The Kurdish Conflict

International Humanitarian Law and Post-Conflict Mechanisms

Kerim Yildiz, Susan Breau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136954627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This book is highly topical considering the recent resurgence of violence by the PKK, the incursions into Northern Iraq by the Turkish army and security forces and Turkey's EU accession negotiations. Turkey has become an increasingly important player in Middle Eastern geopolitics. More than two decades of serious conflict in Turkey are proving to be a barrier to improved relations between Turkey and the EU. This book is the first study to fully address the legal and political dimensions of the conflict, and their impact on mechanisms for conflict resolution in the region, offering a scholarly exploration of a debate that is often politically and emotionally highly charged.

Kerim Yildiz and Susan Breau look at the practical application of the law of armed conflicts to the ongoing situation in Turkey and Northern Iraq. The application of the law in this region also means addressing larger questions in international law, global politics and conflict resolution. Examples include belligerency in international law, whether the 'War on Terror' has resulted in changes to the law of armed conflict and terrorism and conflict resolution.

The Kurdish Conflict explores the practical possibilities of conflict resolution in the region, examining the political dynamics of the region, and suggesting where lessons can be drawn from other peace processes, such as in Northern Ireland.

This book will be of great value to policy-makers, regional experts, and others interested in international humanitarian law and conflict resolution.

1
Historical background

Introduction

The Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iraq have seen more than 20 years of serious conflict, with severe human cost for its people. So that the reader may tackle the legislative and humanitarian dimension of the conflict in the following chapters, this first chapter provides a brief history of the people living in the region and the circumstances of the conflict. Key demographic, historical and political contexts will be introduced, and the main actors in the conflict analysed. It then examines some of the features of the last two decades of violence in the region, providing the factual resources to engage with the legal and political issues that follow.

1.1 The Kurds

The Kurdish people are believed to number between 30 and 40 million¹ and are widely considered to be the largest group of stateless people in the world. Despite this, they have maintained a strong ethnic identity for over 2,000 years. As an ethnic group, Kurds are the product of years of expansion stemming from tribes such as the Guti, Kurti, Mede, Mard, Carduchi, Gordyene, Adianbene, Zila and Khaldi,² and the migration of Indo-European tribes to the Zagros Mountains some 4,000 years ago.³ The Kurds have a clan history, with over 800 tribes in the Kurdish regions.⁴ The Kurds have traditionally inhabited rural districts herding shepherds or goats, with some keeping a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle.

There are a number of dialects in the Kurdish language, but the most widely spoken are Kurmanji and Sorani. Kurmanji is spoken predominantly in Turkey, Syria and Europe, as well as by some Iranian Kurds.⁵ Sorani is spoken by Iraqi Kurds south of the Greater Zab, and by Iranian Kurds in the province of Kordestan. The Kurdish language belongs to the Indo-European language family. Its dialects have been influenced by contact with surrounding modern languages and at times have evolved accordingly.⁶ For example, most Kurds in Turkey speak Kurmanji, but in the northwest of the Kurdish-dominated area (for example the provinces of Tunceli and Elazig) Zaza is also spoken.⁷

The majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims who converted between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries and adhere to the Shafi’i school of Islam. However, many Kurds living in the Iranian province of Kermanshah are Shi’ite. Other Kurds follow Alevism, an unorthodox form of Shi’ite Islam, as well as the indigenous Kurdish faith of Yezidism. There are smaller communities of Kurdish Jews, Christians and Baha’is.

The use of the name ‘Kurd’ dates back to the seventh century AD, and ‘Kurdistan’, or the land of the Kurds, was a term that first appeared in the 12th century when the Turkish Seljuk prince Saandjar created a province of that name in what is today modern-day Iran.⁸ In the 16th century the term came to refer to a system of fiefs generally.⁹ The borders of Kurdistan have fluctuated over time, and the Kurds are now spread through Turkey and the Middle East with smaller populations to be found in the former Soviet Caucasus. The heart of the Kurdish-dominated regions is the Zagros mountain chain which lies in the border area between Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, as well as the eastern extension of the Taurus Mountains. It extends in the south across the Mesopotamian plain and includes the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In recent decades, many Kurds have fled the brutality of regimes governing the Kurdish regions to seek refuge in Western Europe, where they form a sizeable and influential diaspora, particularly in Germany, France, Sweden, Belgium and the United Kingdom.

The term ‘Kurdistan’, however, refers to more than merely a geographical area. It also denotes the culture of the people who inhabit the lands. As successive regimes in Turkey, Iran and Iraq have been extremely reluctant to acknowledge the presence of the Kurds within their borders, and Syria has denied that Kurdistan stretches across its boundaries at all, drawing a map of Kurdistan is always contentious. However, there is no doubt that there exists a large, contiguous area of predominantly Kurdish-inhabited lands, or that the idea of Kurdistan has real meaning to the people who live there, as well as to Kurds living in the diaspora community in Europe and across the world.

Despite the lack of precise figures, largely due to state denial or undercounting for political reasons by countries with Kurdish minorities, the regional spread of Kurdish populations can only be estimated.¹⁰ Kurds in Turkey form the largest population, both numerically and as a percentage of the national population. They currently number approximately 15 to 20 million, making up around 23 per cent of Turkey’s population of 69 million. The Kurdish population in Iraq is estimated to be over 5 million, making up 20 per cent of the population; in Syria 1 million and 9 per cent, and in Iran between 7 and 9 million and 15 per cent.

The Kurds in Turkey are concentrated into the south and east of the country, and form a majority of the population in a number of provinces including Mardin, Siirt, Hakkari, Diyarbakir, Bitlis, Mus, Van and Agri.¹¹ The provinces of Urfa, Adiyaman, Malatya, Elazig, Tunceli, Erzincan, Bingol and Kars have also been traditionally dominated by Kurdish populations. In Iraq today, Kurds predominantly live in the northern governates of Erbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniya, over which the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has federal jurisdiction.¹²

1.2 History of the Republic of Turkey

Modern Turkey emerged in 1923 from the break-up of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of the First World War. Beginning in 1920, nationalists had begun to defy the authority of the Ottoman Sultan. When Turkey was declared a new republic in 1923, it was fronted by nationalist leader, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. As modern Turkey’s first president, Atatürk formed a government from the members of his Ankara-based revolutionary group, and secured the passage of the new Turkish Constitution in 1924. He remained President until his death in 1939.

The 1924 Constitution set out the new ideological premises from which Turkey would be governed. Spurred by the perceived humiliation of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which divided Ottoman territory, Atatürk and his followers asserted a new, ‘Europeanised’ Turkish nationalism based on a vision of the unified, centralised and ethnically homogeneous nation state. They sought to enforce a single Turkish identity, introducing dramatic reforms aimed at displacing the importance of Islam in society, placing the military at the core of the state and looking to the secular, industrial West for inspiration.¹³ Accordingly, the Caliphate was abolished in 1924, the wearing of the traditional fez was forbidden and the Turkish language was Westernised. Atatürk effectively ruled as a dictator, with his Republican People’s Party being the only legal political party.¹⁴

As the largest and most prominent non-Turkish people in Turkey, the Kurds had much to lose from Atatürk’s vision. A necessary tenet of the ambition to achieve an all-Turkish national identity was the destruction of alternative identities through assimilation. This was demonstrated in the failure to recognise the Kurds as a minority in need of protection or to acknowledge their language and culture under the Treaty of Lausanne.¹⁵ Frustration among the Kurds with Turkey’s repressive policies towards them spilled over into a number of revolts, and Turkey’s army became increasingly active in the Kurdish regions. The very existence of the Kurds within Turkey’s borders soon came to be seen in the eyes of the state as synonymous with national disunity, and ultimately, with separatism. The concentration of Turkey’s sizeable Kurdish community along the sensitive frontier with Syria, Iran and Iraq, and the presence of frustrated Kurdish communities in these countries, further fuelled Turkey’s desire to subjugate the Kurds and neutralise their regional dominance. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, during which time Atatürk’s government ruled Turkey along autocratic lines, a programme of ‘Turkification’ was introduced aimed at eradicating non-Turkish allegiances and suppressing non-Turkish culture and expression. The Kurds were to become its primary target, as the organs of the state sought to break up the Kurdish community in the southeast through restrictive legislation and state-sponsored violence.

Following the advent of multi-party democracy in 1945, the presiding government was voted out of office and a more liberal government, formed by the Democratic Party, was elected in 1950. This period saw the re-emergence of Islamic influence in Turkey’s governing regime. This new political era ended in a military coup in 1960, which infamously resulted in several state executions, including that of the Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and a number of other high-ranking officials. Political instability following the coup combined with economic recession in the late 1960s sparked a wave of unrest and social chaos.¹⁶ The military responded with the 1971 ‘coup by memorandum’, threatening to ‘exercise its constitutional duty’ and seize power if its demand of the ‘restoration of law and order’ was not met.¹⁷ The military-backed regime imposed martial law and initiated a widespread crackdown on groups regarded as ‘leftist’ or ‘separatist’. Then, in 1980, the military carried out the third coup in the history of the Republic. Martial law was extended throughout the country, Parliament was abolished and the country ruled through the National Security Council (NSC). A committee appointed by the military drafted a new Constitution, which came into force in 1982.¹⁸ Thus followed a decade of one-party rule under Turgut Ozal’s Motherland Party. Ozal’s death in 1993 led to the second democratic Presidential elections in Turkey’s history.

In 1997 the military again asserted their position within Turkish politics, and forced Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan’s Islamist-led coalition government to resign. The secular military alleged that Erbakan was trying to change the basic nature of Turkish politics and government and turn Turkey into an Islamic-led theocracy like neighbouring Iran. After forcing Erbakan from power, the army turned the government over to more secular politicians in what is called Turkey’s ‘post-modern coup’. However, in 2002 the Justice and Development Party (AKP), regarded as a successor to Erbakan’s party, won parliamentary elections, and in 2007 AKP politician Abdullah Gül was elected President of the Republic.

1.2.1 Political structure

Turkey’s Parliament, known as the Grand National Assembly (GNA), is composed of 550 members elected for a 5-year term. The Prime Minister, who is appointed from amongst the members of the GNA by the President, nominates the Cabinet and together they form the Council of Ministers. All laws are introduced into the GNA by the Council of Ministers and the deputies. Once legislative bills are passed, they require the ratification of the President, who may refer the proposed laws (except the budget) back to the GNA for further consideration. The GNA may also empower the Council of Ministers to issue decrees, except during a state of emergency and martial law.

The President is the Head of State and is elected for a 5-year term (renewable once) by the GNA, requiring a two-thirds majority (or an absolute majority in a third round of voting). Turkey’s President is not simply a titular or symbolic head of the state. The President has substantial powers mandated by Turkey’s Constitution, including the appointment of top military and judicial figures.

Turkey’s history of coups d’état sheds light on the role that the military, led by stringent Kemalists, has played in modern Turkey. The military is considered by many, and not least its own members, as the guardian of Kemalism, and plays a prominent role in the Republic, exercising both formal and informal power. One key institution is the NSC, which was set up following the 1960 military coup to oversee security issues in Turkey. The NSC comprises political and military leaders who meet every 2 months to discuss national security. Since the 1960s, and particularly in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup, the role of the NSC has been further strengthened and militarised. While the 1982 Constitution formally states the role of the NSC as advising the government with ‘regard to the formulation, establishment and implementation of the national security policy of the State’,¹⁹ in reality due to the political weight of the members of NSC, and the institutionalisation of the armed forces within the...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Table of cases
• Table of treaties
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Historical background
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Notes
• Appendix 1 Provisions in Geneva Convention III respecting the classification of prisoners of war
• Appendix 2 Terrorism Conventions
• Appendix 3 The Mitchell Principles
• Bibliography
• Index