A Kurdish Spring on Many Fronts

 

A Kurdish Spring on Many Fronts

By HARVEY MORRIS

http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/a-kurdish-spring-on-many-fronts/?ref=world

 

LONDON - Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the rebel Kurdish Workers

Party, or P.K.K., called for a ceasefire Thursday in the three-decade war

between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish state, giving a new impetus to New

Year celebrations by Kurds.

 

Hundreds of thousands of Kurds gathered in the eastern Turkish city of

Diyarbakir to observe a holiday that they were long forbidden to celebrate

publicly in Turkey.

 

In a message to pro-Kurdish legislators, Mr. Ocalan called for thousands of

his fighters to withdraw from Turkish territory: "We have reached the point

where the guns must be silenced and where ideas must speak."

 

The truce marks the culmination of intensive negotiations between Mr. Ocalan

and Turkish officials on ending a conflict that cost 40,000 lives.

 

The breakthrough will reverberate beyond Turkey's borders to neighboring

Syria, Iraq and Iran, all countries with large Kurdish minorities.

 

The estimated 30 million Kurds of the Middle East -official figures are

deliberately vague - represent the largest nation in the world without a

state of its own.

 

Although linguistically related to the Persians of Iran, which was also

celebrating the pre-Islamic New Year festival of Nowruz on Thursday, the

Kurds have maintained a distinctive culture that has survived centuries of

division and repression.

 

Their fortunes have seen a sharp change in the past decade, with the war in

Iraq, the Arab Spring and Syria's descent into civil war.

 

Ten years ago this week, Kurds were fleeing to the mountains from the cities

of northern Iraq in anticipation of attacks by the forces of Saddam Hussein

following the U.S.-led invasion.

 

Kurdish forces held the line in the north on behalf of the international

coalition after Turkey refused to join the invasion.

 

A decade on, an autonomous Kurdistan is now the most secure and prosperous

region of Iraq and enjoys close relations with a formerly hostile Turkey.

 

In Syria, Kurdish forces, including those allied to the P.K.K., have taken

over territory and frontiers abandoned by the retreating troops of the

Damascus regime.

 

Fears of a Kurdish contagion have now spread to Iran, where the pro-Syrian

Tehran regime is concerned that a P.K.K. peace agreement will not only

strengthen Turkey's hand in the region but might also encourage unrest among

its own Kurdish population.

 

"A P.K.K. that suspends its operations in Turkey is most likely to support

the armed struggle of the Iranian Kurds and fight against Iran, or to go to

Syria to boost and consolidate the gains of the Kurdish people there,"

according to Bayram Sinkaya, writing for Turkey's Center for Middle Eastern

Strategic Studies.

 

For centuries, and before the creation of the modern Iranian, Turkish, Iraqi

and Syrian states, rival powers used the Kurds to fight their wars with

little benefit to the divided Kurdish nation.

 

In modern times, movements such as the P.K.K. have been used as proxies in

conflicts between hostile neighboring states.

 

Analysts believe Turkey was prompted to make its own accommodation with a

rebel movement it had failed to crush in response to the increasing

influence within Syria of the P.K.K.-linked Democratic Union Party, or

P.Y.D.

 

"The Kurdish issue is Turkey's Achilles heel," Kadri Gursel wrote at Al

Monitor, which covers trends in the Middle East. "It is its bleeding wound

and as long as it remains as such Ankara cannot maintain an ambitious policy

that would mean challenging regional powers."

 

The ultimate success of Turkey's attempt to solve its Kurdish question will

doubtless depend on its readiness to recognize the democratic and cultural

rights of its Kurdish population.

 

Kurdish movements in the Middle East, including the P.K.K., have broadly

abandoned the objective of creating a pan-Kurdish state, an aspiration that

was denied to the Kurds in the post-World War I settlement imposed by the

world powers.

 

They now seek broader autonomy and equal rights within the established

borders of existing states. The Turkish-Kurdish truce might bring them one

step closer to that goal.

 

Within a changing Middle East, the Kurds might well discern a symbolic spark

of freedom from the Nowruz bonfires they light on Thursday.

 

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