Posted on 04/08/2003 8:30:10 AM PDT by a_Turk
In the Qandil Mountains...
Separatist Kurds want to use Turkey's rift with the United States over war in Iraq to win U.S. acceptance of their cause and add pressure for Kurdish cultural and political rights.
The brother of captured rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan said U.S. anger over being denied use of Turkish territory for its assault on Iraq was a window of opportunity for Turkey's Kurds.
Washington has so far backed Turkey in a guerrilla war waged by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The PKK campaign for autonomy in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast has claimed over 30,000 lives since 1984, but fighting has died down since Turkey abducted Ocalan in 1999 and sentenced him to death.
"With the war in Iraq, a new situation has emerged," said Ocalan's brother Osman, a senior military and political leader in the PKK and its present incarnation KADEK.
"Before, U.S. ties with Turkey were of the highest strategic importance; after Israel it was the country they trusted most in the Mideast. There has now been a serious setback," he said in a KADEK military camp, in a remote chain of mountains in Kurdish-held northern Iraq.
In February, Turkey's parliament voted down a plan to allow tens of thousands of U.S. troops to use Turkish territory for war on Iraq.
The U.S. has since increased its military cooperation with Kurdish factions controlling northern Iraq, sending in special forces that have advanced with groups of Kurdish fighters into territory abandoned by Iraqi troops.
"Our estimation is that a new relationship could be created with the United States. If it adopts a hostile position toward us we must be ready, but our wish is for relations, an alliance," Osman said.
Turkey fears any Kurdish move on the key northern oil hubs of Kirkuk and Mosul could cement the self-rule Kurds have in the northern zone they seized from Baghdad after the 1991 Gulf War, and rekindle separatism among its own 12 million Kurds.
Ocalan - whose fighters heeded a call for a ceasefire his brother made after being captured - said events in the north showed Washington's need to strike deals with Kurds, even to the annoyance of Nato ally Turkey.
"The role of the Kurds is developing very quickly, and they need to form an alliance with the Kurds; otherwise the U.S. cannot succeed in its plans," he said.
"With the intervention in Iraq, there are more grounds for a political solution (with Turkey on Kurdish rights)... As America settles into Iraq, Turkey's importance diminishes, and its political defences fall. Neither Nato nor the U.S. will protect Turkey like before, and this forces it to act."
Washington considered the PKK a terrorist organisation, and has applied the same designation to KADEK, established in 2002.
Turkey dismisses KADEK, which linked the halt of fighting to steps toward allowing the use of Kurdish in broadcasting and education and widening Kurdish participation in government, as an attempt to win politically what it couldn't on the ground.
Ankara has eased bans on the use of Kurdish under reforms aimed at advancing its bid to join the European Union, but Ocalan said he believed more progress was impossible under Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.
Free Kosovo?? Screw that! FREE KURDISTAN!!
Karmic blowback is a bicth.
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