Idris Bal, now an independent member of the Turkish parliament, was once a member of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), but resigned earlier this year because he no longer wanted his name associated with a Party he felt was no working for the country. Bal, an academic who graduated from Harvard, has recently cautioned against initiatives that could be conducive to supporting and legitimising the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey at a time when the world is mobilising to fight Islamic State (IS) fighters in neighbouring Iraq and Syria. He expressed his exasperation at the “endless contradictions” in the policies of the US and Europe, which had long ago entered the PKK on their lists of terrorist organisations but which today were rushing to arm the Kurds of northern Iraq to support them in their fight against IS. Such weapons, Bal warned, would end up in the hands of their separatist peers in Turkey. It would have been better if these countries had devised a comprehensive plan to dry up the sources of terrorism if they had wanted to secure a definitive worldwide victory over the phenomenon, he said. To Bal, a security affairs expert, such a plan would entail military operations against all terrorist organisations in the region. That the world was currently focusing its efforts on the fight against IS while ignoring the PKK reflected the inconsistencies and double standards in the international community's approach to handling terrorism, he said. He added that the PKK had taken advantage of the period of the Turkish-Kurdish peace process that the Turkish government had initiated in order to stockpile arms that it intended to use for terrorist purposes. The organisation was now much more powerful than it would have been had the 30-year war between the Turkish government and the Kurds continued, he said. He urged the authorities in Ankara to take heed and not to fall into the same trap again. Bal's fears are far from groundless. Last week, the PKK's top field commander Cemil Babik threatened to resume the war within days. In an interview with Amberin Zaman published on the Al-Monitor Website, Babik said that the PKK field command “have the authority to resume the war”. Asked about the position of Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader who has been serving a life sentence in the Imrali Prison in the Sea of Marmara, Babik said that it was unlikely that Ocalan would oppose the decision to fight, especially given the AKP government's failure to take steps towards resolving the Kurdish question. “We are loyal to our leader. But unless Turkey takes some steps, how can our leader say, ‘no, do not fight'? We are having trouble restraining our fighters as it is,” he said, before going on to note a rise in the number of fighters joining the PKK. Whereas in 1993 around 1,000 men joined each month, this had now risen to 1,200, he said. The shift in the Turkish-Kurdish question that Babik's interview indicates could not have occurred had it not been for the stormy developments that have resulted from the vicious conflict in areas of Syria adjacent to Turkey's south-eastern border. This is a corner of Anatolia that has not experienced calm throughout the past three decades, and there are no indications on the horizon that stability will be coming any time soon. Until recently, the impression was that Turkey's chronic Kurdish problem was on the path to a remedy. Now the evidence points very much to the contrary, and the cause is IS, which was supposed to serve as a force alongside the Syrian opposition in the battle to bring down the Baath Party regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad that has been oppressing the Syrian people for the past half century. Ankara had a hand in developments in this regard, and according to evidence cited by some it lent a supporting hand as IS turned against the Free Syrian Army and its supporters, most notably the Kurds of Qamishli in northern Syria and then the Peshmergas in northern Iraq. These attacks outraged the Turkish Kurds, who rushed to join the fight against IS with the blessings of the European capitals and Washington. At the moment, the US and some of its Western and Arab allies are bombing IS-controlled areas in Iraq and Syria, while on the ground the Kurdish Peshmergas and the Iraqi army are providing support to the international coalition that has pledged to furnish them with the weapons they need to fight IS. The question now is what will happen when the conflict ends. The fear in Ankara is that the weapons will be turned against Turkey, which is why the AKP government has been trying to prevail upon its allies not to arm Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria. Yet, surprisingly a number of Turkish politicians, some of whom have even served in the executive, have begun to take a different view, which is that their government should take the initiative to support the Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq. They argue that this change of tack, which would be without precedent, would be to Turkey's credit, especially as the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units, the military wing of the Democratic Union Party which is the Syrian extension of the PKK, has been powerless against the IS siege of Kobani, driving thousands of Syrian Kurds into Turkey. According to a veteran Turkish diplomat who served as foreign minister in the first phase of AKP rule and prior to that was Ankara's ambassador to Cairo in the late 1990s, arming the PKK would speed up the peace talks aimed at resolving the Kurdish question. Therefore, the Turkish government should summon its resolve to offer military assistance to the Kurdish groups without distinction in their fight against IS, he commented. But these experts have not addressed the question of what the (currently stalled) Turkish-Kurdish peace process is expected to yield. More cultural and linguistic rights? Autonomous rule? The AKP and most Turks are unlikely to accept the later, while the ambitions of the Turkish Kurds have now surpassed the former, encouraged in good measure by their increasingly prominent role in the fight against takfiri jihadists such as IS, Al-Qaeda and the Al-Nusra Front. In some quarters of Kurdish opinion, they should be rewarded not just by more rights or autonomous rule, but also by a sovereign state of their own.
