Good Kurd, bad Kurd…

The truth of the matter is that Turkey and the Kurds of northern Iraq have been in an uncomfortable but nonetheless symbiotic relationship since the spring of 1991, when Saddam Hussein turned his helicopter gunships against his own Kurdish population, who had been over-hasty in celebrating his defeat after the First Gulf War. To resolve the vast humanitarian crisis on its border (one that occurred under an ultra-fierce glare of international attention) Turkey was obliged to tolerate the very thing it feared the most, some sort of autonomous entity in the Kurdish north of Iraq. Of course these fears could never be entirely accurately articulated since they derived from the embarrassing anxiety that a successful example of self-governance in Iraq might encourage similar aspirations among Turkey’s own Kurds. Ankara’s passionate defense of the “territorial integrity of Iraq” was very much a sublimated expression of its own worries.

Turkey felt obliged to defend the safe haven which the Kurds of northern Iraq had managed to achieve –-- an invidious position for which they never really forgave the victims. Of course at various instances Ankara did make a virtue of this necessity. For a start, the prosperity and stability of the Turkish Southeast depends not just on a political deal but on the demand for goods and services from the carbon-fed economy on the other side of the border. Turkey, in turn, prior to 2003 was the Iraqi Kurds’ lifeline to the rest of the world. Yet in the Turkish public imagination, fed by the Rambo-esque revenge sagas on television and comic lampoons in the cinema, the Iraqi Kurdish leadership was part of the externalized “foreign threat.”  Indeed the Turkish chiefs of General Staff, in the famous e-memorandum of April 2007 -- the Internet posting which was intended to warn the government to be more careful in its choice of presidential candidate -- openly accused the Kurdish leadership of being the front for a far more insidious attempt to subvert the integrity of the Turkish state, hinting that the ultimate responsibility lay in Washington. At the same time, Barzani, finding himself cast as the villain, decided to take on the role. On occasions he issued his own “one minute” style reprimands and in terse language reminded Ankara to face up to their own Kurdish problem.

What has changed is Turkey’s public commitment to deal with the legitimate aspiration of Kurds in the southeast of the country and to no longer equate even Kurdish cultural rights as incitement to treason. At the same time Ankara is acknowledging, tacitly at least, that it will be far easier to carry out these reforms with support from the other side of its borders. This is an important shift in emphasis and a brave step.