The Party for Socialism and Liberation (U.S.) extends its solidarity to the Kurdish people and the progressive and popular organizations across Turkey currently under siege from the reactionary AKP government and its far-right mobs in the streets.
For over a week, the Kurdish town of Cizre in southeastern Turkey has been placed under curfew by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Under total lock-down, all communication cut-off and no-one allowed to enter or leave it, Cizre has been the target of a brutal military siege by the Turkish security forces operating under AKP’s orders.
For over a week, a population of over 120,000 people, mainly Kurdish, had no access to food, water, medical and emergency services.
Eyewitness reports and limited information by the journalists who have been able to enter the town indicate that the civilian population has been subjected to unprecedented levels of violence at the hands of the Turkish state security forces. People and children were targeted and killed by sniper fire, houses were shelled by tanks and heavy artillery, resulting in a massacre of 18 civilians and many being wounded. Some of the wounded are reported to have died as they were deprived of access to basic health services, a blatant violation of international humanitarian law. The people have not even been able to bury their dead due to the curfew.
The violence unleashed on the Kurdish people by the ruling AKP was not limited to the town of Cizre. Provoked and encouraged by the racist, anti-Kurdish rhetoric by the AKP officials, fascist gangs and lynch-mobs all over the country took to the streets, targeting the offices of the main Kurdish opposition party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), as well as other left and progressive groups. During this mob-violence, which lasted for two nights, AKP’s police sat on the sidelines and watched the events unfold.
In Ankara, on September 8th, HDP’s party headquarters were set on fire, causing extensive damage. On Sept. 10, the HDP announced that 128 party offices around the country had been attacked. In Kirsehir, a small city in central Turkey, the only book store in the city, run by a member of the Communist Party, Turkey, was burnt to the ground.
The recent violence and repression against the Kurdish people is yet another indictment of the ruling AKP. Its 12 years of rule have been marked by repression, corruption and ruthless neoliberal economic policies, coupled with an aggressive Sunni-sectarian foreign policy that has only helped destabilize and tear apart the region. Signalling the growing frustration with AKP rule, in the June general elections, the party lost its parliamentary majoritye. In the same elections, HDP, received over 13 percent of the vote, clearing the undemocratic 10 percent threshold to enter parliament. In Cizre, the city now under siege, HDP received more than 80 percent of the votes.
Since a coalition government was not formed by the time of the Aug. 28 deadline, Turkey is now facing early elections in November and AKP is hoping to regain its single party rule. As they increase the repression against the Kurdish population, they are hoping to consolidate support from their reactionary mass base while also looking to gain votes from the ultra-right sectors of the population that voted for the fascist far-right Nationalist Movement Party in the last elections.
Blood is on the hands not just of President Tayyip Erdogan but the entire U.S.-led NATO alliance. While the U.S. government has paid lip service to Kurdish national aspirations for tactical battlefield convenience or as fodder for its own “humanitarian intervention” propaganda, it will just as easily partner with the butchers of the Kurdish people if it serves imperialist interests.
In the words of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger “America has no permanent friends — only permanent interests.” Its project remains to reinforce U.S. military and economic hegemony in the Middle East and undermine any potential sources of resistance to that hegemony. This was the project that took the lives of over 1 million people in Iraq and stoked civil war so as to destroy the country as a unitary sovereign state; it then repeated the same playbook, to devastating effect, in Libya and Syria — the foundation of the current refugee crisis.
Turkey’s double game — in the service of imperialism
Let us not forget that Turkey is a member of NATO. During its 12-year rule, the AKP has pursued its neo-Ottoman regional ambitions. The AKP’s divide-and-conquer interventionism has strengthened U.S. imperialism even if the two countries’ priorities at times have temporarily conflicted. Led by the U.S. in the ruthless drive to overthrow the government of Syria, AKP has been instrumental in stoking the civil war by providing arms, logistics, training and funding to the extremist jihadist groups, including the Nusra Front and the Islamic State.
The violence unleashed by the Islamic State on the Kurdish people in Kobani and Northern Syria has been used by the U.S. imperialism as a means to pressure the secular Kurdish forces in Syria into cooperating with the other reactionary and imperialist-backed opposition groups aimed at overthrowing the sovereign Syrian government. In the Islamic State’s siege of Kobani, the AKP sealed the border with the majority Kurdish town and actively blocked volunteers from coming to its defense.
In June, as part of the overall plan to overthrow the Syrian government, a shameful, treacherous deal was cut between the U.S. government and AKP for the creation of a so-called ‘safe zone’ in northern Syria. As a result of this dirty deal, AKP granted to the Pentagon access to the Incirlik air base, a facility strategically located very close to Syria, enabling U.S. imperialism to intensify NATO military operations inside Syria, under the pretext of fighting the Islamic State. While the Turkish government pledged to intensify its own operations against the Islamic State, this was a ruse from the start.
The AKP received the approval from the U.S. government to repress the Kurdish opposition on the domestic front with impunity as well as attack PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) in Northern Iraq, unilaterally ending a cease-fire that had been in place between Turkey and PKK since 2013. PKK, whose forces are mainly in Northern Iraq, has waged a 30-year-long armed struggle for Kurdish independence in Turkey.
No matter how it poses, in reality, the U.S. government is no ally of the Kurdish people, whether in Turkey or Syria.
The duplicity, complicity and the hypocrisy of the U.S. government should be clear for everyone to see as the U.S. tacitly watches the Turkish state, a NATO member, repress and kill the Kurdish people in Turkey.
As the Party for Socialism and Liberation, we stand in solidarity with the Kurdish and Turkish people who valiantly resist the brutal repression of the ruling AKP, and all peoples of the region who desire and fight for genuine independence from U.S.-NATO imperialism.
Long lasting and true peace between all the peoples of the Middle East will be achieved by a unified struggle against U.S. imperialism and its partners in the region like AKP.
We condemn Turkey’s state terror against its own citizens, and demand an end to all U.S. and NATO intervention in the region, whether overt or covert. We urge the people in the U.S., the heart of imperialism, to join the struggle to end all U.S. led imperialist wars.
AKP: Stop the attacks on the Kurdish people and Turkey’s progressive movements!
U.S. / NATO hands off the Middle East!
Who the fuck are “we” to tell them anything and why should they listen to “us”?
Paullie: That’s a great sentiment:
“My opinion is that the outside parties that screwed things up should butt out and let the people of that area work it out. Given that they already intervened from outside and screwed things up continuously for nearly a century, I don’t believe any solution imposed by those same outsiders will be taken well by the people who live there, even if it’s actually a good one this time.”
Problem is, there are the Iranians, and the Turks, and the Syrians too. If we cannot get those nations to keep their hands off now, then the only effect of US following that rule is to further screw up a bad situation. Let’s tell them, “split your country now or you’ll continue to get the problems you’ve had!”
It’s both throwing groups that don’t get along into the same artificial nation states as well as dividing ethnic groups between different ethnic states. For example, the Kurds are divided between Iraq, Syria and Turkey, and there are many other examples.
My opinion is that the outside parties that screwed things up should butt out and let the people of that area work it out. Given that they already intervened from outside and screwed things up continuously for nearly a century, I don’t believe any solution imposed by those same outsiders will be taken well by the people who live there, even if it’s actually a good one this time.
Paulie: You said, “The current political lines were deliberately drawn by western colonialists to divide ethnic, religious and cultural groups between nation states, throw conflicting groups into the same state with their enemies, etc – a divide and conquer strategy. ”
Actually, and more precisely, I think the tactics you describe should also be called “UNITE and conquer”, rather than merely “DIVIDE and conquer.” Do you see why? What was done about border-setting back in about 1920 was, in effect, to force people to be in a single nation called “Iraq”, including incompatible minorities. While the term “divide and conquer” is much better known and argumentationally “sexier”. A minority (for instance the Kurds) can be “conquered” by forcing them into a nation, as a political minority, meaning that they will be, in effect, fated to be ruled by a majority, or at least some larger minority. This actually happened: Iraq was controlled by the minority Sunnis until Saddam was overthrown in 2003, and controlled (to the extent you could call it that…) by the majority Shiites afterwards.
“Unite and conquer”,
And perhaps you ought to have said, ” I don’t think those same western colonialist/imperialist outsiders SHOULD impose any solution at all”, rather than what you did say, ” I don’t think those same western colonialist/imperialist outsiders can impose any solution at all”.
But as is common in legal decisions to say, “We aren’t writing on a blank slate”: We can’t pretend that what was done in 1920 does not have residual effects today. It seems clear that the people inside Iraq cannot, unilaterally, make the changes needed. And there is no basis to refuse to change things, merely because we think things were wrongly changed in 1920. We CAN, de facto, change the borders by announcing that the Kurds own so much land, the Shiites own so much, and the Sunnis own so much land. If it is a fair distribution, the various parties will probably see it that way as well, and maybe there will be peace.
The current political lines were deliberately drawn by western colonialists to divide ethnic, religious and cultural groups between nation states, throw conflicting groups into the same state with their enemies, etc – a divide and conquer strategy. Given that history, I don’t think those same western colonialist/imperialist outsiders can impose any solution at all, even if it’s a good one with better motivations this time, but saying what “should” happen doesn’t necessarily imply who would make those changes happen.
“I blame Obama, and secondarily George W Bush. What is currently Iraq should be split into Kurd, Sunni, and Shiite areas. Not a perfect solution, but it would be far better than what they have now.”
Balkinization is more or less their endgame. The idea is for weak divided states to come out of this that are militarily dwarfed by US/NATO and consequently make economic/fossilfuel concessions to our corporate/bankster masters without any complaints.
The Kurds and their libertarian values stand in the way. Like the CNT/FAI in the Spanish Civil War, they are surrounded by foes.
Wasn’t that Joe Biden’s idea?
I blame Obama, and secondarily George W Bush. What is currently Iraq should be split into Kurd, Sunni, and Shiite areas. Not a perfect solution, but it would be far better than what they have now.