[NYTr] Dilip Hiro on Turkey, PKK: Bush's Blind Eye

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Guardian - Oct 24, 2007
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dilip_hiro/2007/10/bushs_blind_eye.html

Bush's blind eye

By Dilip Hiro

It is a clear-cut case of terrorism. The guerrillas of the Turkish
Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan (PKK, Kurdistan Workers Party), wedded to
achieving autonomy for the Kurdish-majority region, and operating from
the mountains of northern Iraq, have recently killed 42 Turks, soldiers
and civilians.

Repeated appeals by the Turkish government to the central authority in
Baghdad and the Bush administration, the occupying power in Iraq, to
close down the PKK bases in Iraqi Kurdistan and hand over its leaders
to it have gone unheeded.

Indeed, the response of the Iraqi Kurdish leaders has been defiant.
Following his meeting with Masoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan
regional government, in the Kurdish city of Suleimaniya, Iraqi
president Jalal Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, said: "Handing over PKK
leaders to Turkey is a dream that will never be realised ... We will
not hand any Kurdish man to Turkey, or even a Kurdish cat."

While Turkish and Iraqi Kurdish leaders are engaged in a robust
repartee, the United States administration, from President George Bush
down, publicly warns the democratically elected government of Turkish
prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan against an incursion into Iraqi
Kurdistan to root out PKK camps.

Washington's stance appears blatantly illogical to the Turkish
leadership.

"Turkey is implementing the same international rules that were
implemented by those who linked the attacks on the twin towers to some
organisation," explained Turkish justice minister Mehmet Ali Sahin.

As active participants in the global "war on terrorism", Sahin and
other leaders of Turkey - a democratic state and a member of Nato - are
puzzled and disappointed by Washington's repeated calls for restraint.
Turkey's public and politicians are not the only ones to detect glaring
inconsistency in the policy of the Bush White House. Many others
monitoring Washington's global war on terrorism have done the same.

They note Turkish prime minister Erdogan faces the same problem as the
Pakistani president, Gen Pervez Musharraf. Both face terrorists
ensconced in the mountainous borderland who challenge their authority
by killing soldiers and civilians.

Yet, while Bush constantly urges Musharraf to intensify his suppression
of the terrorists operating from the tribal badlands along the
Pakistani-Afghan border, he repeatedly advises Erdogan to stay his hand
when challenged by the PKK guerrillas staging ambushes and detonating
bombs.

Little wonder that 81% of Turks have an unfavourable view of Bush and
his policies in the Middle East.

There is a body of analysts, though, which sees no inconsistency in
Bush's behaviour. There is a crucial difference between al-Qaida and
Taliban terrorists operating from the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland
and PKK guerrillas in the Qandil mountains of northern Iraq, it points
out. The former are Islamists, and the latter, secular nationalists.

Bush's war on terrorism is not directed against terrorism itself but
specifically at its Islamist variety, argues this school of analysts.
His soft stance on the Kurdish violence against Turkey has
inadvertently provided these commentators with a strong piece of
evidence to bolster their viewpoint.