It has now been more than a month since Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey, called for his Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, to disband more than 40 years after it started its fight.
“The terrorist group laying down its arms is a victory for civilization,” deputy State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said. “It is the United States’s hope that this announcement will lead to increased stability for the region.”
Turkey says more than 40,000 people died in fighting, though like the casualty figures offered by the “Hamas Ministry of Health,” Turkey’s numbers were made from whole cloth, even as Western officials such as Pigott repeated them uncritically.
The active insurgency was primarily over by 1997, when the Clinton administration designated the PKK a terrorist group. While the PKK had never killed an American citizen and its insurgency was largely over, Turkey demanded its listing as a last-minute requirement against the backdrop of a major arms purchase that President Bill Clinton wished to conclude.
That spurious designation has both undermined peace and exposed U.S. hypocrisy. Successive U.S. administrations both castigated the PKK and praised democracy but never considered that the PKK created the only oasis of progressivism in a region dominated by dictatorships and Islamists. By mislabeling the PKK as terrorists, the U.S. undercut liberalism. For example, as Turkey passively, if not actively, supported the Islamic State, the Defense Department turned to Syrian Kurds, many of whom were affiliated with the PKK. If anyone in the U.S. government took the PKK terrorist group label seriously and refused to work with the group, the Islamic State would still exist and likely rule both Baghdad and Damascus.
Further showing the spuriousness of U.S. terrorism designation is the fact that the Obama administration delisted the Mujahideen al Khalq. This group targeted and killed Americans. The PKK was left on its list. Then again, the Mujahideen pays retired American politicians large honoraria for support; the PKK pays no one.
U.S. demonization of the PKK, coupled with the Turkish government’s belief that the PKK’s disbandment means repression works, could set Turkey down the path to disaster. State Department attention deficit disorder also carries a cost.
Over the past month, I have talked to Kurdish activists and those associated with the PKK. They acknowledged the difficulty they faced with Turkish bombardment and declining U.S. support. The PKK saw the writing on the wall due to the Trump administration’s willingness to abandon Syrian Kurds for the sake of business deals, promises of Turkish mediation, and the illusion of the new Syrian government’s moderation. Trying to put a positive spin on events, many Kurdish leaders also said their fight had achieved all it could, so now was the time for politics and diplomacy.
The problem they face, however, is that neither President Recep Tayyip Erdogan nor President Donald Trump appears interested in either. After such an olive branch, the PKK says, it expects Turkey to make an equal step for peace that would go beyond a general amnesty for the PKK rank and file and safe passage of the PKK leaders to Europe. Many suggest, for example, that Turkey should now release Ocalan, much as Apartheid South Africa did Nelson Mandela.
Erdogan habitually ties Kurdish outreach to demands that they support his political party. When they do not, he turns on them with vengeance. This is why so many elected Kurdish politicians languish in prison. Kurds fear a rerun, and they also demand that Turkey resolve the ethnic discrimination they face and devolve power to localities where Kurds live.
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If Turkey continues its repression and fails to negotiate, they warn, civil war is possible, an event that could bring terror to the streets of Turkey’s largest cities as Kurds conclude Erdogan seeks not peace but their annihilation. After all, with the U.S. abandoning Syrian Kurdistan and Iraqi Kurdish leaders functioning as Erdogan’s kapos, the Kurds have nowhere to go.
The State Department may hope for increased stability in the region, but its failure to push Erdogan to the table promises the opposite. Civil war in Turkey may be closer than Washington or Ankara realizes.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.