Faculty Articles
Kurds at the Nexus of Global Politics:
How the US uses one genocide to justify another
Jesse Benjamin
Published in: Z Magazine 16(6), June 2003.
In the build-up to the war with Iraq, and then in its execution, Kurds once again made a brief if fleeting appearance within Western media and discourse. For Kurds, however, or those who follow Kurdish issues closely and with concern, this revived attention in world media and opinion is somehow false: it is shallow in both its commitment and in its analytic depth. One wants to be pleased that finally the world seems to be paying heed to the plight of the Kurds, but at the same time one must ask what, if anything, this attention is really accomplishing. Colorful front page pictures of Kurds fleeing in a panic from the threat of renewed chemical weapons attacks at the onset of the war showed us Kurds as victims, while colorful photos of peshmergah fighters alongside US Marines confirm other aspects of the typical orientalist stereotypes, but the media analysis rarely goes any deeper than this. True, as little as one month ago, Kurds only appeared in the news media as guests in articles about Turkey or Iraq, as footnotes seen only by avid researchers. But now that the major fighting is past us, and Kurdish issues revolve mostly around what the next Iraqi government will look like, the question remains: why is the complex story of the Kurds still hidden from view?
The truth is that the story of the Kurds is far too damning of US and Western power and complicity in one of the twentieth century’s worst cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide, to ever be a part of mainstream media. The truth of Kurdish history would get in the way of the current US regime’s narrative of justifications for its war against Iraq and its neo-colonial pretensions throughout the Middle East. The Kurds are particularly troublesome now in the post-war articulation of power in the region, especially to the extent that this most deserving of people will again be left out of the super-power politics that determine the region’s fate.
Kurds appear in Western discourse, when they do at all, almost exclusively as victims, as seemingly inert ‘pre-historic’ [or non-historic] objects amidst the world of states and geo-power. The Kurds are thus the ‘other’ of the ‘other.’ They are the racialized victim [‘other’] of much of the “Middle East,” which is itself the racialized victim of US and Western imperialism. As such, this twice marginalized people, doubly erased and oppressed, remain one of the most enigmatic and obscure communities in the world. Yet, what is even more distinct is the absence of knowledge and information about Kurds within the progressive communities of the US and the West, even among anti-war activists. This is a result, among other things, of US hegemony over the global economy and its media, and the fact that colonial and imperial displacement means, in part, [formal] educational underdevelopment and thus great difficulty in self-representation in the West.
One of the most powerful images of the build-up to this new round of war against Iraq was, ironically, that of the caged dog apparently succumbing to chemical or biological weapons testing. True, there has been no shortage of the horrifying footage of Halabja, 1988, which was a primary tool of conditioning US public opinion against Hussein in the first war against Iraq. But with a television-watching US public so easily jaded of atrocities, the footage of the innocent dog was what was new this time around. Forget, of course, most would agree that human lives should matter more, and forget also that the US is known to have tested its weapons of mass destruction against animals and humans [its own unwitting citizens and soldiers] alike. The point is that, like the hapless dog, Kurds seem only to be allowed into Western discourse as discretely defined victims without a history. So seamless is this pattern, it appears that Kurdish reality and history is itself perceived as a threat to Western power in the world.
One wonders then: if the erasure of Kurds from history is central if not necessary to the current global [im]balance of power, does it then follow that knowledge about the Kurds might contribute to the rupture of dominant discourses and, ultimately, help alter the global [im]balance of power? After all, the underlying instability and fragility of the capitalist world system has long been understood, but perhaps never more so than since September 2001, when masses of US citizens looked at maps of central and western Asia on the major networks for ostensibly the first time. Who can forget the news hour graphics of a globe spinning from the Atlantic world until it finally reached Afghanistan and central Asia? Less than two years later, we are seeing maps of Iraq, in which Iraqi Kurds and even sometimes Turkish Kurds occupy the periphery. How then can this important people, numbering well in excess of 30,000,000 souls who are located at the center of world history in this immensely pivotal moment, remain so obscure even to students of politics, history and social change?
The Costs of Statelessness: Kurds in the Vortex of Turkish-US-Israeli “Relations” in the Middle East.
The recent US stand-off with Turkey, and the veritable splitting of NATO and the UN which this in part occasioned, are by all accounts of historic import. Much as ethnic and national strife in the Balkans precipitated the first and second World Wars, the ethnic and national strivings and oppression of the Palestinians and Kurds lie at the foundation of this current global conflict in which the US wages war against Iraq and its intentionally vague wider target: “terrorism”. These conflicts have reached critical junctures at the precise moment in time when US hegemony over the world system is increasingly in question, and most observers believe that some sort of hegemonic shift is already under way, whatever form this may eventually take.
The first round of US-Turkish negotiations was revealing. The US promised first 5, then 15, and finally 30 billion dollars in “aid” and military assistance to Turkey, in exchange for allowing the US to use Turkey as a staging ground from which to launch troops into Iraq as a northern front. US military planners saw this as crucial, because this is the closest border to the main Iraqi oil fields, which are after all the real strategic objective. Also negotiated, but far less discussed until the past few weeks, was the issue of Turkish military presence in Iraq, not just in policing border refugee camps, but also their explicitly stated desire to enter deep into Iraqi territory to seize the oil fields themselves. While it seemed at first that the US wanted to use Turkish forces as shock troops during the campaign, and as an administrative buffer afterwards, they balked at Turkey’s greater ambitions. Turkey is caught here between not only the US and the EEC, but also between the West and the Arab world. As Mohammad Noureddine, in Beirut’s Daily Star put it, Turkey is “between an American rock and a European hard place.” Yet, the driving force in their at times bizarre policy decisions appears in fact to be the stateless Kurds in the southeast of their nation. We repeatedly heard the media mantra, ostensibly true, that Turkey’s primary concern was that if Saddam Hussein fell, and Iraqi Kurds achieved an independent Kurdish state, Turkish Kurds might be inspired to attain fuller rights, or even to join such a state. Noureddine was correct when he stated on the eve of war that “It sometimes seems that the keys to war and peace are in Ankara’s hands rather than in those of Washington and Baghdad!” And Ankara’s decisions seem to be based on their calculations about the Kurds. Thus, the Kurds on both sides of the Turkish border are the hidden core of this pivotal and deadly moment in world history.
Most Western observers thought that the massive protests in Turkey would not alter its support of the US plan, especially with all the money involved, so when the Turkish Parliament failed to give the outright majority needed to authorize the US invasion plans, many were stunned. The Bush administration went into frantic spin control and various plan ‘b’ scenarios, and withdrew its cash offers almost entirely, while an armada of personnel and military equipment languished and were finally transferred out of Turkey’s Mediterranean ports. The planned second vote of parliament never materialized, and as the war began in earnest, Turkey gave, retracted and then gave again permission only to use its airspace for US military fly-overs. This time around, the US would not even be allowed to use Incirlik airforce base, a forward position that was central to its first Gulf War campaign. As recently as last year, the Bush administration tried unsuccessfully to broker a deal to purchase Incirlik outright, for its own private use, so that they could avoid just such a problem in the near future.
The US has invested billions of dollars over five decades cultivating Turkey as a key strategic ally in the region, so it is curious that Turkey should diverge so momentously from its senior partner at this particular moment. Noam Chomsky recently suggested that this might be because Turkey considers its US-sponsored state terror campaign against its own Kurdish population to have been largely successful. With the capture of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the main guerilla opposition [the PKK] to Turkish domination, perhaps Turkey feels it can do without the top level US aid package it garnered throughout the 1990s [after only Israel and Egypt, and now also Columbia]. Along with US military “aid” came strong Israeli support and ties that helped Turkey in its ethnic cleansing campaigns, and probably the capture of Ocalan in Kenya. So why is Turkey willing to forsake the US-Israel nexus, with its “valuable” lessons in repressing Palestinians? Perhaps it is throwing in its lot with Europe, now that the latter’s standoff with the US has gone so public, and its EEC membership is in the balance. Or perhaps its single-minded obsession with repressing Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere is driving Turkey to jeopardize both its alliance with the US/Israel, and its campaign to enter the European Union. Some flatly suggest that Turkey is no longer vital in the post-Cold War world and is being discarded.
Turkey’s close US ties explain why few media pundits here took note when Turkey openly demanded a military role in northern, i.e.: Kurdish Iraq. Turkey made plain its intention to “disarm Iraqi Kurds,” seize control of the oil fields and occupy or rule northern Iraq, if not annex it entirely. In the past few weeks Turkey’s leadership could be heard invoking a greatly exaggerated Turkmen presence and imperilment in northern Iraq as a pretext for an impending intervention. Crazy as all this is, it should have caused a strenuous reaction from the US. Was not the breach of the supposedly inviolable laws of sovereignty the thin US pretext for the First [phase of the] Gulf War, when Iraq invaded Kuwait? How could sovereignty be a sacred principle at one moment, and at the next simply a pawn to be traded for greater US interests? Yet, it was reported that part of the final fly-over agreement between Turkey and the US included vague provisions for a Turkish invasion of Iraq in the event that Iraqi Kurdish forces seized control of the oil fields around Mosul and Kirkuk. So, while President Bush states publicly that he warned Turkey to stay clear of this conflict, his administration has already agreed to plans to the contrary, should Kurds finally achieve a resources base from which to become a viable entity on the world stage of nations. [As this goes to press, we know that Kurdish fighters, under the Kurdish leadership of Iraqi Kurdistan, played a leading role and paid the highest price in the transfer of power in the north. While Turkey and other destabilizing forces work to create narratives of reprisal and Kurdish ethnic violence, the truth of orderliness, restraint and understanding on the part of the majority of Kurdish society is slowly emerging. Mass graves are already being discovered, or more accurately in most cases, may now finally be acknowledged and investigated. “Voices of reason” are already cautioning that the forensic results are not yet in, and by the time they are, the emotional impact of the moment may be lost. Will the world be able to see the unfathomable pain of this moment of accounting and possible reconciliation, or will discourses of “primitive revenge” and “primordial tribalism” predominate?]
The deeper sovereignty issue here is, of course, the larger question of Kurdistan. Denied a country in the post-World War One division of the Ottoman Empire, Kurds were briefly promised a country by none other than President Woodrow Wilson, but then left out in the cold as the former colonial powers [France and Britain] drew up artificial lines of control for their future neo-colonial predation of the region’s resources and labor. The Kurds remained stateless “minorities” in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Armenia. As such, they have been subjected to horrible repression, countless human rights abuses and genocide not only in Iraq, Iran, and Syria but also in Turkey – and the world community has been largely unable to intervene, because this was seen as “the sovereign affairs of other nations.” This at least, has been the case when those nations were US allies, such as Iraq in the 1980s, and Turkey all along. So much so, that the US has gone to the extent of denying atrocities and genocide in both countries, until in the case of Iraq, Hussein made the transition from ally to enemy, at which point it not only became possible but necessary to invoke Kurdish suffering there. Suddenly, US presidents who had conspired to cover up the whole horrid Anfal campaign [which gassed and/or destroyed 200 villages in the late Eighties], began speaking the word Halabja [the largest and best known town to be chemically attacked], with feigned passion and greater consistency, as a justification for their aggression against Iraq.
The Oil Fields of Kirkuk and Mosul: The Political Economy of Ethnic Cleansing
Iraq’s main oil fields, around the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, are not only among the world’s largest, but the world’s most productive. While the biggest fields elsewhere [Saudi Arabia, for example] passed their peak extraction capacity years ago and are currently declining, Iraq’s major oil fields have decades of ascendant productive potential. This, along with the fact that there are still compliant regimes in Saudi Arabia and many other major oil producing nations, explains why Iraq was the target of the moment. The question for more than a year has been: will other Middle East governments be targeted for “regime change” after Iraq, and what will be the nature of post-invasion US power and presence? As we await answers to these questions, it has already been shown that Iraq and its oil eclipsed everywhere else in strategic importance.
The key here is the hidden ethnic history of this vital oil producing region. Tonight, as every night the past few weeks on major US news outlets, one could see Peter Jennings or some other anchor discussing an ethnic map of Iraq: Sunni Muslims in the middle, Shi’a Muslims to the south, and Kurds in the far north and northeast. According to these maps, the oil fields are in the Sunni regions in which Hussein’s party is anchored. These maps however represent the engineered results of recent [Twentieth Century] ethnic cleansing campaigns, started by the British, and continued and intensified under Hussein’s Iraq. The carefully kept secret is that the major oil fields are located in historically Kurdish regions. This, at least, is the case if the oil fields are to be allocated along linear, majority-rules ethnic lines. The truth is that before the Twentieth Century colonial and post-colonial ethnic cleansing of this area, eradicating or relocating its Kurdish majority, the region was one of largely harmonious multi-ethnic coexistence between Kurds, Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, Turkmen, Jews and others. The truth is that here, as in most of the world, ethnic or national conflicts in their modern sense were occasioned by Western invention and intervention. In most cases, the words “from time immemorial” actually indicate comparatively recent origins, 50 to 150 years or so.
As the war arrived, we saw elements of this cultural coexistence in the fact that Kurdish political parties in northern Iraq were collecting names of defectors from the Iraqi army, who wanted to be protected when they surrendered. Many of the surrender plans involved deals cut with rural Kurds, so that Iraqi soldiers and intelligence officers could obtain civilian clothes and shelter by slipping into Kurdish homes until official surrender could be arranged. As much as media pundits love to speak of “primordial tribal [ethnic] hatred,” these actions, as in the First [part of the] Gulf War, speak to the existence of profound inter-ethnic and inter-denominational alliances that are in fact still the historic norm in the region. Kurds have great reason to hate their tormenters, but they can see the difference between the regime and its elite commanders on the one hand, and the rank and file soldiers and civilians swept up in the ethnic maelstrom of Iraqi politics and survival, on the other. However, while one might hear brief discussion of potential Kurdish involvement in a post-Hussein Iraqi government, it is close to impossible to hear of Kurdish entitlement to the oil wells of central and northern Iraq. Of course, we now hear from the US government, because activists the world over raised the issue of oil, that this precious resource should be used to benefit “the people of Iraq.” The fact that the US and the British before them have never shown any interest anywhere in “the people” benefiting from their own national resources [witness Mossadeq], did not seem to trouble Bush when he gave his war speeches to the nation, so confident was he that this history had been sufficiently erased.
The Turkish Double Standard and the Politics of Post-Modern Genocide
While we hear briefly, if repeatedly, in times of war with Iraq about the 1988 chemical weapons attack against Kurds in northern Iraq, there is a constant fear that the justified resistance of Kurds there will lead to the creation of a state not only for Iraqi Kurds, but also for Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere. This is why Turkey lobbies the US so persistently. This is why the Kurds are only brought out for discussion when it is the case of their victimization at the hands of U.S. protégé-cum-enemy, Saddam Hussein. And only then when it fits the needs of US war-making, in this case the need to make a case for its first strike against Iraq. Ironically, whereas the nation-state status of Kuwait allowed for a thin US pretext in the First Gulf War, it is the lack of Kurdish statehood that makes them a less viable legitimation for US imperial intervention. That, and the fact of US responsibility for Kurdish suffering. Such is the muted, ‘subaltern’ agency of the Kurds, erased even as they cause the shifting of geopolitics by their sheer and resolute presence.
This schizophrenic humanism, on the part of the US and its allies, is reflected in the title of Kevin McKiernan’s recent film, “Good Kurds, Bad Kurds.” Iraqi Kurds [during and after the buildup to the Gulf War strikes and invasion] are the “good Kurds,” while Turkey’s Kurds are the “bad Kurds.” It is for this reason that McKiernan’s award winning documentary was at first censored from US television, before finally appearing briefly on PBS affiliates after two years of being shopped, not to mention several petition campaigns run particularly by college students. This film is the best popular introduction to Kurdish issues today, especially the ignored Kurds of Turkey, yet it is unlikely that it would have ever been seen on US television if not for the post-9/11 context that suddenly presented itself. Its showing was blurred in with all the other hard-hitting exposes of Middle Eastern geopolitics and in depth discussions of biological and chemical weapons programs in various parts of the world.
Like the US before it, Turkey’s history of ethnic cleansing and genocide is rooted in history and its particular brand of virulent and racially supremacist nationalism. When Mustafa Kemal Attaturk founded the modern nation of Turkey, he did so on the foundation of genocide against Armenians – a genocide that is yet to be recognized by much of global public opinion or the US Congress. In addition to Armenians, almost a millions Kurds were deported or massacred at that time, and more than a million Greeks were also forced from Anatolia, in a broad attempt to create a racially “pure” Turkish society. Nevertheless, Kurdish leaders and fighters were instrumental to securing Turkey’s borders from various would-be usurpers. Their reward for this help was the mass execution of its leadership, reneged promises, and ongoing repression. After the Armenians, Kurds became the primary targets of nationalist terror, as their “stubbornly” held separate identity posed a threat to Turkey’s vision of a monocultural secular society. The ensuing decades saw dozens of uprisings, all of which were ruthlessly crushed, until guerillas asserted themselves in the mountains and engaged with the Turkish army in the Eighties. This cycle reached its apex in the Eighties and Nineties, when Turkey’s scorched earth policy destroyed more than 3000 villages, forcing far more than 2 millions Kurds into internal exile or permanent refugee status. The penalty for returning to villages remains torture or death, as recent killings by Turkish military and paramilitary forces have shown. To this day, and for one brief moment at least we saw glimpses of this in mainstream press like the New York Times, Kurds are prevented from using their language, naming their children Kurdish names, wearing Kurdish colors – even the traffic lights have been changed to red, yellow and blue, because red, yellow and green are the Kurdish national colors.
Turkey’s efforts to annihilate Kurdish culture – it refers to Kurds only as “mountain Turks” – has been repudiated by all of the world’s respected human rights organizations, notably Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even the US State Department Reports on Human Rights, as well as by numerous European Union representatives and bodies. Turkey’s efforts, including the mass transfer of Kurdish children to boarding schools where they are “decultured” and raised as Turks, constitute in the language of the Geneva Conventions Against Genocide acts of cultural genocide aimed at reduction or elimination of a distinct group of people. The US provided more than 80% of Turkey’s arms during the height of this repression, in the Eighties and Nineties, and so is directly complicit in this under-reported but brutal policy of ethnic cleansing.
In 1977, Mehdi Zana, a courageous Kurdish leader who emerged from the grassroots was elected Mayor of Diyarbakir, largest city and capital, as it were, of Turkish Kurdistan. He was soon arrested and subjected to more than a decade in prison, and unspeakable torture and humiliation that will affect him for the rest of his life, now in exile from his native land. This is all recounted in his powerful testimonial Prison No. 5: Eleven Years in Turkish Jails, with a Preface by Elie Wiesel. The main charge was “separatism,” as evidenced according to his “trial” by the fact that he spoke to his aids in the Kurdish tongue, their only language. Even with the support of European presidents and countless influential people, his plight was not alleviated for more than ten years, and even now he is separated from his family, his wife and children, as well as his people and his homeland.
While he was in jail, this man who became known as the Kurdish Nelson Mandela saw his wife Leyla Zana become increasingly radicalized, and emerge as a leader in her own right. She and five other Kurds were elected to Parliament in 1991, but soon after were stripped of parliamentary immunity and arrested. Their “crimes,” also under the label of “separatism,” consisted of wearing Kurdish colors in their hair [in the case of Leyla Zana], speaking the Kurdish language, and testifying before Europe and the US Congress about human rights abuses in Kurdish areas. They were given fifteen year sentences, and remain in jail to this day. Leyla Zana has been nominated for the Nobel Peace prize, and received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, as well as numerous other awards and honors. Her story is chronicled in her Writings From Prison. She is currently one of the most prominent cases highlighted for attention in Amnesty’s files. Both the Zana books, far too little known in the US, are available from Blue Crane Books in Massachusetts.
At the back of Mehdi Zana’s blood curdling account of just some of the tortures he endured, is a powerful essay by Kendal Nezan, a Kurdish activist living in exile in France. This concise and detailed account of Kurdish history is the single best short scholarly account of Kurdish politics and history, and is itself invaluable for all activists wishing to understand the Kurdish place in world politics. Even more indispensable for US-based activists is the office of AKIN, the American Kurdish Information Network, founded and operated almost single-handedly by Kurdish exile and Gandhian pacifist, Kani Xulam. AKIN is based in Washington DC, and is the only significant Kurdish organization in the US responsible for lobbying on Capital Hill, organizing protests and rallies, disseminating information, working with Kurdish refugees throughout the country and traveling widely to give talks on college campuses and at conferences and events. Part of the politics of colonization, dispossession and statelessness is a dearth of college trained spokespeople, scholars and advocates. It is no wonder then that Kani is largely on his own and constantly in need of volunteer interns and donations. Yet, he has mobilized successful hunger strikes [on the Capital steps] and vigils [in front of the Turkish embassy]. As one of the many forms of harassment he has endured, he was falsely accused by Turkish intelligence of being a terrorist, but after seizure and arrest was soon acquitted of all charges.
This should not surprise anyone. When Nicholas D. Kristof wrote a ground-breaking op-ed piece in the New York Times [March 14, 2003], entitled “Torture, Beyond Saddam,” that detailed some of Turkey’s abuse of Kurds and the terror they now live in, Turkey’s Consulate General responded with thinly veiled public threats. In his letter to the editor [3-18-03], Gulcan Karagoz denied all of the well-documented charges of human rights atrocities against Kurds in Turkey, stating that the comparison of Iraq’s and Turkey’s treatment of Kurds was “preposterous… a grave blunder, whose consequences would harm all, and its originators the most.” I felt for Kristof, who certainly would have received in addition to this numerous threatening and defamatory letters and emails from Turkish nationalists after his courageous article. As anyone who has shown “Good Kurds, Bad Kurds,” or invited Kani Xulam to speak would know, this is a very common experience, sometimes accompanied with threats of violence and/or intimidation – though rarely amounting to much more. Though this may be unpleasant to experience, it shows the need for more people in the US to stand up and support the Kurds in the hour of their greatest need. Invite Kani or Mehdi Zana [when he is well enough to travel] to speak at your campuses, places of worship or community centers, show McKiernan’s film or hold other events to support and educate about the Kurds. Ground with the Kurds living in your local community. Read and study and speak out about this most silent of genocides in our perilous world.
Listen to Kurds themselves talk about what it is like to have had death and violence across three or four generations, losing primary family members through unspeakable acts at every generation. Listen to Kurds describe the effects of [US made] chemical and biological weapons on their bodies, their loved ones, their land, and now their new born generation. Whatever happens to the Kurds at this most hopeful and most perilous moment, the history of suffering must eventually be addressed, will inevitably find a way of some sort into this world. All the Kurds I have known were excellent observers of contemporary geopolitics, always looking for an opening or an angle for their people. Kurds often discussed their position in relation to that of the Palestinians, saying things like: “When the Palestinian question is answered, then it will be the Kurdish turn.” Yet, if the startling Turkish fall from US graces proves in the end not to be a mirage, some are now asking if an emergent Kurdistan might function more like Israel, as a US ally and base in the region. Such comparisons are of course too loaded and complex to make lightly, but the paradigm questions remain real. It is hard to disparage the dangers of US imperial cooptation when the realities of genocide have so long been ubiquitous in Kurdistan. Kurds and Palestinians, like other oppressed and stateless people, desire some of the national privileges accorded Jews via Israel in the wake of World War Two – a nation-state, a safe haven from persecution, the chance for an economy. After eighty years of persecution, the present conjuncture does not offer particularly clear paths toward liberation for Kurds, but nevertheless Kurds will undoubtedly engage what opportunities there are to the best of their advantage. Will the people of the world, and especially progressives, support them?
We must not allow Chomsky to continue to be one of the only US intellectuals to so much as mention, let alone support the Kurdish people. Only if this travesty of justice emerges from the shadows, do we stand a chance of ending this suffering. Since hearing Xulam speak at the St. Cloud State University campus in 2000, students here have organized more than ten Kurdish-related events throughout the state of Minnesota. Other communities throughout the United States are doing similarly in their respective places of organizing. We hope more will join in this struggle, especially now that Kurds are so undeniably at the center of world history in the making. Anti-war activists sickened by the war and the genocidal sanctions regime against the Iraqi people should similarly be horror-struck by the contemptuous use of Kurdish suffering to justify Iraqi torment. We must not accept a world order that justifies one genocide by the use of another, genocides which it alternately covers up, supports and/or deploys for its own ends. Though it will undoubtedly make our organizing efforts more complex, activists must directly address the Kurdish issue, now more than ever.
Jesse Benjamin is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Relations and Multicultural Education at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota.
