Turkey and its Kurds at War
- Details
- Published on Tuesday, 15 September 2015 00:00
- Written by editor
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1162 .... September 15, 2015
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Turkey and its Kurds at War:
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Personal Quest for Survival
Sungur Savran
The Kurdish town of Cizre, a settlement with a population of approximately 150 thousand souls in Southeastern Turkey, is now under siege by the Turkish armed forces and the so-called "special operation force" of the police for a second time, after a previous one-week long siege was lifted for an interlude of two days. Around-the-clock curfew is accompanied by power cuts and the interruption of all means of communication including mobile telephones and the Internet. The evidence that came out when the first round of siege was lifted attests to a terrible human drama. Over 30 civilians are dead, ranging from a 35-day old infant to a 75-year old man.... Before the siege was lifted, government sources claimed that security forces had killed more than a dozen fighters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the Kurdish guerrilla army, denying any civilian deaths. How the baby and the old man could have contributed to the fight of the PKK remains a mystery unexplored by government spokespeople after the facts have come to light.
The plight of Cizre is just the latest and most dramatic episode in a war that the Turkish state has been waging against its own citizens in the Kurdish regions of the country since late July. Basing itself on the excuse of the Suruç massacre on 20th July, in which 32 young Turkish leftists holding a press conference to express their solidarity with the people of Kobane, a city that is part of the Kurdish entity of Rojava within the frontiers of Syria, were killed by a suicide attack, in all probability the making of ISIL, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the Turkish government of the AKP, the party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, started a war... not against ISIL, but against the PKK and the Kurdish people! It is true that the AKP government has made a concession to the U.S. by finally allowing it to use the Incirlik air base in Turkey to attack ISIL and, somewhat later, has also agreed to participate itself in those air raids. This was, however, simply a manoeuvre to consolidate its flank while embarking on a wholesale attack on the Kurdish movement, avoiding tension with the U.S. while engaging in a difficult military enterprise.
