Turkey’s use of chemical weapons and the Kurdish question – a letter to President Obama

Dr Kamal Mirawdeli has written an urgent letter to President Obama about Turkey’s use of chemical weapons against the Kurdish people and presents a road map for a permanent,  just, democratic solution of the Kurdish problem in Turkey.

His Excellency Barrack Obama
President of the United States of America
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500

12 November 2011

Dear President Obama

Turkish Use of Chemical Weapons against Kurdish People/Kurdish Question in Turkey

I would like to bring to your kind attention the disturbing news about the use of new phosphoric and chemical weapons by the Turkish army against the Kurdish people. I was shocked by this abhorrent crime against humanity as well as by your decision to supply Turkey with Predator Drones.  I appeal to your Excellency and hope that you read the following with earnest attention and take urgent measures to have the alleged use of napalm and chemical bombs by Turkey investigated and instead of supplying Turkey with weapons of mass destruction you will use yours and the decisive influence of the US to bring about a permanent peaceful just solution for the Kurdish issue in Turkey. I hope this presentation will make a convincing case that this is, with your kind constructive contribution, possible. This will be the most beautiful legacy your Excellency will leave for 40 million oppressed people in the Middle East.

 1. It has emerged that on 22-24 October 2011, Turkish warplanes killed 36 Kurdish guerrillas in Guze Reshe and Gunde Pire areas of Chele district using extremely high toxic and lethal phosphoric and chemical weapons. The bodies of those killed on 22 October held at Malatya Forensic Medicine Institution bear testimony of their brutal murder in these attacks using napalm bombs and chemical weapons. The burnt faces and the mutilated bodies seen from the photographs simply could not be caused by ordinary weapons. Families who have seen the bodies have confirmed that they were torn to pieces and had burns all over, signs which indicate the use of phosphoric chemical bombs.

2. An interview with a PKK female fighter who has survived the attack, published in the Iraqi Kurdish newspaper Hawlati on 9 November, gives graphic descriptions of the chemical nature and reality of the attacks. The female guerrilla Opalda Angin says: “the Turkish war planes intensively bombed the area of Tiyari valley for   3-4 hours using both napalm and chemical bombs. Chemical gas had infected our throats. This continued until morning. When it became light Copra helicopters attacked and shelled the area.” She continues: In the first three days the attacks did not cause much damage to us. But then they used chemical weapons. We knew that from the strange smell. We were near a stream. So we wetted a piece of cloth and covered our nose and mouth. But our other comrades who were farther from us did not have water. They died as a result of the attack. A strange smell spread in the area. Our comrades could not walk. Their eyes watered. They felt terribly sick. Although we were 1500 metres far from them, we still smelt strong smells. When we breathed it in, our eyes watered. No heavy fighting happened between us and Turkish army.”

The female PKK fighter asserts that the PKK fighters died as a result of the chemical attacks. She says: “There was no heavy fighting between us and the Turkish army. Our comrades were killed by the chemical bombs. I saw the bodies of two of our comrades. But the degree of the burning as a result of the napalm bombs was so extensive and deep, it was very difficult to recognise them. We were walking as small groups of two and three fighters. Suddenly we were attacked by chemical bombs. I thought we were attacked by artillery shelling and usual bombs, or even rockets which they had used before, but this time it was different. Although the bombs fell far from us the pieces would hit us and the sand created by them would create a strong heat. They continued bombing us for a while. Then because of the poisons of the bombs we could not breathe. I could not breathe. I realised my chest was hit by a particle. After a while, my body deteriorated and I fell. I tried to move and rolled down the hill. Then I lost my consciousness. When I became conscious again, I started to walk.”

This female fighter managed to walk to safety with two of her surviving comrades. They were 200 metres away from their scorched comrades. She says: “We stayed in that area for two days. It was on the third day we felt the smell. It was like the smell of apples and pears. Even when we walked away from the area we could still feel the smell. With my two other comrades we threw ourselves in water. Then when I arrived back to my comrades they treated me. If the enemy had not used the chemical weapons our comrades would have fought back even if they were wounded and could have saved themselves.”

3. I believe this is a crime against humanity, against life, civilization and all sacred and secular laws and conventions. The US and Nato, of which Turkey is an active member, cannot avoid responsibility of collaboration in Turkey’s crimes. The weapons must have been provided by the US. The attack was most likely facilitated through the US’s ‘intelligence sharing’ with Turkey.

4. And now there is even more disturbing news. Recently it was reported in the media that:”Ankara is claiming a major diplomatic triumph after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he recently received a commitment from U.S. President Barack Obama to allow Turkey to use U.S. Predator drones. The drones are seen by Ankara as a decisive weapon in its battle against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the Kurdish rebel group.

“The atmosphere seems to be that Turkey did indeed receive a positive reply from the U.S. that some of those Predators currently in Iraq will be transferred to Incirlik and potentially made available for the use of the Turkish military,” says former Turkish diplomat Sinan Ulgen, a visiting research fellow at the U.S.-based Carnegie Institute.

Turkish diplomatic sources suggest Washington had resisted for years Turkish requests, citing its need for the drones in its war against Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

Ulgen says Obama is rewarding Turkey for its support in the region, in particular its decision to participate in NATO’s antimissile system, which Washington says is aimed at countering threats from rogue states including Iran.

“The big element in this equation was Turkey’s acceptance for hosting the early warning radar, for the missile-defense initiative, and now Ankara’s policy with regard to Damascus has been closely concerted with Washington,” Ulgen says. “Now the two sides are on the same page — and [in] part of that overall equation the U.S. gave [a] positive signal regarding…the Predators to Turkey.”

The drones are seen as potentially key in the Turkish armed forces’ fight against the PKK. Until recently it had used Israeli-made Heron drones. But their use has been severely curtailed since Israeli technical support ended. Ankara severed all military ties in September following Israel’s deadly assault last year on a Turkish aid ship, the “Mavi Marmara,” seeking to break the embargo on Gaza. According to Turkish media reports, six Herons sent to Israel for repair have not been returned.” (End of the report).

http://www.rferl.org/content/turkey_eyes_us_drones_pkk_fight/24383897.html

While I was writing this letter, it has been reported by the Turkish daily newspaper ‘Today’s Zaman’ , on 11 November, that “The United States has deployed four Predator drones at an air base in southern Turkey, a news report said on Friday. The report, published in the Taraf daily, said a total of four drones arrived at İncirlik Air Base on Oct. 16 and Oct. 23, several days before Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan discussed a Turkish request to purchase drones to be used in the fight against the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) with US President Barack Obama on the sidelines of a G-20 summit in Paris.” [http://www.todayszaman.com/news-262308-report-us-drones-deployed-in-turkey.html]

5. This is a very serious lethal development of Turkey’s continuous oppression and genocidal war supported by the US and NATO, against non-Turkish nations in Turkey, which has continued since the foundation of the unitary Turkish state after the First World War on the ideology of racist supremacy and strategy of forced assimilation or elimination of non-Turkish peoples. The first criminal implementation of this strategy was the destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, amounting to over 1 million people, during and just after the War through wholesale massacres and deportations. Tens of thousands of Kurds were also massacred; Kurdistan was occupied and has since been ruled directly or indirectly by martial law and implementation of oppressive discriminative racist policies and repressive military and security measures against the Kurdish nation within the new violently-imposed racist state.

6.  Unfortunately, because of the bi-polar world system of the conflict between the West and the former Communist System, the West did not only turn a blind eye to the militarist and racist practices of the Turkish state against the Kurdish people, but also, at least on the ideological and media level, has tried to portray Turkey as a new Western-style modern democratic state. But for the Kurdish people Turkey has been no more than a racist militarist fascist state that far surpassed the apartheid system of South Africa in the cruelty and racism of its formal militarist state ideology, policies and practice which have affected every aspect of the lives of Kurdish citizens, from political rights of freedom and participation, to education, language and leading a normal way of life as Kurdish creatures of God.

7. It is absolutely shameful, inhuman and immoral to allow Turkey even now at this second decade of the 21st century, to use the same practices in a way that violates every principle and value of human rights, human dignity, humanity and civilized decency using the propaganda and false justification of fighting terrorism. In spite of the maximum cruelty of Turkish political, security and military practices in north Kurdistan, the Kurdish people, including PKK fighters, have never resorted to terrorist actions. There have been no car bombs, suicidal attacks, or road side bombs, or indiscriminate killings of civilians although Turkish government has deliberately been trying to create an environment in which there would remain no means and mechanisms of peaceful resistance and political action for Kurdish people. Since the 1990s, Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is a secular rational defensive group many of whose fighters are women, have declared and implemented unilateral ceasefire many times, and have always called for a peaceful, democratic, political solution for the Kurdish problem in Turkey. They have even been prepared to give up their arms in return for just a general amnesty and allowing political organisation and cultural rights, especially education in Kurdish, for Kurdish citizens in a united democratic Turkey. The Kurdish people in Turkey have persistently and strategically chosen peaceful civilized struggle and participation in Turkish democratic elections and structures as the only possible right way for a peaceful solution of Kurdish problem.

8. I believe that democracy can solve the Kurdish problem as well as any other political problem in Turkey. But democracy by definition needs to be inclusive, outreaching, flexible and assured equal opportunity in its processes and outcomes. But Turkish ‘democracy’ defies the ways of God and man. It wants Kurds to be Turks in order to have human and democratic rights. But even when the Kurdish people vote as ‘Turkish’ citizens but use their ethnic sympathies and considerations of local interests to vote for Kurdish or pro-Kurdish candidates for the Turkish parliament, their democratic participation is soon aborted, repressed and reversed by the racist Turkish unitary state. The situation has not improved under the Islamist government of Recap Tayyip Erdogan. In fact, since his and his party’s re-election with increased majority in the last elections, his arrogance, narcissist sadist thirst of power and dream of the recreation of a New Ottoman Empire, are becoming increasingly dangerous motives for his political games, international policies and criminal callous practices in Kurdistan.

9. When he took power in 2002, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to seek a political solution to the conflict, declaring in a historic speech that “the Kurdish problem is my problem”. Erdogan acknowledged that the government had mismanaged relations with the Kurdish population, and promised greater democracy. Kurdish people and their political representatives, and even PKK, responded with open arms and hearts. The Kurds participated with great hope and enthusiasm in the June 2011 elections. The pro-Kurdish BDP has 36 members in the 550-member parliament. But Turkish government kept six of them in jail allegedly for supporting the PKK and, as usual, started a campaign of anti-democratic political repression to reverse the Kurdish achievements and consequently kill the reform process.  Owen Mathews wrote in Newsweek on 7 November 2011:

“Over the last four months, Erdogan’s “Kurdish opening” has been steadily dismantled piece by piece by Turkey’s judiciary, by the PKK, and even by Erdogan himself. In the run-up to a general election this June, Erdogan—playing for ultranationalist votes—said that if he’d been in power when Öcalan was captured, he would have had him hanged. Turkish judges, known for their hardline views, jailed a series of Kurdish activists, including a mayor who provided municipal services in the Kurdish language (still banned for government communications) and an editor who was sentenced to 166 years for supporting Öcalan in his newspaper. PKK returnees were jailed for terrorism in defiance of a government amnesty. Finally, despite an unusually strong showing by pro-Kurdish parties in elections, courts stripped a Kurdish M.P. of his parliamentary seat on a technicality—and then, to add insult to injury, allocated it to Erdogan’s ruling AK Party. As a result, Kurdish M.P.s boycotted Parliament and announced a campaign for greater powers for local government—an initiative they call “democratic autonomy.” Autonomy was, of course, exactly what Erdogan’s original outreach was supposed to avoid. And in the wake of the latest attacks, Turkish police further alienated Kurdish opinion by arresting 44 prominent Kurdish intellectuals in a probe into the PKK’s political wing.”

10. In fact, the scale and severity of repression is far greater than what has scantily been reported by the biased Western press.  According to reliable documents “nearly 4,000 people have been arrested in the past 30 months alone. According to the worldwide writers association PEN, Turkish authorities have arrested up to 1,000 scholars, writers, publishers and rights advocates alone during a two-year crackdown. The head offices of the Human Rights Association (İHD), the Education and Science Workers’ Union (Eğitim-Sen) and the Health and Social Service Workers Union (SES) in the south-eastern city of Urfa have also been raided with members detained. Even Kemal Aydin, Executive of the Association for Solidarity and Support of Relatives of Disappeared People (YAKAY-DER) has been detained. Alongside these arrests, the state has continued to wage a war against Kurds and even extended its assault into northern Iraq (South Kurdistan). A report by the Human Rights Delegation from Hamburg and Stuttgart recently concluded that “the number of war crimes committed by the Turkish military has risen sharply again since 2009. These crimes include torture and the mutilation of dead guerrillas, extra-judicial executions of civilians and captured guerrillas, and the use of chemical weapons … We condemn in the strongest terms the repeated and targeted killing of civilians and BDP officials by Turkish security forces”. Other human rights reports have arrived at similar conclusions, even as the British, German, French and US governments have continued to extend diplomatic and even military/psychological warfare oriented support to the Turkish state in its highly questionable ‘anti-terrorism’ drives that are targeting academics, human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists, relatives of the disappeared, ‘pro-Kurdish’ politicians, musicians, trade unionists and students, amongst ‘Others’.”

11. It seems that what the West is most concerned about is Turkey’s strategic, especially military, relations with Israel, and keeping Turkey as a market for the sale of its arms and promoting military industry. In the current economic crisis in the West, it seems that arms sales and securing energy resources are the foremost priorities of the Western political and military direction. The West’s military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have been motivated by economic consideration more than any claims of West’s security or hypocritical rhetoric of liberation and democratisation. I am concerned that the West’s unjustified military support for Turkey will continue to be at the expences of Kurdish blood, life and freedom.  This policy will be inhuman, costly and counter-productive. The Kurdish people in Turkey will be forced to enter into alliances with non-democratic forces and some desperate groups may emerge who might resort to outright Qaida-style terrorist actions. This will be totally tragic for Kurds, destructive for Turkey and destabilising for the whole region although the evil blood-thirsty arms industry may be delighted in any prolonged prospect of death and destruction.

12. The West should support a peaceful, just, democratic solution of the Kurdish problem in Turkey which will lead to far more greater positive changes and alliances in the Middle East that will ensure ideal environment for economic development, justice, prosperity and trade that will benefit Europe and West, too, far more than immoral arms sales and promotion of death and destruction.  It is shameful for Israel and the pro-Israel Jews in general, who, while keeping the Jewish people’s  own experience of holocaust alive and unforgettable, have been participating so crudely and cruelly in the Turkish genocide of the Kurdish people through various known and hidden ways. This immoral practice by Israel and their American Jewish supporters, is totally unnecessary, irrational, and inhumanely opportunistic and Nazist.  The Kurds have never had any reason, motive, or power to be hostile to Israel. On the contrary a free secular democratic Kurdistan in the Middle East will objectively and logically, be a great support for Israel by being a force of good, democracy and proactive peaceful co-operative co-existence.

13. Turkish political elite, from all parties and ideologies, do not want to leave the era of the genocidal 1920s formative years of a racially-constructed ideal of a unitary Turkish state and dogmatic ideological fantasizeation of a monolithic Turkish identity materialised with blood and bones of Armenians and Kurds by Ataturk’s generals and the despotic destruction of the centuries’ old multi-cultural heritage of the Ottoman Empire. They still see in the Ataturk’s dogma of artificially-constructed supremacist Turkish race the necessary condition for the survival of the Turkish state. They are blind to all the changes that have taken place in the world over almost a century. Ideologies no more create states let alone nations. Democratic inclusive economic, social and cultural integration is the sole right way. The Kurdish people in Turkey have hoped, and still do hope, that the Kurds and Turks would live peacefully and constructively together as equal citizens of a genuinely and inclusively democratic Turkey.

14. But this will not happen unless Erdogan is honest, urgent and serious about constitutional reform. A new democratic fair and prosperous Turkey needs a new Constitution that will not discriminate between its citizens on the grounds of race, language, religion, culture, class, gender, ideology and sexuality. It will allow freedom of conscience, thinking, education with whatever language, political organisation and participation for all, and equal opportunities for participation in the Republic’s political processes and economic and cultural activities. This reform will allow reorganisation of the state’s institutions, ideas and structures. That is the most essential requirement. The rest will be no more than practical and procedural details that with honest intention and strong will to do the right thing can easily be sorted out.

15. Once Constitutional reform is achieved, then the doors must be open for everyone to participate in democratic elections and political processes without any precondition, prejudice or preclusion.  Thus it will be wrong for the Turkish traditional elite to insist on excluding PKK from such processes. Once PKK accepts constitutional reforms and agrees to give up armed defence and be integrated into peaceful democratic processes, they must be allowed to do so without much ado. As the first step, Turkey could declare a general amnesty and the PKK fighters could have sanctuary in the Kurdistan region of Iraq while the issues of laying down arms and return to normal political processes are sorted out. By the same token, it will be wrong for the Kurds to insist on the centrality of PKK or the paramount role for the jailed leader Abdullah Ocelan.  Representatives of people are those who are freely elected by people or will be elected by people. Within this collective united will to build a new 21st century Turkey, then the scope will be opened up for new ideas about the best forms and structures of political governance, civil administration and economic management. Perhaps, then the issue of devolution to regional entities will not be conceived as an ethnic issue but as a rational instrument for a better-managed democratic country.

Dear President Obama

I felt it necessary to write to you about the Kurdish situation and issues in Turkey and explain my ideas in some detail to present to your Excellency a clear picture and attract your Excellency’s attention to the fact that the conditions in Turkey are ripe for a right humane democratic solution of the Kurdish problem. Insistence on military solution and the US’s supplying Turkey with napalm, warplanes, chemical weapons, intelligence sharing and now Predator Drones will only prolong and worsen the tragic situation of 20 million people in Turkey and create injustice and instability in the area.

I appeal to your Excellency:

1. To order an immediate investigation of the alleged incidents of the use of chemical weapons and napalm by Turkey against Kurdish guerrillas

2. To abrogate the decision of the sale of Predator Drones to Turkey as well as banning all weapons and materials of mass destruction.

3. To ask Turkey to stop its incursions and bombardment of Kurdish areas in Kurdistan region of Iraq.

4. To encourage people to hasten the process of Constitutional reform and open up the democratic political process for the Kurdish people along with language and cultural rights.

5. To ask Turkey to immediately release all political; prisoners from Kurds and Turks who have been arbitrarily detained and imprisoned by Turkey for their support for a peaceful solution of Kurdish question and political freedoms.

6. To consider a permanent solution for the Kurdish/Turkish co-existence along the lines suggested in this presentation.

Yours,

Kamal Mirawdeli (Dr)

Kurdish writer and Presidential Candidate in 2009 Kurdistan Region elections

 

 

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