Erdogan’s Anti-Kurdish Campaign Threatens to Engulf Turkey in Civil War

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Erdogan’s Anti-Kurdish Campaign Threatens to Engulf Turkey in Civil War

Turkish President Recept Tayyip Erdogan’s unquenchable thirst to concentrate political power in his hands, together with his ever-broadening campaign against the Kurds, both at home and in neighboring Syria, threatens to take the country “to the brink of a fully-fledged civil war,” warns Pakistani political analyst Salman Rafi Sheikh.

In his latest analysis for the internet-based foreign policy journal New Eastern Outlook, Sheikh, a freelance journalist and political analyst who covers international relations and Pakistani affairs, explained that the present Turkish leadership’s intolerance toward the idea of sharing power with the Kurdish minority threatens to become a recipe for disaster.

“If we were to believe Erdogan’s up-beat ‘anti-terror’ rhetoric,” the analyst writes, “we might also be also be tempted to believe that Turkey, led by him, has been one of the most important states fighting terrorists since the beginning of the current phase of the conflict in the Middle East – a phase that originally started with the Western-engineered so-called ‘Arab Spring’.”
Unfortunately, “while the ‘spring’ has since long become a disastrous ‘winter’, the spate of violence continues to send political jolts across the entire Mid-Eastern political landscape, pitting states against states as well as non-state actors against states.”

“Nowhere is this tussle more evident and crucial,” Sheikh argues, “than in the case of the Kurds, who have been one of the most important groups successfully contesting Islamic State’s [Daesh’s] militant onslaught. The struggle has been greatly successful and the more successful it becomes, the more uneasy the Turkish leadership [becomes].” This, the analyst suggests, “is evident from Erdogan’s war against Kurds both inside and outside Turkey.”

Moreover, he notes, the Turkish government’s attempts to project the Kurds as “politically subversive” not only paves the way for political intolerance, but also “unwittingly push[es] them to start a more vigorous campaign for the protection of their rights.”

Turkish riot police stand guard during a protest against the curfew in Sur district in the Kurdish dominated southeastern city of Diyarbakir, Turkey, December 6, 2015.

The latest call, Sheikh recalls, came late last week, when several Kurdish organizations, including the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), Turkey’s second largest opposition party, gathered in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir to demand more autonomy on the local level.
HDP co-chairman Selahattin Demirtas, Sheikh noted, “said that Turkey’s largest ethnic minority had to decide whether to live in autonomy or ‘under one man’s tyranny’. His call –although a reflection of the political suppression Kurds have been subjected to –was, as could be expected, projected by Turkey’s [government] as ‘unmistakable’ evidence of ‘treachery’ and ‘treason’.”

On Saturday, quoted by the Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman, Erdogan suggested that the HDP’s leadership should be stripped of their parliamentary immunity for what he called their “constitutional crime” of calling for more autonomy. This followed on earlier, harsher but at the same time murkier threats, with the president suggesting that Demirtas’ words amounted to “provocation” and “treason.”

What the Turkish media hasn’t mentioned, Sheikh notes, is that “Erdogan’s war against Kurds has intensified manifold since the beginning of Turkey’s direct military intervention in Syria and Iraq. Demirtas’ call came amid this very highly intensified war against [the Kurds]. Tension are running high in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, which has been rocked by curfews imposed on several towns where the security forces have been battling PKK fighters.”

Fighters from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) sit in the back of a vehicle in the al-Zohour neighbourhood of northeastern Syrian city of Hasakeh on August 2, 2015, a week after Syrian troops and Kurdish fighters ousted the Islamic State group from Hasakeh

The Turkish-outlawed PKK, it’s worth recalling, is affiliated with the Syrian YPG – or People’s Protection Units, a military force which has played a decisive role in resisting Daesh and other jihadist terrorists which have taken over much of Syria.
The government’s war on the Kurds, Sheikh suggests, looks more and more “like a systematic massacre,” with residents of the towns in question facing 24-hour curfews, “food shortages and problems with water and electricity supplies,” their homes being damaged by shelling. Over 125 civilians are reported to have been killed since the start of the operation.

“In the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, police were reported to have fired tear gas and [used] water cannons against protesters who demonstrated against the curfew in the Sur district of the city,” which has faced several curfews lasting several days at a time in the past month alone…..More Here

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Erdogan’s Anti-Kurdish Campaign Threatens to Engulf Turkey in Civil War