By Melissa Seelye:

Right wing conspiracists in the West pegged Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan as the ‘next Hitler’ some years ago but, with the PM’s ‘objectionable’ statement at the UN Alliance of Civilizations in Vienna on February 28 condemning Islamophobia as a crime against humanity ‘just like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism’, now Western policy-makers also fear the same.

Along with a swift reproving tweet from Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, U.S. Secretary of State Kerry promised he would discuss the matter ‘very directly’ with Erdoğan. After facing criticism from the Geneva-based NGO, UN Watch, for not speaking out against the ‘Ahmandinejad-style pronouncements’ in Vienna, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the comments ‘hurtful and divisive’ as well. Then, just last week, 89 members of the U.S. Congress and 20 EU parliamentarians signed two separate letters similarly condemning Erdoğan’s remarks. Such responses are clear indications that the benchmark for liberalism is Netanyahu’s proverbial ‘red lines’.

However, the international community has refused to criticize Erdoğan’s anti-Zionism on the basis that the PM is in no position to champion minority rights anywhere. With Kurds—the world’s largest stateless people—still being denied their cultural rights, condemned to impoverishment, wrongfully imprisoned, and killed on a habitual basis in Turkey, this systemic international disregard for the Kurdish question has set a far more perilous precedent than Erdoğan’s long foreseeable anti-Zionist rhetoric.

Because Kurds remain stateless and are denied their right to exist in Turkey as Kurds, there is little, if any, census information on the ‘Mountain Turks’, as they were dubbed. Estimates place the global Kurdish population between 30 and 40 million with approximately 15 to 20 million Kurds living in Turkey.

Militarily, politically, and economically, Kurds in Turkey have no international allies. Further compounding their disempowerment, members of Kurdish political parties, such as the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), along with community organizations, are routinely persecuted and imprisoned. As well, the armed Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), having been obediently reviled by the West at Turkey’s bidding for years, will very likely be disarmed and exiled altogether by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) ‘peace talks’ with jailed PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan. Even the increasingly influential Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, governing the only semi-autonomous Kurdish region, has been persuaded by Turkey and the West to refrain from aiding their ‘terrorist’ counterparts in Turkey.

All this, and Kurds – reminiscent of Israel’s constant lamentation, but far truer for land-locked Kurdistan – are ‘surrounded by enemies on all sides’. In Turkey they are the sole targets of the conscription-fed Turkish army, NATO’s second-largest only after the U.S. Turkey – like Israel but to a lesser degree – has also been aided in their more than $300 billion war on Kurds/the PKK by an intelligence-sharing, military, and economic alliance with the U.S.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to enjoy ‘unshakeable’ American support. According to a U.S. Congressional Research Service report dated March 2012, Israel had at that point received a total of $115 billion in ‘bilateral assistance’, including mostly military but also economic handouts. In addition to allowing Israel to become the world’s second-largest producer and largest exporter of drones, this support has also fed Israel’s ‘secret’ nuclear arsenal of 100-400 warheads, and helped develop their Iron Dome anti-missile system. Even with the U.S. now facing an $85 billion federal budget sequestration, the 10-year, $30 billion military aid package to Israel initiated by the Bush Administration in 2007 will surely emerge largely unscathed.

Both Kurds and Jews have also faced oppression, persecution, forced relocation, and genocide. However, while the 6 million Jews killed in Nazi Germany is a now widely-known figure, the international community neither knows nor cares how many Kurds have been killed in the various genocidal campaigns waged against them over the last century alone.

Beginning with a now better-known case, Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam Hussein’s Al-Anfal campaign of 1987-1988 killed 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds in Iraq, with others placing the number closer to 200,000. Of course, these deaths do not encompass history of Kurdish genocide in Iraq ranging from at least 1963 to the present. Crimes range from the ‘Arabization’ of Kurdish towns and cities to the destruction of 90% – 4,500 – of Kurdish villages from 1976 to 1988, the still unresolved ‘disappearances’ of hundreds of thousands of Kurds, the use of chemical weapons on Kurdish villages, and the ongoing bombings in ethnically-mixed Iraqi cities such as Kirkuk, where Kurds are the primary victims. No accurate depiction of the number of Kurds exterminated in Iraq will be possible until the mass graves containing all those who disappeared are unearthed – a project lacking international interest and funding.

Ethnic cleansing campaigns against Kurds in Turkey are even less documented. What is certain is that the ‘Turkification’ agenda formalized in 1923 by the founder of Turkey’s Republic, President Atatürk, has continued to this day. Kurds have been the primary victims, as the Young Turks had already carried out the Armenian genocide from 1915-1923. In practice, this ‘Turkification’ has entailed the bombing of Kurdish regions in both southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq, where the PKK is based, as well as assimilation policies aimed to destroy any remnants of Kurdish identity.

As Atatürk began implementing his fascist colonial ‘reforms’ in the mid-1920s, Kurdish resistance took hold in the Kurdish Southeast and in 1925 Sheikh Said’s rebellion was brutally crushed by the new Republic. Kurdish political leader, Dr. Abdul Rahman Qassemlou (who was himself assassinated by Iranian agents in 1989 for political reasons), estimated that 53 rebels (including Said) and 15,200 Kurdish civilians were massacred.

This was followed by the 1927-1930 Kurdish nationalist Ararat rebellion led by General Ihsan Nuri Pasha. Though the Kurdish death toll is, naturally, unknown, 66,000 Turkish troops were reportedly sent to smother the uprising and Law No. 1850 was thereafter passed to ensure the crimes committed would not be recognized as such.

Then, from 1937-1938, the Turkish government brutally repressed the Dêrsim rebellion led by Seyid Riza. An estimated 13,000 to 70,000 Kurdish Alevi were killed or later died in the genocidal policies following the massacre. Atatürk’s adopted daughter, Sabiha Gokcen, is renowned as Turkey’s first female pilot and leader of the airstrike on Dêrsim.

Finally, the armed conflict with the PKK, the most enduring Kurdish self-determination force to date, began in 1984 and so far an estimated 40,000 have been killed, many of them Kurdish civilians. Still, these numbers cannot even remotely convey the day-to-day violence and oppression endured by Kurds in Turkey for almost a century.

Throughout, various Turkish leaders have implemented policies aimed at ‘civilizing’ Kurds. As such, Kurds in Turkey have been prohibited from speaking and writing in their mother tongue and, even presently, the Kurdish language has no official status in the country. What this means is that Kurds put on trial for often fabricated charges of terrorism are still being denied the right to testify in their own language. The names of thousands of Kurdish towns and villages have also been Turkified, with an estimated 6,000 destroyed altogether, displacing millions of Kurdish people.

Erdoğan’s primary contributions to the war on Kurds have been his now infamous (among Kurds anyway) anti-terror legislation and Koma Civakên Kurdistan (KCK) trials aimed at silencing political opposition and Kurds in particular. As of 2012, Reporters Without Borders had identified Turkey, with an estimated 10,000 primarily Kurdish political prisoners, as ‘the world’s biggest prison for journalists’. In custody, Kurds continue to be lethally assaulted by Turkish security forces and the tradition of raping or threatening to rape Kurdish women remains an interrogation tactic. Denying the genocide of not only Kurds, but also Armenians and other minorities, is also commonplace.

Alongside these policies, Turkish airstrikes on Kurdish areas continue with Western backing, even now amidst the PKK ‘peace talks’. Most memorable in recent years was the December 2011 Uludere massacre in which 34 Kurds, the majority children, were killed. It was not until May 2012, however, that the U.S.’ role in alerting Turkish authorities of the group’s location via Predator drone surveillance was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The Pentagon responded: ‘Without commenting on matters of intelligence, the United States strongly values its enduring military relationship with Turkey’.

U.S. drone intelligence-sharing with Turkey dates back to the 2007 creation of the Combined Intelligence Fusion Cell in Ankara under U.S. President Bush. Additionally, if not for Erdogan’s rift with Israel over the past several years, the U.S. Congress would have already approved Turkey’s request for ‘hunter killer’ MQ-9 Reaper UAVs and AH-1W attack helicopters predestined for erasing the Kurdish question once and for all.

And yet, while denying the Holocaust is rightfully considered a criminal act in a number of countries, the ongoing genocide and linguicide of Kurds is ignored altogether, with the exception of scattered European recognition of Al-Anfal as genocide decades after the fact. One cannot help but wonder how many more thousands of Kurds will be murdered by Turkish state apparatuses before the world finally condemns these crimes against humanity for what they are. More to the point, how many more acts of genocide must we witness before we cease to discriminate among acts of the indiscriminate killing of human beings?

Melissa Seelye is an independent researcher and professional freelance editor currently residing in Canada. Her primary areas of interest are minorities, women, and Kurdish affairs.

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