On
March 21, 2013, after years of armed struggle, Abdullah Öcalan—Turkey’s
imprisoned Kurdish leader—accepted a peace deal proffered by Turkey’s
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. While Erdoğan will claim credit for
winning an agreement to have PKK fighters withdraw, the life expectancy
of the deal remains in question because Erdoğan seems unwilling to
implement the confederation which Turkey’s Kurds and Öcalan’s followers
demand. Such a confederation would not only require political
reorganization, but would also demand fundamental reform of Turkey’s arm
forces and security services to enable Kurds to serve in the bodies
which once oppressed them.
So what is Turkey’s motive for pushing a peace process which the Turkish leadership is not willing to see to the end? In my Kurdistan Tribune column,
I cynically suggested two theories: First was Erdoğan’s desire to win
the Kurdish vote for any constitutional referendum that could propel
Erdoğan into a revamped presidency, offering him even greater powers.
And the second was a desire to win the 2020 Summer Olympics, the award
of which to Turkey could personally net Erdoğan’s family hundreds of
millions of dollars since, regardless of what debt hosting the Olympics
might incur to the Turkish people, seldom is there a large project which
Erdoğan cannot direct to Çalik Holdings, a company run by his
son-in-law.
In
a recent speech, Fethullah Gülen, the controversial Turkish religious
thinker in self-imposed exile in the United States, has suggested a
third goal. According to Hürriyet Daily News:
Gülen
has spoken out on the peace process, calling on everyone to “find
religion as the common ground…” Gülen said groups should unite over what
they hold in common, “our God, our prophet, our religion,” warning
people against ignoring these common points, which would lead them to
“disunity.”
That
sounds good but, in effect, Gülen is arguing Kurds—who tend to
prioritize ethnic identity over religious identity—should embrace more
Islamist thinking in order to find commonality with their oppressors. It
is worth noting where we have heard such thinking before: In 1971,
after the Pakistani Army lost Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), the
Pakistani military and President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto sought consciously
to promote religion as the identity which would unite all Pakistanis
regardless of ethnic group. (Pakistan had been formed as a state for the
Muslims but, in practice, ethnic identity remained as important if not
more so among the Pashtun, Baluchi, and Bengalis). The result was a
deliberate—and largely successful—attempt to radicalize the population.
Pakistan
is a mess today largely because the Pakistani military and its
component, the Inter-Services Intelligence–implemented Bhutto’s vision.
It got worse: After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Pakistan was able
to leverage its position as the only point of egress for the West into
Afghanistan as a way to exclusively support the so-called Peshawar
Seven, in effect transforming Pakistan’s religious obsession into their
far more liberal neighbor, forever changing that land as well.
Make
no mistake: It is long past time for Turkey to make peace with the
Kurds. Let us hope that Turkey does not believe that the path to peace
lies in promoting religious identity over righting historical wrongs.
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