Transborder violence: the PKK in Turkey, Syria and Iraq

Abstract

This paper develops the category of transborder violence in order to analyze PKK mobilization and use of violence in and from Syria and Iraq. Wars, regional crises and insurgencies produce new configurations of political opportunities by offering new spaces and resources to the PKK as well as to state actors (Turkey, Iraq and Syria). Political actors use these spaces and resources in order to protect themselves, invent legitimacies, and organize armed operations by reproducing political violence.

Keywords::

• political violence
• transborder region
• armed struggle
• the PKK
• Middle East

Notes

^1. This study depends on a relatively small number of sources because there has been little previous scholarly attention to transborder activities of militant groups in the Middle East.

^2.Eisinger, “The Conditions of Protest Behavior”, pp. 11–12. TillyFrom mobilization to revolution. For this comment, see Meyer and Staggenborg, “Movements, Countermovements, and the Structure of Political Opportunity”, pp. 1628–1660.

^3.Jenkins, and Perrow “Insurgency of the Powerless”, pp. 249–268.

^4.McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930–1970.

^5.McAdam, “Conceptual origins, current problems, future Directions”, pp. 23–40. Tilly and Tarrow, Politiques du conflit, p. 107.

^6.Goodwin and Jasper, “Caught in a winding, snarling vine”, p. 29. For a comment on this topic, see Brockett, Political movements and violence in Central America, p. 15.

^7. Brockett, Political movements and violence in Central America, p. 16.

^8.Goldstone and Tilly, “Threat (and Opportunity)”, p. 181.

^9. Brockett, Political movements and violence in Central America.

^10.Bozarslan, “Le nationalisme kurde, de la violence politique au suicide sacrificiel”, p. 104.

^11. Tilly and Tarrow focus on the fact that opportunities and threats tend to appear simultaneously for actors. Tilly and Tarrow, Politiques du conflit, p. 107. In an analysis about the PKK and the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Columbia (FARC), Vera Eccarius Kelly underlines their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions. See Kelly, “Surreptitious Lifelines”, pp. 235–258.

^12. The Kurdish issue was already studied as a trans-state problem which is not confined to, or soluble within, Turkey's own national borders by Winrow and Kirişçi. I should, however, note that this article aims at analyzing “political violence” in the transborder context. It seeks to explain particularly how transborder dynamics shape the path of violence, quite neglected by earlier studies. The Kurdish problem and political violence are, of course, interlinked, but they do not operate exactly in the same way. Thus, in general, an analysis of the Kurdish question at the trans-state level does not necessarily focus on the use of political violence at the same level. See Kirişçi and Winrow, The Kurdish question and Turkey.

^13.İmset, PKK: Ayrılıkçı Şiddetin 20 Yılı (1973–1992), p. 85.

^14. Ibid., p. 87.

^15. Mazlum Doğan (1955–1982), one of the founders and members of the Central Committee of the PKK, was arrested by the Turkish police when he was preparing to cross the Turkish–Syrian border in Urfa in 1979. The kind of examples mentioned also shows the importance of the use of transborder space by militant organizations in order to escape state control in times of political crisis.

^16. Ibid., p. 88.

^90.http://www.institutkurde.org/images/cartes_and_maps/major_political_parties.jpg

^17.Özdağ, Türkiye Kuzey Irak ve PKK, p. 27.

^18. İmset, PKK, p. 90. See also Serxwebûn, 1988, December, No. 84, p. 17.

^19. İmset, PKK, p. 90, and Serxwebûn, 1988, December, No. 84, p. 17.

^20. İmset, PKK, p. 69.

^21. Ibid., p. 90. For the second congress of the PKK, see also Serxwebûn, 1982, December, Special Issue 2.

^22. İmset, PKK, p. 90. The PKK also organized its third congress in Bekaa valley in 1986.

^23. Ibid., p. 116.

^24. Ibid.

^25. Bozarslan, “Le nationalisme kurde”, p. 105.

^26.Bölükbaşı, “Ankara, Damascus, Baghdad”, pp. 15–36.

^27.Düzgören, KürtÇıkmazı, pp. 226–227.

^28. Ibid.

^29.Denker, Uluslararasi Terör, Türkiye ve PKK, p. 69.

^30. Özdağ, Türkiye Kuzey Irak ve PKK, p. 30.

^31. Bölükbaşı, “Ankara, Damascus, Baghdad”, p. 18.

^32. The Hatay dispute was resolved in 2001.

^33. After travelling to Italy, Russia and Greece, Abdullah Öcalan was arrested in Kenya and imprisoned in Turkey.

^34. The information concerns 2011, namely the Syrian population before insurgency.

^35. For a study about Kurds and political movements in Syria, see Mustafa, Al-kurdu al-sûriyûn wa-l-hirâku al-dîmuqrâtî.

^36. The number later increased to 300,000 people.

^37. Author unknown, “Majorités et minorités au Moyen-Orient”. The document I referred to is a French version of an article published in Israel Economist, Jerusalem: Ahva Press, February 1969.

^38.Barfi, “The Fractious Politics of Syria's Kurds”.

^39. Social base was one of the key analytical concepts in my doctoral dissertation in order to study the social mobilization into political violence. This concept signifies the civilian society which contributes to the production of political violence in my research, but its meaning should also extend to networks, frames, memories and cultural predispositions in the sense of Tilly and Tarrow. Orhan, Violence Politique dans l'espace kurde de Turquie. Tilly and Tarrow, Politiques du conflit.

^40. I should herein add two points. My argument should not be interpreted exclusively in an ethno-political sense. Social institutions like religion, language, kinship and commerce usually make political borders less effective. İsmail Beşikçi long ago made a similar observation about the Hakkâri region near Iraq. See Beşikçi, Doğu Anadolunun Düzeni. Sosyo-Ekonomik ve Etnik Temeller (vol. II). Second, my observation concerns transborder villages. It is indeed very difficult to establish the same relationship between the Kurds living in more interior regions of Turkey, and those in Syria, Iraq, Iran for several reasons, the foremost being geographical distance. Moreover, the distance is cultural and political because the Kurds have lived in different nationalist states (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran). For instance, the Kurds in Elazığ or Dersim are culturally and politically distant from the Kurds in Efrîn or Erbil. The readers should therefore be reminded that the author takes into account how proximity due to geographical, social and cultural factors affects transborder mobilization; but this observation does not mean that political borders are not effective and do not have any function. In time, they may even break the social and kin relations between cross-border communities.

^41. Please note that there are several parties which hold the same names in Kurdish history and its political field. The two organizations in question here are in Syria; Azadî is led by Mustafa Cuma and Yekîtî led by İbrahim Bro.

^42. The Kurdish National Council in Syria was chaired by Abdul Hakim Bashar, secretary general of the Kurdish Democratic Party in Syria (El-Parti) when the council was founded.

^43. This party comes from the organization of PDKS which fragmented between left and right generations in 1965.

^44.Park, “Turkey's Multiple Kurdish Dilemmas”.

^45. Karasungur (born in 1947) and Bilgin (born in 1963) were killed in Iraq in 1983. See Serxwebûn, Special issue 3, July, 1983, p. 2 and Serxwebun, Special issue 5, May 1984, p. 5.

^46. Özdağ, Türkiye Kuzey Irak ve PKK.

^47. Bölükbaşı, “Ankara, Damascus, Baghdad”, p. 24.

^48. Bölükbaşı suggests that Turkish operations could have targeted the camps of the PDK for two reasons. Either the camps of the PKK were not easy to be distinguished from those of the PDK. Or the operations' objective was an indication that Ankara was an ally of Baghdad which was aimed at crushing the PDK and YNK. See Bölükbaşı, “Ankara, Damascus, Baghdad”, p. 24.

^49. Bölükbaşı, “Ankara, Damascus, Baghdad”, p. 24.

^50. Ibid.

^51. Ibid.

^52. Ibid.

^53. Özdağ, Türkiye Kuzey Irak ve PKK, p. 33.

^54. İmset, PKK: Ayrılıkçı Şiddetin 20 Yılı.

^55. Ibid., p. 116. The term peshmergas herein means Kurdish fighters linked with the PDK and/or the YNK in Iraq.

^56. Özdağ, Türkiye Kuzey Irak ve PKK, p. 44.

^57. Bölükbaşı, “Ankara, Damascus, Baghdad”.

^58. Ibid., p. 32.

^59. Özdağ, Türkiye Kuzey Irak ve PKK, pp. 48–50.

^60. Ariel Merari pays attention to this fact of territory when he defines the guerilla. The necessity of controlling a territory is a key element in the strategy of an insurgent guerilla. See Merari, “Du terrorisme comme stratégie d'insurrection”, pp. 24–60.

^61. Also, a no-fly zone was established to end Iraqi attacks on the Shia in the South in 1992.

^62.Olson, “The Kurdish question in the aftermath of the Gulf War”, pp. 475–499.

^63.Milliyet, 21 March, 1995. In this part of the piece, the author uses the press releases because they are necessary to establish a correct chronology of events and armed conflicts rather than the analysis is based on them.

^64.Hürriyet, 14 October, 1997.

^65. The argument here should be considered in a comparative logic between the PDK and the YNK.

^66. In 2009, the Goran party gained 22 seats in the regional government, while the majority was constituted by the alliance between Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani.

^67. One must, however, consider this autonomy in a more complex way due to Iranian multidimensional politics in the Kurdish region of Iraq. These politics are variable given the type of conflict and Kurdish organizations. The Iranian revolution impacted the emergence of Kurdish Islamist parties in the Halabja region. The opposition between the Sunni and Shia powers loses its meaning at this point. The Iranian government seems to be closer to Kurdish Islamic parties in their struggles against Kurdish nationalist secular organizations. For instance, in a conflict between the YNK and Kurdistan Islamic Movement, Iran favors the latter one. However, when the conflict takes place between the YNK and Komela, Iran promotes the first one simply because Komela fights against the Iranian government.

^68.Milliyet, 22 October, 2007.

^69.Radikal, 26 December, 2007.

^70.ANF, 26 December, 2007.

^71.Hürriyet, 16 January, 2008.

^72.Radikal, 22 February, 2008.

^73.Taraf, 14 October 2008.

^74. In a television interview, İlker Basbuğ, former chief of the Turkish General Staff, underlined the role of newly emerging conditions after the Turkish operations by emphasising the two Iraqi Wars. “İlker Basbuğ's interview with Uğur Dündar”, Star TV, 5 July 2010.

^75. One should note that PKK was not absent between 1999 and 2011 in Syria, but the organization had fewer mobilization availabilities.

^76. Please note that Peter Cole makes a similar observation on Libyan civil war in 2011. Cole, “Borderline Chaos? Securing Libya's Periphery”.

^77. I handle this sort of scientific questions in the context of sociological approaches such as “configuration” by Norbert Elias, “structuration” by Anthony Giddens and “habitus” by Pierre Bourdieu, which comply with a double hermeneutic and characteristics and so do not make any opposition between objectivity and subjectivity, action and structure, or the individual and the social. There is indeed a dualistic relationship between these apparent opposites, and one cannot be conceived apart from the other. See, among others, Elias, Qu'est-ce que la sociologie?; Giddens, La constitution de la société; Bourdieu, Réponses.

^78.Gündoğan, From Traditionalism to Modernism.

^79.Orhan, Violence Politique dans l'espace kurde de Turquie, p. 141.

^80.Fakhry, “Iran's War against PJAK”.

^81. Refer for this conception to Boudon, La logique du social.

^82.Kawa was a Moist Kurdish organization founded in 1976. Rizgarî, another Kurdish group, was founded in 1975–1976.

^83.Olson, “Turkey Syria Relations”, pp. 168–193.

^84.Woollacott, “Poised Hammer, no clout”,.

^85. Ibid.

^86. Ibid.

^87. Ibid.

^88. Ibid.

^89. Giddens, La constitution de la société, p. 32.