Elements of the PKK based in the Kurdish northern part of Iraq recently conducted a cross-border raid into Turkey and took, they claim, eight Turkish soldiers hostage.
What follows is a speculation about why they did that. I have not read this speculation in the traditional media, which strikes me as a reason to believe that it’s correct. If it is, then the Bush Admistration has a bigger problem, even, than they are letting on. The White House has been performing an extremely unstable balancing act with Baghdad and the Kurdish Regional Government vis-a-vis Kirkuk. The PKK move, I suspect, has blown it up.
I speculate that the PKK is holding the eight Turkish soldiers it claims to have captured, hostage, in order to pressure Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki and the Bush Administration into allowing the Kirkuk referendum to go through this year, as required by article 140 of the Iraqi Constitution.
So the PKK has taken eight Turkish soldiers as hostages.
Stratfor writes, in a recent analysis:
Arab newspapers report that Kurdish parties in Iraq are working to reverse the demographics of Kirkuk by paying Arabs to relocate. Arabs leaving Kirkuk are being paid approximately $16,248 per family to leave the city, according to Dubai-based Gulf News.
The process of “Kurdifying” the ancient, multiethnic and oil-rich city of Kirkuk has been going on for awhile and is, for Iraqi Kurds, a vital step toward financial independence. Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq’s Sunni and Shiite factions all have a vested interest in making sure Kirkuk’s oil wealth does not officially fall under the Kurds’ control, however, and are actively working to settle more Arabs in the city in order to shift the demographics back in their favor.
This tug-of-war over Kirkuk will intensify in the coming months as the constitutional deadline approaches. Article 140 of the Iraqi Constitution stipulates that the final status of Kirkuk and other disputed areas is supposed to be settled in a local referendum by the end of 2007. For the referendum to take place, Kirkuk must first be demographically “normalized” and a census must be conducted. But Iraq’s central government has put enough obstacles in place to prevent the census from being taken.
The LA Times affirms half of this speculation in today’s paper. The LA Times writes that Kurds suspect that Turkey is acting warlike at the moment in order to prevent the Kirkuk referendum. The idea, here, is that Turkey doesn’t actually care about the PKK or their own Turkish soldiers that much — they just want to prevent a strong Kurdish region from developing.
Iraq’s Kurds suspect Ankara is flexing its military might in part because it wants to weaken Iraqi Kurdistan and exert pressure on the Kurds over the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. The city is home to a Turkmen population, as well as Arabs and Kurds. Turkey has warned the city should not be annexed to Iraqi Kurdistan.
With a November deadline for a referendum on its future about to pass, Kirkuk’s future remains unsettled. “The aim is to really just weaken and decrease the Kurdish region and make it weaker and smaller,” said Kurdish parliament member Mahmoud Othman. “They are not aiming at the PKK.”
Many Iraqi Kurds, haunted by their tragic history under Saddam Hussein, worry that the country’s Arab-led central government will try to roll back their hard-won freedoms in the north, be it their ability to negotiate oil contracts independently of Baghdad or to celebrate Kurdish culture. They fear that the issue of the PKK is pretext for an effort to erode their privileges.
But the other half of this, though, is the idea that the PKK, by taking eight Turkish soldiers hostage, is giving itself and the KRG an extra bargaining chip. This will be giving the Bush Administration a big headache, as the Bush Administration has been going along with Baghdad in slow-walking the Kirkuk referendum. Bush thought he could do two contrary things:
(1) Be friendly with the Kurds, including not going hard militarily against the PKK.
(2) Not give the Kurds the Kirkuk referendum.
But this move by PKK collapses the illusion that the White House could do both.
Heretofore, the US has tried to balance (1) and (2) by pleading an inability to go after the PKK. This is a useful claim because it could at least placate Baghdad and Turkey; hold them at bay. The New York Times puts it like this in today’s paper:
The United States lists the P.K.K. as a terrorist organization, but American military commanders in Baghdad have long resisted calls by Turkey to devote American military resources to going after the group in mountainous northern Iraq. The commanders say they have barely enough troops to deal with the insurgency in Iraq, so using them to contain the P.K.K. has never been a serious option.
You can be sure that in the midst of all the “emergency calls” between Secretary of State Rice and the leaders of the KRG, that several things are happening. As reported publically, Rice is telling the Kurdish Regional Government to crack down on the PKK. But we can be confident that Rice is also assuring the KRG that they will get their Kirkuk referendum sooner or later. And we can be confident that the KRG is telling her that “sooner or later” is not good enough; it must be this year, as the Iraqi Constitution requires.
Here is what we’re reading in the papers about those calls. New York Times:
President Bush discussed Turkey’s concerns with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq during a video conference on Monday. “The prime minister agreed with President Bush that Turkey should have no doubt about our mutual commitment to end all terrorist activity from Iraqi soil,” said a White House spokesman, Gordon Johndroe.
Administration officials said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had told Massoud Barzani, the leader of the Iraqi Kurdish region, in a telephone call that the relative peace and prosperity of Iraqi Kurdistan was at risk because of the cross-border attacks by the P.K.K.
“Relative prosperity of Iraqi Kurdistan” I take to be code for “Kirkuk”, as well as for White House winking at KRG oil contracts generally.
The LA Times last night (same link) reported that the PKK offered a truce to Turkey, the PKK saying, “If the Turkish state stops the attacks, this escalating environment of tension will turn into a clash-free one.”
But CNN is now reporting that Turkey rejects the offer.
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan rejected reports of an apparent cease-fire offer from Kurdish separatists Tuesday after arriving in Baghdad for talks with Iraqi leaders aimed at defusing tensions along the countries’ shared border.
Babacan says that no truce can be held with a “terrorist organization”, which is both tactically predictable and also, one assumes, perfectly fair: the EU and the US also call the PKK a terrorist organization.
With 60,000 Turkish troops massing close to the country’s south-eastern frontier, Erdogan’s government faces growing public pressure to take action following a weekend PKK ambush which left at least 12 Turkish soldiers dead and eight more missing.
— snip —
In a telephone call Monday, U.S. President George W. Bush expressed “deep concern” over the attack and told Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul that Washington was urging Iraqi action against the PKK. The PKK is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. and the European Union.
There might not be any way out of this. The White House can’t give the KRG its referendum. Baghdad will not allow it. Turkey won’t stand for it. But the KRG demands it and the PKK now claims to have Turkish hostages, intending, I suspect, to force it.
It’s going to be an interesting two months, as we run up to the end-of-year deadline for Article 140 of the Iraqi Constitution.
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