from the KDP’s peshmerga forces.
The PKK have had bases in the Iraqi mountains since the time when the KDP was also a guerrilla organisation, and in May 2013, with the agreement of Masoud Barzani, the PKK began a total withdrawal from Turkey into these bases as part of peace talks with the Turkish government. In 2014, when PKK fighters came down from the mountains to protect the region from ISIS, Masoud Barzani went personally to meet and thank the PKK commanders. However, when President Erdoğan reversed track on the peace talks, and even denied all knowledge of the Dolmabahçe Agreement that listed priorities for resolving the Kurdish Question, Barzani and the KDP were ready and willing to support Turkey’s increasingly virulent attack on an organisation that they consider as rivals in their bid for Kurdish leadership.
After an enthusiastic welcome, and meetings with the Barzanis, Fidan commented “I would especially like to express my thanks to [the Erbil administration] for their cooperation with Turkey in the fight against terrorism. We have a lot of work to do to get rid of the scourge of terrorism. As you know, we have dealt with this issue to a great extent in Turkey. Both the Baghdad administration and the Erbil administration are very determined to clear the PKK from Iraqi territory. We are also pleased about this, and we will give all the support we can to these authorities.” The KDP also dutifully announced without evidence, as they always do, that the Turkish drone attacks had killed PKK fighters.
To secure the KDP’s dominance in the region, and their own opulent lifestyles, the Barzanis have actively supported what is effectively a military occupation by their Turkish bosses of large parts of Kurdistan, and they have put the region’s economy at the mercy of Turkish whims through an oil deal that allows Turkey exceptionally favourable terms. The dominance they have gifted Turkey was demonstrated after their own Kurdish Independence Referendum in 2017, when Turkey helped to thwart the result becoming a reality by effectively shutting down the region’s economy.
This oil deal has created difficulties between the region and the Federal Government, and consequently between Iraq and Turkey. Much of Iraq’s oil is found in the autonomous Kurdistan Region, but the Iraqi Federal Government has disputed the region’s right to assume sole charge of it. Iraq submitted their case to the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris, accusing Turkey of facilitating illegal oil exports from the region, and, last March, the international judges ruled in Iraq’s favour, ordering Turkey to pay Iraq 1.5 billion dollars in compensation.
Turkey, which doesn’t have much respect for international courts, said no. They knew that the Kurdistan Region needed the Turkish pipeline to export the oil, and they planned to use this leverage to make a new deal. No oil has flowed since the Paris ruling, and the Kurdistan Region has suffered considerably more in lost income than the value of the Turkish compensation. The Federal Government has suffered too, but not by nearly as much, especially as they have been able to divert oil from Kirkuk south to refineries in Salahaddin. Amwaj Media reports that Turkish demands are said to include a more active role in the Kurdistan Region’s oil operations, continued discounts, and for Iraq to drop a further claim for compensation for the period after 2018, after the start of the concluded case.
There was also a meeting of the oil ministers of Iraq and Turkey in Ankara the day before Fidan’s visit to Iraq, but none of these meetings have achieved an agreement to get the oil flowing again.
The Kurdistan Regional Government is further penalised by ongoing budget and revenue disputes with the Iraqi Federal Government. Yet again, it is the people who suffer, with public sector salaries once more being delayed.
For the Iraqi Government, water is a key issue, as Turkey continues to hold back the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates. There has been a drought, and Turkey is also short of water, but they have been taking more than their agreed share. The reduction of flow in the Euphrates is an act of war against the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, which is between Turkey and Iraq, but Turkey can also see the power that their control over the river water gives them in any negotiations over other issues. The power of states over those further downstream is only going to increase. Ten days ago, Turkey announced that they were to proceed with the construction of a further large and controversial dam across the Tigris.
Positions taken by the Iraqi government reflect the overriding influence of Iran, for whom Turkey is a regional rival. Pro-Iranian groups not only resist any increase in Turkish power, but also call for Turkey’s withdrawal from Iraq, and especially from their military base at Basiqa, near Mosul, which has been the target of attacks by pro-Iranian militia. In the meetings with Fidan, the Iraqi president, Latif Rashid, demanded that Turkey respect Iraqi sovereignty, while Hadi Amri, leader of the influential Badr movement, told Fidan that the Turkish state should leave Iraq.
This resistance to Turkey does not make pro-Iranian Iraqis friends of the Kurds. Iran has assassinated Kurdish dissidents who had taken refuge in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and has attacked the camps of Kurdish Iranian opposition groups. And Iran is demanding – with the threat of further attacks – that the Kurdistan Regional Government disarm these groups. Iran will even cooperate with Turkey when it comes to attacking members of the PKK, or of the group that follows Öcalan’s ideas in Iran, PJAK. (To add a further layer of tension, Iran, too, has diverted water from flowing into Iraq.)
At a joint press conference with Iraq’s Foreign minister, Fidan said, “We expect [Iraq] to officially recognise the PKK as a terrorist organisation, as friendship and brotherhood necessitates”. He called on Iraq to “not allow our mutual enemy, the PKK terrorist organisation, to poison our bilateral relations”, and he described the PKK as a “challenge against Iraq’s sovereignty”. Iraq is concerned about Iraqi sovereignty too, but although they have evinced no sympathy with the PKK, their bigger worry, as already mentioned, has been Turkey’s military operations and attacks on Iraqi soil, especially when these have killed civilians. Turkey has also tried to portray themselves as defenders of Syrian integrity while occupying large parts of that country.
Throughout all the red carpets and handshakes, the Turkish army has continued to pound Iraq’s northern mountains, and the PKK have continued their resistance from their rockcut tunnels. The PKK’s plea to the KDP not to assist Turkey has fallen on very deaf ears, and fears continue of the possibility of intra-Kurdish fighting, from which Turkey would be the only winner.
Iran
Across the border in Iran, both protestors and government are anticipating the anniversary of the death of Jina Amini, three weeks from today. The people of Baluchistan have managed to keep up their Friday protests, but, generally, protest activities have not been sustained at a significant level. However, from the government side, detentions, torture, and also executions have only increased, and it seems that the regime is sending a warning to those planning to use the forthcoming anniversary as a catalyst for further protest that the response will be brutal. The authorities have especially been targeting families of people killed in the protests, with intimidation, arrests, and desecration of the graves. Meanwhile, an even more severe hijab law has moved a step closer to implementation.
Many people are hesitant to relaunch protest action in Rojhelat – the Kurdish provinces – without more support from Iran’s central cities, which is where the power lies. Tehran never matched the intensity of the protests in Rojhelat and Baluchistan. But others remain defiant. One activist wrote “The spirit of Mozhgan Eftekhari, the courageous mother of Jina, resonates with the majority of the victims’ families and mothers, and has the power to turn all the suppressive efforts of the regime’s security apparatus against the regime itself.”
While they attempt to control their population through fear, the Iranian regime has gained more weight on the world stage this week as one of the new members of the BRICS economic bloc.
Syria
In Syria, Turkey continues their lethal and deliberately destabilising attacks. Last Saturday, YPJ commander, Sosîn Bîrhat, was killed in a targeted assassination. The YPJ and YPG have never threatened Turkey, though they have of course defended their homeland against Turkish aggression.
On Wednesday, a Turkish drone destroyed a car belonging to Jin TV (Women’s TV). The driver, Necmedîn Faysal Hecî Sînan, was killed, and a journalist was badly injured.
One impact of the disastrously low water levels resulting from Turkey’s retention of river waters is an increase of infectious diseases. The Health Committee in Deir ez-Zor reports the spread of meningitis, cholera, and leishmaniasis.
Meanwhile, there has again been growing unrest against the Assad government in parts of southern Syria – protesting against dire conditions, instability, and corruption. Protestors are demanding autonomy, and the Syrian Democratic Council of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria has expressed their solidarity. They have long been arguing for greater regional autonomy as the basis for a democratic Syrian settlement.
Turkey
In Turkey itself, this week has brought further examples of corrupted justice. In the ongoing Kobanê Case, Kurdish politician Mesut Bağcık pointed out that at the time when an anonymous witness claimed that he, Bağcık, was visiting the PKK in Qandil, he was actually in prison. He highlighted other clear fabrications in witness testimonies, too. “How is it possible that two different people, five months apart, can give the exact same statement about two different individuals?” and “Anonymous witness Atlas has provided identical statements word for word about at least 10 people.”
On the “evidence” of another secret witness, Kurdish musician, Emel Çiftçi, has been arrested and imprisoned despite being under treatment for cancer and in need of emergency surgery. On Sunday, members of the Green Left Party in Adana caught a woman placing bottles of inflammable liquid at the entrance to the party office. When stopped, she claimed that she was acting under instructions from the police. The authorities quickly declared her to be mentally unstable.
And the Istanbul imam who was suspended for calling on people to prepare loaded guns for election day, has been quietly reinstated.
Germany
For anyone trying to escape all this and seek asylum in Germany, Gercek News has published some depressing statistics. The first seven months of this year saw an increase in refugee applications from Turkey, of which 83% identified as Kurdish, but acceptance rates have fallen dramatically, with 60% of those who identified as Turkish given asylum and only a mere 5% of the Kurds.
Sorry not to end on a more positive note. Next week I will be on holiday. I hope to find some better news in two weeks’ time. The struggle continues.
Sarah Glynn is a writer and activist – check her website and follow her on Twitter