Turkish Forum

Category: Turkey

  • The Turkish-Armenian Rapprochement: Implications for the South Caucasus

    The Turkish-Armenian Rapprochement: Implications for the South Caucasus

    Turkey’s recent and ongoing rapprochement with Armenia, addressed in last week’s Caucasus Update from the Turkish angle, has implications that could reverberate throughout the South Caucasus and beyond. Arguably, the normalisation of ties between Armenia and Turkey would be an event of equivalent regional significance as the Russo-Georgian war of last August.

    Details remain unclear. This diplomatic murkiness testifies to just how explosive the issue has become for the Turkish, Azerbaijani and Armenian governments. The outlines, however, are apparent – that Turkey and Armenia are expected to begin opening their mutual border and establishing diplomatic relations probably sooner than later. The Turkish overtures are contingent on two things: firstly, that US President Barack Obama does not openly acknowledge the Armenian ‘genocide’, and secondly (and much less publicly) that Armenia renounces or at least quietly suspends its own push for genocide recognition and its long-dormant claims to Turkey’s eastern provinces as part of its “Greater Armenia” concept.

    A third condition – that any formal moves are also conditional on Armenian progress towards removing its troops from Nagorno-Karabakh and the territories around it – is unconfirmed. The very idea that Turkey would go through with the border talks without attaching any conditions on Karabakh has provoked fury in Azerbaijan, especially since Turkey sealed the border in 1993 in response to the Armenian occupation of the regions, a reality which has clearly not changed. In Baku, the issue has created a rare patch of common ground for the government and the opposition (APA, April 7).

    Essentially, what has developed appears to be an enormous three-way game.  Firstly, Turkey’s determination to go ahead with the thaw – including the establishment of an alleged framework for talks in the areas of border openings, diplomatic representations, and dispute commissions (Wall Street Journal, April 2) – has been curbed by its recognition of the obvious, and urgent, need to keep their ethnic and linguistic brethren in Azerbaijan on side. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on April 7 that “The Azerbaijani-Armenian dispute should be resolved first. Then, problems between Turkey and Armenia can be solved, too”. According to Today’s Zaman, Turkey’s bluff may be to limit the thaw to occasional border openings and limited diplomatic contact until October, when a World Cup qualifying match between Armenia and Turkey (the return leg of the fixture which began the whole process last September with Turkish President’s visit to Yerevan) is due to take place in Istanbul (Today’s Zaman, April 9). This would give Ankara time to push Azerbaijan and Armenia into a compromise over Karabakh, probably under the auspices of Turkey’s much-discussed Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform.

    Secondly, Yerevan’s strategy is to decouple the issue of the Turkish border from the Karabakh issue, ensuring that Armenia receives the economic and political benefits of relations with Turkey without having to concede ground vis-à-vis Azerbaijan. Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian clearly illustrated this bluff on April 5 when he warned Mr. Erdogan that attempts to link the two issues were an attempt to impede progress (RFE/RL, April 7).

    Clearly, Yerevan anticipates that Turkey is unwilling to exasperate President Obama and – more importantly – undermine its role as a regional stabiliser by allowing the talks to fail. It is also attempting to ensure that the status quo in Karabakh is maintained. Armenia has no particular interest in altering the situation in the disputed territories hoping that one day Azerbaijan will be demanded by the world to reconcile with the loss of its territories (a belief that has been reinforced by the recognition of Kosovo). So without a continuing Turkish blockade Yerevan is unlikely to offer any concessions to Baku, and may in time feel emboldened enough to start demanding that Azerbaijan back down.

    Azerbaijan, thirdly, is hoping that Turkey is not willing to betray its Turkic-speaking ally. However, it reflects the level of concern in Baku that Azerbaijan is not simply relying on ethnic and linguistic solidarity but has been actively (if unofficially) challenging Turkey’s strategic interests. President Ilham Aliyev reportedly said that if Turkey made a deal with Armenia that did not consider Karabakh, Azerbaijan could cut the gas supplies to Turkey (Jamestown Eurasia Daily Monitor, April 9). In this light one should consider recent cooperation between Baku and Russian energy giant Gazprom and discussions between President Aliyev and Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko on alternative gas routes via the Black Sea: in other words, the White Stream pipeline across the Black Sea to Ukraine, which would avoid Turkey (APA, April 10). Given these recent moves, it seems very likely that Azerbaijan will begin seriously reconsidering its participation in the planned Nabucco pipeline to Europe, a project with which it has already grown impatient.

    More significantly, the country could start to reconsider its whole geopolitical orientation. President Aliyev hinted at both of these possibilities at a meeting of Azerbaijan’s Security Council on April 6, in which he stressed the independence of Baku’s foreign policy and the importance of Azerbaijan for the execution of any transnational energy projects in the region (APA, April 6). The voices are getting louder in Baku arguing that the policy of trusting Turkey and the West to support it over Karabakh, incurring Russian displeasure in the process, has achieved nothing. Azerbaijan’s confidence in the West was already damaged by the Russo-Georgian war, in which Washington and Brussels indicated that they would not respond materially to any conflicts in the post-Soviet space. Turkey’s decision to negotiate with Armenia, and the vocal support of the US and the EU for the talks, has struck a further blow to Baku’s faith in the West.

    So why not turn towards Russia? Turkey clearly has diminished its leverage in any Karabakh peace talks and the OSCE’s Minsk Group has made painfully slow progress. The only actor who possesses clear and significant influence in the peace process is Russia, Armenia’s most important ally. Russia is one of the Minsk Group co-chairs but has demonstrated a willingness to act more or less unilaterally, for instance in the Moscow Declaration which it brokered between the two sides last November. Although few Azerbaijanis desire the return of Russian suzerainty, Karabakh is predominant. If Russia can help solve the conflict in a way which is acceptable to Azerbaijan, then all other considerations are secondary. Gas supplies and the cooling of ties with NATO and Washington are a small price to pay.

    The West, and Turkey, must recognise the implications of the Armenian thaw. Clearly, peace in the Caucasus is desirable. Closed borders and mutual distrust are not to be welcomed. But if Turkey’s AKP party rushes ahead, it will embolden nationalists at home who could impede the country’s progress towards the EU. This sounds counter-intuitive: opening the border with Armenia is expected to boost Turkey’s EU accession hopes. But this analysis is from Brussels’ perspective. Domestically, the AKP is weaker than before after March’s local elections, and hasty, unpopular foreign policy gestures may cripple its hopes for the 2011 general election (especially if the EU continues to block accession, regardless of the thaw) and give nationalists the upper hand.

    But even more concerning is the danger that Turkey and the West could ‘lose’ Azerbaijan to Russia. This would not only sound the death knell for Nabucco, but it would also alter the geopolitical profile of the whole of Eurasia and pose a new and serious risk in the Karabakh conflict. Patience is a virtue – Ankara, as well as Brussels and Washington, should bear this maxim in mind.

     

  • The Turkish Conundrum

    The Turkish Conundrum

    This post is authored for PoliGazette by Robert Ellis. As usual, guests posts do not necessarily reflect the opinion of PoliGazette or any of its authors.

    Three weeks ago Stephen Kinzer claimed in The Guardian that NATO had “dissed” the Muslim world by nominating Danish PM Rasmussen as its new secretary-general. But the boot is on the other foot.

    The occasion was the 60th anniversary of the founding of the NATO alliance in 1949. The preamble to the treaty declares that the parties are “determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”. In other words, the alliance was founded to defend the values on which our Western civilisation is based.

    However, the question that arose during the debate surrounding Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s candidacy is how far Turkey, which has been a loyal and stable member of the alliance since 1952, shares these values, especially since the advent of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government in 2002. Since the end of the Cold War NATO now faces a confrontation with militant Islam, particularly in Afghanistan and Iran. And the main objection that Turkey raised, that of the role played by the Danish prime minister during the cartoon crisis in 2005, created a doubt as to whether Turkey was acting as a spokesman for the Muslim world or the Western alliance.

    The cartoon crisis

    The background to the cartoon crisis was the attack on a lecturer at Copenhagen University in October 2004, because he as a ‘kuffar’ (unbeliever) had recited from the Koran during a lecture. The following month the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, was murdered because his critical view of Islam, “Submission”, had been shown on Dutch tv.

    Consequently, a Danish author of a children’s book on the life of the prophet Muhammad had difficulty in a finding an illustrator, and when he finally found one, the artist insisted on remaining anonymous. This, coupled with other incidents of self-censorship, prompted the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten to ask the Danish Cartoonists’ Association to draw the prophet “as you see him”. 12 replied, and the cartoons were published at the end of September 2005.

    Then the ball started rolling. 11 Muslim ambassadors wrote to the Danish prime minister, complaining of the “ongoing smearing campaign” against Islam and Muslims, and called on Rasmussen to “take all those responsible to task under law of the land”. In fact, the tone of the letter was not, as Stephen Kinzer alleges, conciliatory but confrontational.

    Three days later the Danish prime minister received a letter from Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Turkish secretary general of the OIC (Organisation of the Islamic Conference), reiterating the ambassadors’ complaint. In the circumstances, Rasmussen decided not to meet with the ambassadors and sent an identical reply to them and the OIC, where he explained that the freedom of expression has a wide scope and that the Danish government has no means of influencing the press.

    Shortly afterwards Rasmussen reminded Turkey that one of the criteria that qualify for EU membership is that a society complies in full with democratic principles, including the freedom of expression and the press’s unlimited right within the law to criticize both political and religious authorities.

    Between two stools

    Turkey’s problem, which has been underlined by the recent controversy, is that it falls between two stools. On the one hand, Turkey as a member of the Council of Europe is signatory to the European Human Rights Convention, which maintains the right of freedom of expression subject to such laws as are necessary in a democratic society. On the other hand, as a member of the OIC it is also signatory to the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, which stipulates that everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely “in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the Shari’a”.

    The Turkish premier, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, explained that his objections to Rasmussen’s appointment were those that had been expressed to him by various Muslim states, in which case the question arises whether Turkey, as a member of NATO and a candidate for EU membership, is a spokesman for the Muslim world or representative of Western values in that region.

    This is not the first time Erdogan has been caught in such a conflict. For example, the European Court of Human Rights upheld the headscarf ban at Turkish universities in 2005, but Erdogan immediately disputed the Court’s competence to issue a ruling on this issue. “That right”, he stated, “belongs to the scholars of Islam”. This is the same Erdogan that fifteen years ago declared: “Thank God Almighty, I am a servant of the Shari’a.”

    Olli Rehn, the EU’s enlargement commissioer, also found the ground for Turkey’s opposition to Rasmussen’s candidacy “a bit hollow” and added: “It does not look good from a European perspective, because freedom of expression is such a fundamental value, and meanwhile Turkey is aiming to become a member of the European Union.”

    Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gül, found Rehn’s remarks “unpleasant” and warned that such criticism could have consequences for Western securíty. According to Gül: ´”We acted in a rational, logical and modern way”, but it was only Barack Obama’s intervention that forestalled a standoff.

    It is ironic that the NATO summit in Strasbourg was followed by the second forum in the Alliance of Civilizations in Istanbul. Here Rasmussen once again stressed that freedom of expression is a precondition for open dialogue and that all forms of censorship are enemies of that dialogue. Turkey, which has a dismal human rights record and ranks 102nd out of 173 countries in terms of freedom of the press, should – instead of being offended – take the new secretary-general’s remarks to heart.

    Robert Ellis is a regular commentator on Turkish affairs in Denmark and from 2005 to 2008 was a frequent contributor to the Turkish Daily News. 

  • Turkish military disposes anti-personnel mines

    Turkish military disposes anti-personnel mines

    By SELCAN HACAOGLU
    Associated Press, 2009-04-10 10:19 PM

    Turkey’s military on Friday said it has destroyed half of the anti-personnel mines in its inventory in compliance with an international treaty banning the weapons.

    The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a Geneva-based organization which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, criticized Turkey, Greece and Belarus late last year for missing deadlines to destroy a total of nearly 7.5 million of land mines by March 2008.

    “We have destroyed half of the anti-personnel mines,” said Lt. Col. Zafer Akalin, commander of the military’s munitions disposal facility in Kirikkale, central Turkey on Friday. He would not say how many mines were in the military’s inventory.

    Last year, Turkey said that preparations for getting rid of its stockpiles took longer than planned. The disposal facility was inaugurated in November 2007 –more than three years after Turkey signed the 1997 Ottawa Convention against land mines.

    Akalin said the facility was designed to carry out an environmentally safe destruction of munitions. Dozens of military experts were destroying rockets and dismantling rows of various types of anti-personnel mines during a media tour on Friday. Automated machines were also used to scrap huge artillery shells.

    Mine explosions have killed or maimed hundreds of people in Turkey’s southeast where the military has been fighting separatist Kurdish rebels since 1984.

    Turkey, a NATO member and U.S. ally, last year began clearing an estimated half a million mines laid along the Syrian border in 1950s to secure the plain border.

    Source:  www.etaiwannews.com, 10.04.2009

  • Obsolete ‘War on terror’ gone

    Obsolete ‘War on terror’ gone

    By Reza Aslan
    Los Angeles Times

    Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton let slip last week that the Obama administration has abandoned the phrase “war on terror.” Its absence had been noted by commentators. There was no directive, Clinton said, “it’s just not being used.”

    It might seem a trivial thing, but the change in rhetoric marks a significant turning point in the ideological contest with radical Islam. That is because the war on terror always has been a conflict more rhetorical than real. There is, of course, a very real, very bloody military component in the struggle against extremist forces in the Muslim world, although one can argue whether the U.S. and allied engagements in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond are an integral part of that struggle, a distraction from it or, worse, evidence of its subversion and failure. But to the extent that the war on terror has been posited, from the start, as a war of ideology a clash of civilizations it is a rhetorical war, one fought more constructively with words and ideas than with guns and bombs.

    The truth is that the phrase “war on terror” always has been problematic, not just because “terror,” “terrorism” and “terrorist” are wastebasket terms that often convey as much about the person using them as they do about the events or people being described, but because this was never meant to be a war against terrorism per se. If it were, it would have involved the Basque separatists in Spain, the Hindu/Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Maoist rebels in eastern India, Israeli ultranationalists, the Kurdish PKK, remnants of the Irish Republican Army and the Sikh separatist movements, and so on.

    Rather, the war on terror, as conceived of by the Bush administration, was targeted at a particular brand of terrorism that employed exclusively by Islamic entities. Which is why the enemy in this ideological conflict was gradually and systematically expanded to include not just the people who attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, and the organizations that supported them, but an ever-widening conspiracy of disparate groups, such as Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the clerical regime in Iran, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Kashmiri militants, the Taliban and any other organization that declared itself Muslim and employed terrorism as a tactic.

    According to the master narrative of the war on terror, these were a monolithic enemy with a common agenda and a shared ideology. Never mind that many of these groups consider one another to be a graver threat than they consider America, that they have vastly different and sometimes irreconcilable political yearnings and religious beliefs, and that, until the war on terror, many had never thought of the United States as an enemy. Give this imaginary monolith a made-up name say, “Islamofascism” and an easily recognizable enemy is created, one that exists not so much as a force to be defeated but as an idea to be opposed, one whose chief attribute appears to be that “they” are not “us.”

    By lumping together the disparate forces, movements, armies, ideas and grievances of the greater Muslim world, from Morocco to Malaysia; by placing them in a single category (“enemy”), assigning them a single identity (“terrorist”); and by countering them with a single strategy (war), the Bush administration seemed to be making a blatant statement that the war on terror was, in fact, “a war against Islam.”

    That is certainly how the conflict has been viewed by a majority in four major Muslim countries Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan and Indonesia in a worldpublicopinion.org poll in 2007. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they believe that the purpose of the war on terror is to “spread Christianity in the region” of the Middle East.

    Indeed, if the war on terror was meant to be an ideological battle against groups such as al-Qaida for the hearts and minds of Muslims, the consensus around the globe seems to be that the battle has been lost.

    A September 2008 BBC World Service survey of 23 countries, including Russia, Australia, Pakistan, Turkey, France, Germany, Britain, the U.S., China and Mexico, found that almost 60 percent of all respondents said the war on terror either has had no effect or that it has made al-Qaida stronger. Forty-seven percent said they think that neither side was winning; 56 percent of Americans have that view.

    It is time not just to abandon the phrase “war on terror” but to admit that the ideological struggle against radical Islam could never be won militarily. The battle for the hearts and minds of Muslims will take place not in the streets of Baghdad or in the mountains of Afghanistan but in the suburbs of Paris, the slums of East London and the cosmopolitan cities of Berlin and New York.

    In the end, the most effective weapon in countering the appeal of groups such as al-Qaida may be the words we use.

    Aslan is the author of “How To Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror.”

    Source: www.thecabin.net, 10.04.2009

    How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror by Reza Aslan
    How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror by Reza Aslan
  • The Dream of a Kurdish State

    The Dream of a Kurdish State

    By Hewa Aziz

    Sulaimaniyah, Asharq Al-Awsat- Throughout its long history, the forty-million strong Kurdish nation has never had its own independent state. Since the decline of the Median Empire some 3000 years ago, the Kurds have remained part of other states or, at the best, managed to establish scattered principalities as part of larger empires dominating the region such as the Islamic and Ottoman Empires.

    The Kurds established the principalities of Baban in Sulaimaniyah, Ardalan and Botan, and later founded the province of Sharazor, the capital of which was Kirkuk, and Mosul and other cities.

    The idea of establishing an independent Kurdish state was not a priority for the Kurds, nor was it a matter of necessity. This is because the concept of the modern state was yet to emerge or appear in the region until the late nineteenth century when states began to emerge according to a modern system.

    At the time, despite their potential, Kurdish leaders were preoccupied with minor issues that took their attention away from realizing the dream of establishing an independent Kurdish state, a dream that the Persian and the Ottoman Empires, and modern-day Iran and Turkey have fought against.

    After World War I, an opportunity arose for the Kurds to outline the features of their independent state within the framework of treaties and the international and regional coalitions that dominated that period. However, the Kurdish leader Sheikh Mahmoud al Hafid in particular, was content with establishing his small kingdom in Sulaimaniyah. The kingdom soon collapsed following bloody wars with the British occupation forces that brought down the Ottoman Empire and with it all its allying bodies including al Hafid’s kingdom. He failed to make the most of Kurdish sentiment at the time regarding the Kurdish right to establish a homeland.

    Sheikh Mahmoud al Hafid was unaware of the fact that the new age required a new a vision and conduct, and as a result, the Turks established their own state and the Kurds were dispersed between four of the regional countries: Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.

    Almost a century has elapsed since then. That experience was followed by other attempts to establish a Kurdish state such as the Republic of Mahabad by Qazi Mohammed in Iranian Kurdistan back in 1946. This attempt was short lived and was brought down by the army of the Pahlavi regime. The dream of establishing an independent Kurdish state is yet to be realized. But the main question is: will this dream ever come true?

    Many Kurdish politicians, intellectuals and decision-makers agree that this dream is possible and can be realized in the right political regional and international circumstances. Others are of the view that the dream is unattainable for geopolitical reasons whereas others predict that more than one autonomous or semi-autonomous state will emerge in the four parts of Kurdistan shortly in view of recent developments and the potential political shifts in the new Middle East over the next two decades.

    Fareed Asasard, a leading figure at the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK] party and the director of Kurdistan’s Strategic Studies Centre based in Sulaimaniyah, believes that the idea of forming or founding an independent Greater Kurdistan comprising of Kurdistan’s four areas continues to be a hypothetical issue.

    “The basic components required for establishing any state are still unavailable [to the Kurds] at the present time and I believe that they will not be available in the long term for several reasons, the most important of which is that the world will witness a shift in the decades to come causing it to rely on geo-economics instead of geopolitics as the case is at present,” said Asasard.

    Asasard, who has conducted a lot of research on this topic, stresses that the idea of founding a greater independent state has failed a number of times. For example the Turks failed to found the Greater Turkish Empire from China to the Mediterranean to ensure the existence of the Turkish race everywhere. Asasard adds, “In the mid-1990s, I presented a research paper on the geopolitics of Kurdistan in which I made clear that establishing an independent Kurdish state in Iraqi Kurdistan would be very difficult as it requires changing the map of a significant part of the world. Besides, even if this state were established, it would remain isolated from the world as it would have no seaports.”

    Asasard expects that there will be several small Kurdish statelets in other parts of Kurdistan in the long term especially as the initial step in this direction has already been taken in the sense that the political and administrative structure of Iraqi Kurdistan is quite independent. However, he stressed that the link between these Kurdish states on the economic level in the future will be very weak and that these states will remain linked to the central systems in Tehran, Turkey and Baghdad.

    Asasard stated that he believes that international politics will be subject to the logics and authority of the economy in upcoming decades. Therefore, the Kurdish statelets, if they emerge, will be economically weak and this will be their biggest problem, not to mention their unfortunate location, which will always tip the scale in favour of their neighbours, making it subordinate to these neighbouring countries. Therefore, the idea of founding an independent Kurdish state is an unachievable dream.

    On the other hand however, Dr. Jaza Toufi Taleb, professor of geopolitics at the University of Sulaimani believes that all the basic constituents are available for an independent Kurdish state to be established on Kurdish land such as the geographical borders, nation, economy and seaports. However, the political atmosphere is completely unsuitable for outlining the features of the state at present, especially as the concerned countries continue to reject even marginal autonomy for the Kurds in their countries. Dr Taleb explained that even though several independent states around the world, such as Kosovo for example, do not have the potential that Iraqi Kurdistan enjoys.

    “I believe that if reformists in Iran and the moderates in Turkey gain power in the upcoming elections, and with the geopolitical changes in Syria that are taking place, this would allow for the rise of political bodies in the Kurdistan region, specifically in Turkey which wants to join the EU but a precondition is the acknowledgement of the rights of all minorities. In Iran, there are signs of such bodies emerging under the rule of reformists. These bodies will represent the initial step towards the establishment of the Kurdish state in the long term. Turkey will be the starting point towards this goal. However, geopolitically, the dream of establishing the greater Kurdish state remains a difficult dream to make come true,” explained Dr Taleb.

    But Hussein Yazdan Bana, Vice President of the Kurdistan Freedom Party headed by Ali Qazi Mohammed, the son of the founder of the Kurdish Mahabad Republic in Iranian Kurdistan, stressed that the Kurdish nation has the right to an independent state on its land in accordance with international law. He emphasized that Kurdistan possesses all the requirements necessary for establishing an independent state just like other countries in the world. “Conspiracies and international interests were, and still are, the major obstacles to the establishment of the Kurdish state. This is exemplified by what happened to Sheikh Mahmoud al Hafid’s kingdom and the Kurdistan Republic [of Mahabad] founded by Qazi Mohamed.”

    Yazdan Bana emphasized that the most important prerequisite for the establishment of any state is the will and resolution of the nation itself and the favourable external factors and circumstances that have not been agreeable to the Kurds until now.

    “If the British had not been present and the superpowers did not have their own interests, the Kurdish, Baban, Botan and Ardalan principalities would have been successful in establishing Greater Kurdistan. In addition, the very few opportunities that were made available to the Kurds throughout history, specifically after World War I, were not utilised well by Kurdish politicians to establish that state.”

    Yazdan Bana confirmed that international policies in the current age of globalization are not resistant to the aspirations of countries seeking to establish their own independent states. These conditions can be utilised to make the Kurdish dream come true provided that there is a unified political will among the Kurds.

    Yazdan Bana said, “The establishment of the Kurdish state is a goal that the Kurds and their political powers should act to achieve, and we can do this provided that a unified and a solid political will is made available. At present, the establishment of this state is not possible for several reasons, but once the Kurdish politicians abandon their personal dreams and ambitions for power and influence then forty million people will be able to establish their own state.”

    Abdul Baqi Yousef, member of the politburo of the Kurdish Yekiti Party in Syria highlighted that the establishment of an independent state is the right of the Kurdish nation and it is not an impossible dream. However, he explains that this is conditional upon future political developments in the region that will outline existing ties between the Kurds and the Middle East region and will result in establishing ties between all the parts of Kurdistan.

    “States are not established based on emotions or desires but basic factors such as geography, economy and others factors that are all available in Kurdistan. I believe that the future developments, in the long run, will allow for the establishment of several Kurdish statelets in the region, and this will lead to the establishment of independent greater Kurdistan.”

    But the issue differs for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party [PKK] in Turkey, which called for establishing greater Kurdistan since it began the armed struggle in 1984. The party reduced its demand to establishing a confederation system that ensures national and cultural rights for Kurds whose population exceeds ten million in Turkey’s Kurdistan region alone.

    Ahmed Deniz, the PKK’s foreign affairs officer, believes that the municipal elections that took place recently in Turkey were promising as they indicated fair democratic and political solutions to the Kurdish cause in Turkey.

    Deniz told Asharq Al-Awsat that the Kurdish nation, whose land was split between the four countries following the Treaty of Lausanne that was signed after World War I, is still the only nation with no independent state in the region despite that its population exceeds 40 million.

    “In the PKK, we believe that a confederation system based on the freedom and rights of the Kurdish people is best suited to the Kurdish cause not only in Turkey but in the entire Kurdistan region as is the case with several advanced European countries. However, the PKK still believes in the right of the Kurdish people to an independent state. But the PKK’s political strategy at present does not aim to establish an independent state that requires a particular atmosphere that we lack at present, especially as an independent state does not necessarily mean freedom for nations. What is more important to us is that the Kurds gain their freedom, enjoy real democracy and human rights. Only then can the Kurds decide themselves the nature of the political identity they want,” said Deniz.

    As for the renowned Kurdish-Syrian writer Nouri Brimo, he said that “the [establishment of the] Kurdish state is not a dream but a political course and its supporters increase as it gains strength through the sacrifices of its people. In all cases, the Kurds have been able to prove throughout history that they have always been rational in their political discourse and presentation and that they have always respected their neighbours.”

    But Sami Davood, a renowned researcher at the Syrian Sardam cultural institution, stated that the establishment of the Kurdish state is related to geographical factors first and foremost. In other words, the issue requires the liberation of Kurdistan’s geographical region before an independent identity can be built.

    Due to the geographical nature of the Kurdish areas in Syria, there cannot be any armed struggle unlike in the Kurdish regions in Iraq, Turkey and Iran in addition to the population density of each of the four regions. Therefore, Davood believes that any attempt by the Kurds to establish their own state will be confronted with strong opposition from the regional states not so that they can keep the Kurds within the boundaries of their own countries by force, but because the majority of water and energy resources are situated in the Kurdish areas of the four countries.

    Source: aawsat.com, 10/04/2009

  • World Azerbaijanis Congress against opening of Turkey-Armenia borders

    World Azerbaijanis Congress against opening of Turkey-Armenia borders

    Baku. Ramil Mammadli–APA. The World Azerbaijanis Congress (WAC), co-chaired by Pasha Galbinur and Mahammadrza Kheshti, issued a statement against the talks over the opening of Turkey-Armenia borders and establishing of diplomatic and economic relations, WAC press service told APA. The Congress expressed concern of all Azerbaijanis over the world. “Canakkale, where Azerbaijanis shed their blood, and Azerbaijani lands where our Turkish brothers shed their blood, both are Motherland. It is not suitable politically or publicly to open borders in one side of the Motherland when other side is at war”.

    “Azerbaijani public, governmental and Diaspora organizations provide useful activity against the Armenia’s occupant policy against Azerbaijan and its territorial and “genocide” claims against Turkey. Today Armenia faces with difficult economic and political crisis. It has no other international access except Iran. Undoubtedly only Armenia will benefit from the opening of borders. This action will negatively effect on the negotiation process between Armenia and Azerbaijan, will justify the occupant policy of Armenia and encourage it for new occupation. Armenia will continue its territorial and “genocide” claims against Turkey even after the opening of the borders”.

    WAC said it believed Turkey would avoid the decision, which could damage the Turkic world’s interests, and would take the interests of Turkic peoples into consideration.