TT >ENG It's not the PKK, but the Oil of Kirkuk

[mary <humdrum2 at libero.it>]

It’s not the PKK, but the oil of Kirkuk that Turkey aims for
 
Published on 19 10 2007 da ufficio
stampa

Fabio Alberti
18 October 2007
The Turkish threat of military intervention in Iraq must be taken very
seriously, together with the possibility of an American attack against
Iran. The consequences for world peace and for the lives of millions of
people in the Middle East could be devastating. 

With an almost unanimous vote, for the first time after decades, the
Turkish Parliament has voted upon a resolution that authorises the
Government to send soldiers abroad, in the north of Iraq. The declared
pretext is the will to contrast the military actions that the PKK is said
to be undertaking on the other side of the border and the lack of
repression of the same by the part of the Regional Kurdish Government.
As always happens when wars are being prepared, the motivations are never
those (or only those) that are declared. The casus belli always
hides other, less confessable motivations. 
The last time an episode like that of 7 October occurred, in which 13
Turkish soldiers lost their lives in a clash, was 12 years ago. The
coincidence it has with the request made by Erdogan to the Parliament to
authorise the envoy of soldiers in Iraq is, at the very least,
suspicious. 

In order to evaluate the true entity of the danger that is constituted by
the Turkish threat one must bear in mind the complexity of the regional
sphere, without ever forgetting that in the north of Iraq there are
enormous oil reserves. 
The Turkish Government has opened at least two dossiers on the region,
and they have examined them when they have reached this decision: the
possibility of a United States attack against Iran, and the institutional
future of northern Iraq. 

The war against Iran, the American pacifists argue, is an event that is
much more likely to take place than their media has been allowing them to
see. Their politicians seem to think that the peace movement is weak and
defeated. And, this is for two reasons: the first is that Iran is the
weakest element in the new strategic alliance that is being constituted
between Russia, China, and naturally, Iran itself. It is an alliance
that, if consolidated, could in the coming decades challenge the hegemony
of the United States and seriously menace the unilateral system of world
government that has been constituted following the collapse of the Soviet
bloc. 
The second reason is that an attack against Iran could be the only
solution that remains for the Bush Administration to avoid a strategic
defeat in Iraq. Already for some time there has been the start of a
political change in the USA of its alliance with Iraq. From an
endorsement of the Shi’a political-religious elite, they are passing more
and more to greater support of the Sunni component. Ever more frequently
it is being justified as the necessity to contain the Iranian influence.
Faced with the impasse in which the Bush Administration finds itself, the
temptation to force its hand, enlarging the conflict, must be very strong
in Washington in these months. From this point of view, the threat of war
is enormous: it’s not a given that Russia and China will sit by the
sidelines and just watch.

Should this happen, with the almost automatic dismemberment of Iraq, the
Turkish government will reserve for itself the possibility of “taking
part in the match”. 

The second dossier is, in fact, the one linked to the final institutional
status of Iraq, where the possibility of repartition of the country is
still on the To Do list, especially after the deliberation on this issue
at the 26 September Congressional vote in the United States.

Since 2003, immediately following the invasion of Iraq, the Turkish
government has undertaken a policy that is aimed at claiming the
“Turkishness” of the zone of Kirkuk, financing the Turkoman political
forces, emphasising the historical presence of this community in the
oil-rich cities in the northern part of Mesopotamia. Ankara, perhaps, is
not even extraneous to the terrorist campaign that for months has
expressed itself to the sound of bombs in the cities. The status of the
Kirkuk zone, that the Kurdish authorities claim, is supposed to be
decided by a referendum that was meant to be held in November and that
for now has been postponed, also due to Turkish pressure. The possibility
that a Kurdish entity at their confines, one that controls one third of
Iraqi oil, is seen (and this fact has never been kept hidden) as a threat
to Ankara. It carries with it the possibility that the Turkish generals
should decide to impede it at any cost, even one that calls for invasion
of the neighbouring country. 

That the PKK once again undertakes military activities, after a
unilateral ceasefire that has been in force for many years, and to which
the Turkish government had not responded with availability to start a
negotiation process, nor to even recognise unilaterally a minimum of
national rights to the Turkish population, could have been wilfully
provoked in order to construct the context that would justify Turkish
military involvement in the conflict that is currently in course in the
Middle East. 

This start of military actions is heavily emphasised: the military
operations of the PKK have been, in these recent years, extremely
limited. They include almost exclusively defensive responses to attacks
that the army that once was of Ataturk has continued to perpetrate. And
they have done so with such perseverance that it makes one think of the
will to impede the definitive passage of the Kurdish political
representatives to an exclusively political strategy. Every army, in
order to justify its actions, needs an enemy. If the Turkish-Kurdish
conflict had been truly resolved, the mightiest military machine of the
Mediterranean, only after that of Israel, would lose very much of its
enormous power. This policy of closure to negotiations and especially of
continuous military provocation has reinforced the PKK and given it the
push towards resorting once again to arms, which is today taken as a
pretext. 

It is faced with this scenario that Turkey has formed a heretofore-unseen
alliance between religious and military elements and it seems as though
it has decided the time has come to play its hand. Exactly how far they
will go is unknown: if they limit themselves to impeding Kurdish control
of the oil of Kirkuk or if they will try, in the quagmire of the possible
war against Iran, to actually conquer it. In both cases, the threat must
be taken seriously. 

Original article in Italian:

http://www.unponteper.it/informati/article.php?sid=1483
 
Translated from Italian by Mary Rizzo, member of
Tlaxcala, network of translators
for linguistic diversity. 


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