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KT News:
Wall under construction; Pic – Anatolia News Agency
The Turkish government is building a wall on the Kurd-populated areas of its border with Syria. This wall would create a 2 metres high barrier between the Kurdish districts of Qamishlo in Syria/west Kurdistan and Nusaybin in Turkey.
The authorities are saying the wall is needed to deter smugglers and al Qaeda fighters coming from Syria.
However, the mayor of Nusaybin, Ayşe Gökkana, a Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) member, has dismissed these claims.
“One reason behind this wall is to separate Kurds… there are 900 km of border with Syria, why doesn’t Turkey build a wall anywhere else?
“This is political … there are no attacks coming from Rojava …Al-Qaeda fighters are crossing from Turkey to the other side”, Ayşe Gökkan told reporters.
“Kurds have cleared the border region of mines with their own bodies. Not accepting the borders put between each other, people have been crossing these borders for nearly half century today. This is an inhuman situation that the Kurdish people never accept”.
In his latest blog, Al Jazeera producer Omar al-Saleh considers the official explanation for the wall and agrees there could be ‘other reasons’: namely Turkey’s fear of the sceptre of Kurd autonomy.
“That is another nightmare scenario for Turkey” he writes, “because Turkey fears the creation of another federal Kurdish region on its borders. And with an autonomous Kurdish region in Northern Iraq, it could lead Turkey’s Kurds making similar demands”.
Ayşe Gökkan says there will be mass protests against what she describes as the “wall of shame” – echoing Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s own description of the wall that Israel built between the Palestinian Gaza and West Bank territories.
It’s not as easy as it seems to many of us. Keeping borders open to a neighboring country in war could have many consequences. Why are we not talking about how the KRG in Iraqi Kurdistan has closed the borders with the Syrian Kurdish area? Can we also say this is discrimination? Again, let’s not be naive and use common sense if we are going to criticize enemy so we don’t look foolish.