Palestine – Chickens Coming Home to Roost for Turkey
Turkey’s championing of the Palestinian Arabs in their quest for an independent State has come back to bite the country with a vengeance – as Kurdish Statehood is once again firmly placed on the political agenda…writes David Singer.Turkey became the first country in the world with an ambassador to “Palestine” – after its envoy in Ramallah, Şakir Özkan Torunlar, presented his Letter of Credence to “State of Palestine” President Mahmoud Abbas on 14 April 2013.
Incredibly this self-declared “State of Palestine” – admitted as a member State of UNESCO on 31 October 2011 and as a non-State observer to the United Nations on 29 November 2012 with Turkey’s active support – lacks the four following criteria required by the 1933 Montevideo Convention to qualify as a State:
- a permanent population;
- a defined territory;
- a government; and
- capacity to enter into relations with the other states.
Turkey’s swift recognition of this illegally constituted state for the “Palestinians” – a people only created for the first time in 1964 by the PLO Charter – starkly contrasts with Turkey’s consistent refusal to grant its 15 million ancient Kurdish community – part of the largest stateless minority group in the world – the identical right to their own State in Northern Turkey for the last 90 years.
The New York Times’ Tim Arango sums up the current situation:
The Kurds – a population of roughly 30 million spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria – have historically been treated as second-class citizens by autocratic governments and have long dreamed of their own state. Their aspirations were thwarted by Western powers after World War I, when new borders were drawn that carved up the Kurdish communities. But slowly, during the upheaval of the Middle East, the Kurds are now reaching for self-determination.
The battle for Kobani last year in Syria, which ended in victory for the Kurds after a month-long American-led air campaign, drew Kurdish fighters from around the world and fanned the flames of pan-Kurdish nationalism.
In Iraq, after the Islamic State swept across the north of the country last year and captured Mosul, Kurdish forces took charge of Kirkuk, a city long contested between Kurds and Arabs that sits on a sea of oil and is considered something of a spiritual homeland for the Kurds.
Gains by the pro-Kurdish Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) in the last Turkish elections at the expense of Turkey’s President Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party (A.K.P) have put added pressure on Kurdish demands for their own State.
Barham Salih – former prime minister of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region – has stated:
“I think this is a milestone for Kurdish people and for Turkish politics. Not long ago, Kurds were officially non-existent, at best identified as mountain Turks. After decades of denial and persecution, the time for the Kurds has arrived.”
Distinguished Turkish novelist Elif Safak wrote in Time magazine:
“It is one of the biggest ironies of Turkish political history that the Kurds — once belittled by the elites as a ‘backward culture’ — have become the major progressive force in the country.”
Turkey and the Kurds now appear to be hurtling toward renewing the all-out conflict that plagued Kurdish Statehood demands for decades – following a suicide attack that killed 32 people in the town of Suruc along the Syrian border.
Erdogan – robbed of his parliamentary majority by the Kurds – is in no mood to support Kurdish Statehood – a position he so enthusiastically embraced for the Palestinians.
Turkey seems set to pay a huge price for Erdogan’s hypocritical double standards.
The chickens are indeed coming home to roost.
David Singer is a Sydney Lawyer and Foundation Member of the International Analysts Network
You’re absolutely right, David. And the fact that the US, Australia, UK, et al are silent over the opportunity the Turks are taking to attack Kurds while they purportedly go in to fight IS, is a disgrace.