31.10.2024

First stumble on a slippery road

Esen Uslu discusses the possibility of a Turkish ‘peace process’ with the PKK and how to assess the suicide attack on the TIA factory in Ankara. With the US election and ongoing kaleidoscopic regional power struggles we should expect the unexpected

Parliamentary elections in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region were finally held on October 20. Maybe the fact that the poll had been repeatedly delayed - the original plan was for 2022 - increased voter turnout. It went from 59% in 2018 to 72%, a figure widely interpreted as a reflection of people wanting stability.

Bafel Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan failed dismally to achieve its much-hyped breakthrough: it only won 23 seats (the prediction was for 28-30) with 22% of the popular vote. However, Masoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party won 44% of the vote and got 39 seats - doing better than the predictions (30-35 seats).

Shaswar Adbulwahid’s New Generation Movement came third winning 16% of the vote and 15 seats. Almost doubling its representation over the 2018 elections, NGM got a far better result than predicted. Its leadership declared immediately after the elections, as promised before, that it would not take part in any coalition government. Appearing as the representative of the newly emerging business class, popular with media-savvy educated young voters, it believes that standing aloof from traditional tribal politics will improve its political fortunes. NGM may, therefore, soon be eagerly courted by regional and global power players, including the USA.

Some lengthy negotiations and hard bargaining will be the order of the day before another, shaky, coalition government is formed. However, power struggles between Iran and Turkey have certainly increased pressure on the Kurdish parties. Turkish military operations have increased in size and scope, forcing what has been a power-sharing government since 1992, as well as the KPD’s peshmergas, towards a policy of increased collaboration. Meanwhile, in January, the Iranians bombed the so-called Mossad ‘spy HQ’ in the regional capital of Erbil, this following attacks, in September 2022, on bases of Iranian Kurdish organisations located in Barzani’s zone of Iraqi Kurdistan. Iran has thereby encouraged, as perhaps intended, the central government in Baghdad into asserting itself at the expense of the Kurds.

Oil exports

Kurdish oil exports through Turkey, bypassing the Iraqi central government, have now stopped. This after the case before the international arbitration court had obtained a favourable ruling. Since then, the Kurdish regional government has failed to set up a new profit-sharing mechanism with the central government. As a result, oil revenues have dried up.

The dire economic consequences have seen the regional government in Erbil being unable to pay the salaries of state employees and members of the peshmerga. It grudgingly sought support from the Iraqi government. The price it had to pay was the acceptance of mediation between the Shia parties and Iran in order to be able to sit at a bargaining table with the Iraqi government.

Turkey did everything it could to successfully prevent a PUK win in the elections. However it was unable to achieve its main aims, and now an outcome more beneficial to the Iraqi central government and Iran has emerged.

Last year, during the provincial elections in Kirkuk, which is overwhelmingly a Kurdish city, but constitutionally outside the borders of the regional government, Turkey supported an ad hoc coalition of the KDP with Turkmen and Arab minority parties to pile pressure on the PUK. But PUK has maintained its support for the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) - which seeks autonomy within Turkey - and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Talabani has clearly opted to form closer relations with the Baghdad regime and the Shia parties - and through them the Tehran regime.

After the September 2017 botched attempt at independence was stopped by all the regional powers, Kurdish parties and peshmergas were forced to evacuate the disputed oil-rich area of Kirkuk. Military control went from the peshmergas to central government soldiers. However, in the first elections after the takeover, Talabani’s PUK won the governorate, much to the chagrin of Turkey.

A sizeable minority in Kirkuk are Turkmen, but Turkey’s longstanding policy of attempting to use them as proxies has visibly failed. Turkey had installed a Muslim Brotherhood supporter to head the Turkmen Front, which brings various Turkmen factions together in Iraq. During the 2014 Islamic State uprising Turkey blatantly supported the Sunnis, and it lost the support of the Shia Turkmen in the Kirkuk region. Increasingly Turkmen cleaved to an accommodation with both Baghdad and Tehran.

However, the Turkmen minority within the official borders of the regional government was quite small and very apolitical in respect to the elections - they do not vote in large numbers. Since the quota system - which was supposed to increase their participation in the political process - has, in fact, been controlled by the KDP and PUK in their zones, only candidates close to them have been elected.

This apathy has not changed much with the recent changes in the quota system. Out of the five seats earmarked for the Turkmen minority, two went to candidates supported by Talabani’s PUK, and three went to those with the support of Barzani’s KDP.

New tack

While Iraqi Kurdistan was busy with elections, Syrian Kurdistan remained the main headache for Turkey. Thanks to Russian mediation, a kind of accommodation has been reached with the Assad regime. However, the primary condition for Damascus was the withdrawal of the Turkish occupation army in northern Syria and an end to its support of the Sunni Islamist regime in Idlib province.

The calamity of the Israel-Palestine war has pushed Turkey into an accommodation with Syria. However, while the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava) is still there, and large swathes of land are controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces in alliance with the US, Turkey cannot move.

The government’s ‘solution’ to the impasse was to improve relations with the PKK and end its “terror war”. In fact, for a long period the PKK has not engaged in any substantial guerrilla attacks within Turkey, but its stature in the Rojava region is growing stronger, not least thanks to its ability to withstand Turkey’s aerial bombardment and long-distance artillery barrages.

The initial move came from a small party in the coalition government under president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan - in fact, from Devlet Bahçeli, president of the MHP (Nationalist Action Party) of the infamous fascist Grey Wolves. When the Turkish parliament convened after the summer recess, Bahçeli went over to the seats occupied by the pro-Kurdish Peoples Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) and shook hands with its MPs. Just a few weeks ago, the same man was calling for a ban on the DEM, demanding that its MPs were thrown out of parliament and that the payment of state funds to which they are entitled be stopped. Such a sudden change in political approach was surely only possible if there was an agreement with Erdoğan.

A hullabaloo was raised within the opposition ranks. Even some of Erdoğan’s own MPs were caught unaware. The main opposition party, the Republican Peoples Party (CHP), stated that it believes the “normalisation” of relations between opposing politics would be beneficial for Turkish democracy.

Within a couple of days, Bahçeli raised the stakes, In his weekly speech to the MHP group in parliament, he said that if Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the PKK, is ready to shout unequivocally that he has abolished that “terrorist organisation”, he should therefore be released from prison to address MPs.

This call was a cold-shock for many rightwing MPs, including influential faction leaders within Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). After all, Öcalan, has been kept incommunicado for more than four years, unable to speak to his lawyers or relatives. Now MHP’s leader is calling his arch enemy, the leader of the Kurdish freedom movement to come to the sacred Turkish parliament and address its members! In return he would benefit from a change in the law which has been preventing his release, despite the fact that he has completed 25 years of a life sentence.

A couple of days later, Öcalan’s nephew, who is a DEM MP, was allowed to visit him. He returned with Öcalan’s message welcoming the move, and stating, “Provided that the circumstances are put in place, I have the theoretical and practical acumen to proceed towards peace.”

Rank-and-file politicians who had been unable to cope with the change gradually came to their senses. However, Erdoğan has yet to commit himself. But the CHP leader visited the former president of the DEM, Selahattin Demirtaş, in prison and came out with his tacit support to the new approach, stating that any political move should accept Öcalan as the respondent, and that the Kurdish movement would stand by him as a bloc.

That move was designed as a snub to Erdoğan, who was adamant on keeping Demirtaş in jail, while playing the Öcalan trump. Afterwards Özgür Özel, leader of CHP, entered talks with local Kurdish politicians, starting with a visit to Diyarbakır, the hotbed of Kurdish resistance. However, as he arrived, the Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) factory in Ankara was attacked by two PKK suicide bombers. Along with them, five people were killed, and 22 wounded.

Aeronautics

The TAI factory has been the focal point of the state’s efforts to create an aeronautics industry – CASA 235 transport planes and F-16 fighter jets were assembled there. But the government’s ineptitude to prevent such an attack in the capital city on such an important facility, and failure to obtain any intelligence beforehand (while boasting that it knew each and every ‘terrorist’ and their whereabouts), were hard to believe. Another glaring security failure was the leaking of CCTV footage from the TAI security cameras to the press, so that the attack was broadcast as a live TV show.

But the government attempted to prove that its ‘war on terror’ was working, and claimed the guerrillas had come from Syrian Kurdistan. It started a fresh wave of aerial bombing in Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan the same night. Mazlum Kobane, the leader of the Syrian Democratic Forces, took part in a TV broadcast where he refused all allegations categorically stating that the SDF had resolved not to engage in any military activity on Turkish soil. He reiterated that its primary and only field of activity has been in Syria.

For a day or so the PKK was unsure what to say, but eventually it produced a statement saying that the action had been planned well in advance against a military target by an autonomous cell, and had nothing to do with the recent policy change of the government.

After the initial shock of the TAI attack, all parties seemed bent on continuing the peace process. The parliamentary opposition saw the prospect of a cynical approach to changing the constitution through policy change, so as to enable Erdoğan’s life-long electability as president and a further strengthening of presidential rule. Before the dust of the US presidential elections has settled, such a move is not expected, but all parties, including the top brass of Turkey’s security apparatus, seem to be preparing for sudden changes.

The path pursued by Turkey on its current slippery slope seems to have many pitfalls. In these circumstances, we will continue to ‘expect the unexpected and suspect the unsuspected’! l