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The rhetoric between Ankara and Washington heated up during the past week. Turkish president Erdogan demanded that the Americans cease working with, meeting with or supporting the Syrian Kurds. Turkey views the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its associated YPG-YPJ militias as Syrian branches of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and Mr. Erdogan and his ministers’ language towards the Americans has become much more strident, recently asking Washington, “Are you on our side or the side of the terrorist PYD and PKK organization?” Mr. Erdogan added, "We have written proof! We tell the Americans: 'It's a terror group.' But the Americans stand up and say: 'No, we don't see them as terror groups.'"
The PYD hasn’t really done anything to merit placement on anyone’s “terrorism list,” of course. On the contrary, the group has been leading the fight against the worst terrorists in the area – the Islamic State and various Syrian al-Qaeda affiliates such as Jabhat al-Nusra. The Obama administration therefore demonstrated admirable resolve in not letting the Turks bully, cajole or trick them into abandoning the PYD.
Mr. Erdogan and his government do have a point, however, when they point out organic links between the PYD and the PKK. The former includes many veterans of the latter, both organizations revere PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan, their symbols and flags are almost indistinguishable, and the ideological discourse of both organizations – focused on empowering women, the ecology, “democratic autonomy” and local self-government – seems identical. The claim that the PYD was created as the Syrian branch of the PKK, much the same way that PJAK (the Free Life Party) serves as its Iranian branch, is not so far-fetched.
American officials know this, but pretend not to. This infuriates the Turks, who see the clear links between the PYD and the PKK as damning evidence of the PYD’s “terrorist” nature. “The PKK is on your terror list,” they insist, “so the PYD should be as well! It must be!”
The problem, however, is that the PKK was put on the United States and Europe’s terrorism lists because Turkey asked them to put it there in the early 1990s. The PKK has not conducted attacks on Americans, Europeans, or other international targets, although in the 1990s there were some street battles in Germany between PKK supporters and Turkish nationalists. Since the late 1990s, the PKK has also largely avoided the intentional killing of anyone but police, military and other security forces (such as the Kurdish “village guards” that the government set up). Exceptions to this were labelled “rogue operations” and quickly and loudly denounced by the PKK leadership.
As an American official recently told me, however, “once you’re on the terrorism list it’s very hard to get off it.” U.S. government officials pay close attention to PKK tactics, and debate amongst themselves whether or not the group still resorts to terrorism. The PKK’s placement of improvised explosive devices on roads, the January bombing of a police station that also killed civilians nearby, and threats against civilian government employees all get considered in the debate. Their implicit, operating definition of “terrorism” is the ““The intentional use of violence, or threat to use violence, against civilians in order to attain political aims,” although no government actually has such a sensible definition of the term. Instead, governments prefer to designate any non-state actor fighting them as “terrorists,” irrespective of whether or not they actually target civilians.
The government terrorism lists unfortunately lead to a Catch-22. In Turkey’s case, the government says it wants to end the conflict in Turkey’s southeast, but refuses to negotiate with “terrorists.” The “terrorists,” of course, are anyone fighting the state. So the government will not talk about peace with anyone actually taking up arms against it. Instead, Prime Minister Davutoglu unveiled a “peace plan” last week which focuses on promises of socio-economic development programs in the Kurdish southeast of Turkey, along with plenty more police stations and military bases.
Although the paper is now old and yellowing, this looks like an exact copy of all the vaunted “counter-terrorism plans” announced by Ankara since 1984 – plans that created headlines like “Dry the Swamp to Eliminate the Mosquitos” and which I used to cut out of newspapers and save in a scrap book. Actually talking to the PKK, allowing the truly free use of the Kurdish language, revoking strict limits on freedom of expression, and the decentralization of political power always remain inconceivable to such plans.
The difference today, however, is that Turkey seems to have much fewer friends than it used to. A series of foreign policy blunders led Ankara’s relations with Moscow, Damascus, Tel Aviv, Baghdad and Cairo to collapse, while ties with Washington remain strained. At the same time, the PKK and its affiliates seem to have more friends than before. Internationally, fewer people still view the PKK as terrorists. Although U.S. vice-president Joe Biden equated the PKK with ISIS on a visit to Istanbul a few weeks ago, American officials privately acknowledge that the parallel is ridiculous. But they go along with the ruse to mollify Turkey as best they can. Humoring Mr. Erdogan and his government has its limits, however, and one of those limits just appeared in Syria with the PYD.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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