The US and European acquiescence in Turkey’s refusal to honour Kurdish ethnic, cultural, and political rights has come home to roost with Turkish opposition to Finnish and Swedish NATO membership. The criticism has generated discussions about Turkey’s contentious membership in the North Atlantic security alliance. Its defenders argue that it is key to maintaining the alliance’s southern flank. Opponents point to its problematic military intervention in Syria, relations with Russia, and alleged fuelling of tension in the Mideast.
Kurdish rights hardly figure in debates on Turkish foreign policy, and if they do, only as a prop for taking Turkey to task for its slide into authoritarianism. Kurds are viewed as assets in the battle against the Islamic State at best, and a danger to Turkish security and territorial integrity at worst. The Turkish government has asked Finland and Sweden to accept its definition of terrorism as including any national expression of Kurdish identity.
Turkey has asked that Sweden and Finland extradite 33 persons for suspected support for the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) or exiled preacher Fethullah Gulen. Turkey has labelled the PKK as a terrorist organisation, joining the United States and the European Union in doing so. Turkey wants Sweden and Finland to support its military operation against the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a US-backed Syrian Kurdish group. Turkey asserts that the YPG is an extension of the PKK. The offensive would target the YPG in the towns of Tel Rifaat and Manbij.
US and European failure to stand up for Kurdish rights has complicated the fight against Islamic State, stymied Kurdish aspirations beyond Turkey’s borders and enabled repression of Kurdish rights in Turkey. Failure to hold Turkey accountable for its repression within the framework of the Turkish state has enabled Ankara to establish Turkish policies that violate NATO membership criteria. In 1991, Turkey abolished the prohibition on Kurdish languages and the term Kurd. Kurds had previously been referred as ‘mountain Turks’. The governor of Diyarbakir forced a writer to flee the region under threat of death for using Kurd rather than mountain Turk in interviews.
The failure to take Turkey early on in the crisis in Ukraine takes on added significance at a time when NATO casts the war in Ukraine as a battle of values and democracy versus autocracy.Most Kurdish-language services and activities established by local governments were discontinued by government-appointed trustees who replaced hundreds of Kurdish mayors removed by Ankara for suspected PKK affiliations. Many of the deposed mayors and other prominent Kurdish politicians remain imprisoned. For his part, US Vice President Joe Biden has attempted to reclaim the moral high ground in the aftermath of Trump’s administration, which defied American liberals by declaring that ‘America is back’ in the fight for democracy and human rights.
Joe Biden and Europe’s credibility rides on cleaning up at home and ensuring that they are seen as sincere rather than hypocritical. That’s a tall order amid assertions of structural racism on both sides of the Atlantic and controversy over gun ownership in the United States. Europe’s problem is that it treats violations of human and political rights differently depending on who commits them.
Meeting Turkish demands on political violence offenders is one thing; agreeing to the criminalization of lawful Kurdish political and cultural expression is quite another. Finland and Sweden could offer a compromise formula that could serve everyone’s interest and help Turkey solve a problem that promises to be one of the Middle East’s exploding powder kegs.
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