Ethnic Alliances Deconstructed: The PKK Sanctuary in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Internationalization of Ethnic Conflict Revisited

Abstract

This article presents a critique of how the dominant paradigms in international relations (IR)—neo-realism, neo-liberalism and systemic constructivism—approach and explain ethnic conflict. It deconstructs one of the most prominent explanatory frameworks that mainstream IR has contributed to the analysis of the internationalization of ethnic conflicts, the ethnic alliance model, and demonstrates theoretically and empirically, by way of a case study of the Kurdistan Workers' Party sanctuary in Iraqi Kurdistan, the epistemological and ontological deficiencies of this approach. Furthermore, by dissecting the inherent ‘groupism’ of this model and related frameworks, it problematizes how scholars as co-protagonists of ethnic conflicts substantialize and reify the ethnicized discourse and politics of ethnic division, and thus contribute to the construction of a normativist and essentialist ‘reality’ of the conflicts that they set out to describe.

Acknowledgements

The author's thanks first and foremost go to Sarah Keeler, whose encouragement, support and intellectual input to his work in general and to this article in particular have been invaluable. The author's extensive field research and interviews in Iraqi Kurdistan, partially funded by a generous grant from the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, would have been impossible without the unwavering support of Omar Sheikhmous, to whom he owes his most profound gratitude. The author's appreciation also extends to the two anonymous reviewers of Ethnopolitics who provided valuable feedback to this article.

Funding

This work was partially supported by the British Institute for the Study of Iraq.

Notes

1 Posen's approach features prominently in Brown (1996), is mirrored in Wagner (1993) and van Evera (1994), and has been utilized and adapted by a myriad of scholars from such diverse schools of thought as Kaufmann (1996, 1998), Roe (1999) and Saideman (2001). It is criticized by, among others, David (1997), Kaufman (2001) and Cederman (2012).

2 Echoing Hutchinson (2005), here, rather than ‘nation state’, I use the term ‘nationalizing state’, not only to indicate that the four states in the context of this article—Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria—are home to more than one nation, but also to allude to the often brutal process of assimilation during their ongoing state formation.

3 A similar recent case for a primacy of IR in analysing ethnic conflicts is made in another primer by Neal Jesse and Kristen Williams (2010).

4 IR is a notorious latecomer to debates on questions of identity—the concept did not feature prominently as an eminent category in IR-specific approaches until the so-called ‘Fourth Great Debate’ and the post-positivist challenge of the early 1990s (Zalewski & Enloe, 1995). In slight exaggeration, John Stack (1997, p. 11) observes ‘ethnicity is as alien to the study of international relations as would be Sigmund Freud's musings in Civilization and Its Discontents’.

5 These limitations are particularly lamentable because questions of identity (who are we as individuals, as a community and polity?) should be at the centre of our discipline, and as Hansen (2006) and Weber (2010) argue, once were—think Kenneth Waltz's original Man, the State and War (Waltz, 1959). Since then mainstream IR has come to neglect them, to our discipline's detriment.

6 The convergence of key positions of these two schools of thought in the 1980s, such as on the state as unitary actor, has been termed the ‘neo-neo synthesis’ and is discussed exemplarily in Wæver (1997).

7 Owing to the political situation in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria any figures on the Kurdish population there can only be estimates. According to Gunter (2009, p. XXIX), there are ‘12 to 15 million Kurds in Turkey (18 to 23 percent of the population), 6.5 million in Iran (11 percent), 3.5 to 4 million in Iraq (17 to 20 percent), 1 million in Syria (9 percent)’, and one to two million in the diaspora in Europe and North America.

8 Although the Treaty of Zuhab in 1639 stabilized the border between the empires after almost 150 years of intermittent wars, border disputes remained the norm in the larger Ottoman–Persian antagonism.

9 For the early stages of Kurdish ethnonationalism see Jwaideh (2006), for general overviews see Natali (2005), Romano (2006), McDowall (2007), Tahiri (2007) and Entessar (2009).

10 Partially these arguments are taken from Natali (2005) and McDowall (2007); in their entirety they are made for the first time in Černy (forthcoming a).

11 The only other instance in Kurdish post-World War II history where a case for secessionism can be made was the short-lived Republic of Mahabad in Iran in 1946/47; see Eagleton (1963) and Ghassemlou (1965).

12 They found that the presence of an ‘ethnic alliance’ increases conflict between dyads of states by two weighted points on a scale from zero to 60 (Davis & Moore, 1997, p. 179).

13 Petersen detected a 3.4 weighted points amplitude towards conflictual dyadic interaction on the same scale from zero to 60 (Petersen, 2004, p. 36).

14 However, the term ‘internationalization’ itself might be an anachronism in an inaccessible mountain terrain beyond any attempt to enforce the law, monitor and police the borders or keep taps on comings and goings. This is to say that that the concept of ‘internationalization of a conflict’ does not mean the same in the Kurdish mountains as at the border separating the two Koreas. Until recent advances in satellite technology generations of mountain dwellers with clan links encompassing the entire region and with the interchangeable expertise of pastoralists, smugglers, and guerrilleros have moved goods, arms, and drugs on hidden paths and hazardous tracks only known to their kin as freely as if in the Schengen Area. International borders have mostly existed on paper and in the heads of bureaucrats in the nationalizing and state-building capitals of Tehran, Ankara, Baghdad and Damascus.

15 The first military application of the alliance took place in 1956 when Iranian and Iraqi forces in joint operations crushed the uprising of Djiwanroji Kurds in Iran (Nezan, 1993, p. 64).

16 Interview with then PUK representative in Beirut, Adel Murad, Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, 3 September 2010.

17 Massoud Barzani in an interview with Turkish journalist Rafet Balli in 1993, quoted in Marcus (2007, p. 70).

18 Offering more detailed background on the three Kurdish parties than this article can provide are, for the KDP and PUK, Stansfield (2003), and, for the PKK, the slightly dated but excellent study of White (2000), the more recent treatments of Eccarius-Kelly (2011) and Gunes (2011) as well as the more journalistic approach of Marcus (2007), and, in German, the account of a former PKK fighter by Çelik (2002).

19 One of the signature feats of the PKK in its founding year was an assassination attempt on Kurdish MP Mehmet Celal Bucak, whose relatives had founded the KDP-T, mirrored on and enjoying cordial relations with Barzani's KDP (McDowall, 2007).

20 This was confirmed in an interview with the leading expert on Iran and its relations with its own and Iraqi Kurds, Abbas Vali, Istanbul, Turkey, 8 May 2012, as well as by Turkish scholar Doğu Ergil, interviewed in Istanbul, Turkey, 25 October 2011. Other scholars with decades of expertise on the Iraqi Kurdish nationalist parties such as Robert Olson and Michael Gunter, when asked, thought this chain of events ‘absolutely plausible’; interviewed in Lexington, USA, 9 March 2011, and Cookeville, USA, 11 March 2011, respectively.

21 Özal is said to have harboured ambitions to regain the Ottoman vilayet of Mosul, roughly corresponding with today's Iraqi Kurdistan, for Turkey via the Iraqi Kurds (Lundgren, 2007). This argument is often used by Kurdish critics of the KRG's present dependence on Turkey, a view they believe substantiated by Jalal Talabani initially in 1991 offering Turgut Özal Iraqi Kurdistan as a Turkish protectorate (Marcus, 2007).

22 Interview with Qamran Karadaghi, the Iraqi Kurdish journalist who facilitated the first contact between Özal and Talabani, London, UK, 21 April 2011.

23 Rather than of the Turkish state it would be more correct here to speak of Özal and his closest confidants. In this mediation effort the president acted on his own initiative and against most of the Turkish politico-military establishment (Pope & Pope, 2005).

24 Interview with the PUK field commander to whom the PKK surrendered in October 1992, Mustafa Chawrash, Sulimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan, 31 May 2010.

25 This reading of events is supported by former PKK fighter Selahettin Çelik, interviewed 9 May 2010, San Louis, France, as well as several Iraqi Kurdish journalists I spoke to in situ and the scholars Michael Gunter, interviewed in Cookeville, USA, 11 March 2011, and Henri Barkey, in Bethlehem, USA, 1 February 2011.

26 Interview with then Director of Persian Gulf Affairs of the National Security Council, Kenneth Pollack, Washington, USA, 21 March 2011.

27 In both Artens (2013) and Černy (forthcoming a)—see note 31—I have portrayed the Iraqi Kurdish elites and main parties, KDP and PUK, as enjoying the role of ‘kingmaker’ in today's inner-Iraqi politics. As a matter of fact, Prime Minister al-Maliki would not be in power were it not for Barzani's backing after the elections of 2010.

28 In its most radical form this view led to the simplistic and equally essentializing excesses of the ‘greed versus grievances’ theory (Berdal & Malone, 2000; Collier & Hoeffler, 2000).

29 Since for him the term ethnic group can encompass any politically conscious status group, Cohen (1974) infamously goes so far as to identify stockbrokers as an ethnic group. This trivialization ultimately renders the social category ‘ethnicity’ absolutely meaningless and useless for analysis.

30 In general I am very sceptical of the suitability of quantitative analyses for capturing the complexities of ethnic conflicts. On its limitations, see an excellent symposium in Ethnopolitics, 7(2–3), with contributions by Shale Horowitz, Pieter van Houten, Patrick James, Stuart Kaufman et al. In the annotations only the article by Horowitz (2008) is referenced, but the entire exchange is to be recommended.

31 All my publications prior to 2014 appear under the name ‘Hannes Artens’.

32 Interview with Huge Pope, International Crisis Group Representative in Turkey, Istanbul, Turkey, 6 May 2012. See also International Crisis Group (2012). Presumably, as is discussed repeatedly, Iraqi Kurdistan could serve as a future exile for former PKK fighters who Turkey refuses to readmit—as it already does for thousands of Kurdish political refugees from Turkey and hundreds of PKK dissenters.