PKK Blowback
The Turkish military is attacking PKK bases in northern Iraq. With a virtual news blackout it is impossible to know what is happening on the ground in Iraq. However, the war might be coming closer, much closer. The PKK reportedly has asked its youthful supporters “to make [Turkey’s] cities uninhabitable”. There has already been a spate of cars set mysteriously on fire over the past month in several districts of Istanbul.If there is PKK terror in the cities, Turkey’s Kurdish population will be in a difficult position as anti-PKK hatred already has spilled over into anti-Kurdish sentiment. Some of this is orchestrated by the state in emotional televised funerals of soldiers (“martyrs”) killed in PKK fighting. In any case, Kurdish heritage will once again brand a Turk as a potential traitor, an enormous step back from the more conciliatory approach fostered by the AKP government that has been pushing to solve the “Kurdish problem” through acknowledgement of ethnic differences, language and cultural rights and economic development of the largely Kurdish east.
The government has been pushed into this corner by the PKK’s renewed fighting and by the Turkish military’s insistence on a massive cross-border response. Both the PKK and the Turkish military are finding in this hot conflict a raison d’etre. Both have been nudged aside by a society wishing to try another way. The PKK and Kurdish political parties lost much ground in last year’s elections as Kurds voted for the AKP. Under the AKP, the Turkish military has been losing its ability to intervene in politics and its role as guardian of secularism has been made increasingly irrelevant as parliament expands religious rights. A security emergency is exactly what the PKK and the military need to become immediately relevant and to rally people behind them.
The blowback, however, will be unpredictable – and potentially destabilizing of Turkey itself. At the very least, it will make AKP’s conciliatory programs impossible. And there are elements of the Turkish state (and perhaps the PKK) who would rejoice at that.
Turkey Increases Security as PKK Calls for Violence” (click here for article)
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