17.10.2024

Slippery road ahead

Kurdish politics are hugely complex. Not only do they involve a dizzy range of parties, factions and interests: there are the regional power players too. Esen Uslu looks at the ever changing alliances and positions

Parliamentary elections in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region will be held on October 20. Around 3.5 million voters will go to the polls in the first parliamentary elections since 2018 (barring a last-minute postponement!). Originally scheduled to take place in 2022, the elections have been postponed several times due to the intense internal struggle between the currently ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by Masoud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, founded by former Iraqi president Jalal Talabani.

For years, the KDP’s power base has been in the central part of the autonomous region, around Duhok and Erbil, while the PUK’s power base is in the south, around Sulaymaniyah. This internal battle takes place in the context of the power struggles in the region between the US, Russia, Iran, Turkey and the Arab world, and has led to rapidly changing and reversing alliances and positions.

In addition to the KDP and PUK, the Kurdistan Islamic Union, the Kurdistan Justice Group, the Gorran Movement, the National Coalition, other smaller political organisations and independent candidates will be contesting the elections. According to previous agreements, there are some quotas for minorities in both the government and parliament. However, PUK recently challenged the previous agreements in the Supreme Court in Baghdad and succeeded in changing the quota system slightly by reducing the number of seats allocated to minorities. The PUK hopes that the changes will benefit its electoral prospects.

Bafel Talabani, son of Jalal and PUK’s current head, will hold an election rally in Erbil in the coming days, as the Erbil region is key to swing votes. Meanwhile, the KDP’s chummy relations with the Turkish regime appear to be quite toxic for it, and pundits expect KDP to lose a significant number of votes (but still come first). The expected distribution of seats is 28-30 for PUK and 30‑35 for KDP, but everything could change at the last minute.

As this number of seats is not sufficient to form a majority government, both parties would be forced to come to an agreement to form a government. However, KDP would be obliged to make concessions and PUK would insist on reducing relations with the Turkish regime and force KDP to ask Turkey to leave the occupied Iraqi Kurdish areas. This demand seems to be in line with Iranian and US policies. Therefore, we can expect changes in the economic-political-military relations between Turkey and the KDP-dominated regime in the autonomous region.

As Turkey’s influence in the region diminishes, Iranian influence would inevitably increase. This could have profound implications for US policy in the region. While the USA is pushing for more centralisation and consolidation of the position of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava) in Syria, Rojava could also continue its old policy of forming a centralised organisation by bringing together different militias. This would affect the positions of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Kurdish freedom movement as a whole.

The Baghdad regime declared the PKK a “banned organisation” after the rapprochement with Turkey last spring. In August, it confirmed this position and took measures against organisations supporting the PKK, which have been banned and their assets confiscated. However, the PKK has made it clear that it will not take part in electoral politics in the autonomous region.

On paper

In return, Turkey entered into an agreement with the Iraqi government, at least on paper, to share one of Turkey’s most important year-round occupied bases, which controls an important junction on the routes around the Kurdish mountains: the Bashiqa base established in 2015 in the traditional Barzani stronghold. It was agreed that a joint security coordination centre would be set up between Turkey and Iraq.

However, Turkey’s unilateral actions continued and an armed UAV that flew over some sensitive areas of Iraq without due notice was shot down by the country’s surface-to-air missile command.

The main sop to the Iraqi government was the signing of an agreement to build a modern rail and road link between the new deep-sea port, which is being built on the al-Faw peninsula in the Basra region, and Turkey via a new route bypassing the Kurdish autonomous region. The first phase of the Faw Grand Port is due to be completed in 2028, and the so-called ‘Iraq-Turkey Development Road’ could be an important channel for global trade if all parties agree on the route and manage to finance its $17 billion construction.

With the other Gulf states concerned about the future of their ports - especially if the new link ends up competing with the congested Suez Canal and the potential Road and Belt Initiative being developed by China - there may be many pitfalls along the way. As this route could exclude the oil-rich Kurdish regions from reaching global markets, any improvement in the autonomous region’s relations with Turkey and Iraq would require a delicate balancing act.

With the Kurdish Regional Government no longer able to export oil through the pipeline via Turkey (after the international arbitration court imposed a heavy fine on Turkey and ordered compensation to be paid to the Iraqi central government), the Kurdish oil exports were routed via Iran. The new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, recently visited Erbil and Sulaymaniyah and met with Barzani and Talabani. He was trying to improve relations between the Iraqi Shia militias and the KDP.

These improved economic relations with Iran led the KDP to make a bold move to win the appointment of the regional governor for Kirkuk and outmanoeuvre the PUK and the Arab minority in the region at an electoral conference held in Baghdad, with the support of Iran and the Iraqi central government. Turkish and Turkoman protests, as well as the PUK’s protests against foul play, failed to produce any results.

When a security agreement was signed between Iran and the KDP last year, the price paid was the cessation of activities by Iranian Kurdish opposition forces operating in Iraqi Kurdistan and the closure of their camps along the border. Tehran continues to press for the complete disarmament of Iranian Kurdish organisations and their expulsion to third countries. The KDP regime deported a leader of the Iranian KDP living in Sulaymaniyah to Iran and there is a list of 180 Iranian Kurdish leaders now awaiting deportation.

Despite all these humiliations, the KDP is unable or unwilling to completely compromise its relations with the USA and Turkey. So dithering and instability are the order of the day. The price the KDP will have to pay will be made clear by the October 20 elections.

The attitude of the hawks in the Turkish regime was recently made clear by a former head of military intelligence, on TV. Speaking about the security agreement between Iraq and Turkey, he said: “The agreement reached with Iraq is very important. We should do the same in Syria. If Bafel Talabani continues his attempts to sabotage it, he should be neutralised, I mean, if necessary, an assassination could be arranged.” The studio presenter intervened to apologetically proclaim that Turkey would do no such thing, but he continued unabashed: “If you can’t do it, get someone else to do it for you.”

This is not just a reckless statement, but the reality of the Turkish regime’s blatant attitude towards the Kurdish movements in Iraq and Syria. Turkey is still funding and equipping the so-called Syrian National Army as well as the various associated militias that gathered in Idlib, northern Syria. As Israeli air attacks in Lebanon - including on the Syrian-Lebanese border as well as in the suburbs of Damascus - intensify, there is a clear danger of unleashing these forces again in northern Syria and opening up Rojava, as well as the Aleppo, Latakia and Hama provinces, to attack.

Using this option as a threat, Turkey is forcing the Syrian regime to come to an agreement and normalise relations. So far, this ploy has been unsuccessful, with president Bashar al-Assad insisting that Turkey leave Syrian territory before any bilateral talks. Russia, note, supports Assad’s line.

Weakened Erdoğan

Meanwhile, president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government is losing its popular appeal and public support. The main driver of this decline is the dismal economic performance, but the corruption, mismanagement and arbitrary rule akin to a dictatorship, created by the Turkish-style presidential system, have also played their part.

Now, desperate for public support, Erdoğan has called a snap election to extend his rule beyond the constitutional limit, since he cannot run again in a normal presidential election. He is trying to manoeuvre the opposition into supporting his ploy by exploiting a loophole in the electoral law that does not prevent him from standing in an early election.

He has the unerring support of the nationalist-fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), but it is not enough. He has desperately appealed to Kurdish voters in a bid to secure a mandate to stay in power. The price is a humiliating retreat. But he has to do this so neatly that he disarms the opposition and presents himself as a peacemaker - the only person capable of pulling this off to start a new ‘peace process’. He has already made his first moves - even persuading the MHP leaders to shake hands with the MPs belonging to the pro-Kurdish People’s Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) and making an emolument speech at the opening of parliament.

One obstacle is the incommunicado detention of PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan. He has been serving a life sentence since 1999. Under normal rules, a life prisoner who has served 25 years would be eligible for conditional release. The Kurdish freedom movement and the DEM deputies are organising demonstrations whenever they can to demand his release. However, the security establishment is determined to drag him down. There is talk of bringing a new charge against Öcalan to keep him in jail indefinitely, arguing that he is continuing to run a banned organisation from prison, because he acted as a mediator between Kurdish guerrillas and the political establishment in the previous peace process.

On October 15, the police in Diyarbakır arrested 269 people out of the 1,500 or so who took part in a demonstration two days earlier, which demanded ending Öcalan’s solitary confinement and his release. Therefore, if Erdoğan wants to pull off his trick, he has to reach an agreement with those parts of the security apparatus that are willing to try a new strategy and show them that he could disarm the opposition by reducing some of the old repressive measures. He has to prove to them that he can present this new course as a relaxation - an end to the policy of repression, an initiative to return to the rule of law and democracy.

On October 15, Erdoğan-supporting newspapers published the speech he made the day before: “They tried to pit our people against each other by saying ‘secular-religious’, ‘progressive-reactionary’. Millions of our citizens were marginalised, because they only spoke their mother tongue. Unfortunately, they were subjected to injustice and lawlessness.”

These carefully chosen words obscure the issue. Who did this? “They”, who remain unspecified. And, by using the past tense, the speech tried to hide the ongoing repression of the Kurdish language. These are just the opening salvos of a new line of attack.

Kurdish opposition figures are cautiously welcoming his latest comments. For example, the deputy of the National Assembly, Sirri Süreyya Önder, who was at the forefront of the previous peace initiative (and suffered the consequences in prison), said from the podium that he welcomed the moves and words of Erdoğan and the MHP leaders. Another important figure of the previous peace process, Cengiz Çandar, gave a long interview, in which he supported the line. He also added that the imprisoned former leader of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, Selahattin Demirtaş, supported the move.

So - interesting times, but a slippery road ahead.