Communicating Arts - Main Web Site"I assured the minister that the Iraqi government will actively help Turkey to overcome this menace. We agreed that the position we should take is a common one to fight terrorism. We will not allow any party, including the PKK, to poison our bilateral relations." [1]
The speaker: Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari.
However unpleasant the announcement to Kurdish readers, it fits with the Conspiracy Against the Romantic that has characterized battles at places as different as Lal Masjid in Pakistan and Nahr al-Bared in Lebanon.
The militant's whose causes have been so deeply woven into their heads as to defy translation into immediate, realistic, and achievable political objectives, find themselves inevitably cordoned by far larger powers.
The principle of the romantic: the good gesture.
Across the Islamic Small Wars, the beau geste signals authentic dedication to the cause.
The issues that have energized the PKK differ quite from those that have turned "Islamists" into self-immolating smart bombs elsewhere: for the PKK, communal sharing (or whatever remnant ideas have survived its socialist start), preservation of culture, and the consolidation of Kurdish culture into a single national entity (rather than scattered across four state boundaries) serve for cause.
Unforutunately, for the PKK, the mechanics that pit contemporary guerrilla warriors against determined state forces would seem to care not for cause: the world and time swirl on around these fixed brave last stands.
In my opinion, of course, until they stand, the less notorious of PKK members may well recede into Iraqi Kurdistan's security force and then serve under the control and at the pleasure of the still new minted regional government. Who is to know? How? But those who are better known may face a frightful prospect under arrest or battle with Turkish forces or otherwise fugitive from the people and land closest to their hearts.
The NATO allies have at stake the preservation of their established security arrangement, which here would seem to pit young democracies and "meritocracies" against the feudal ties that would comprise the alternative organizing system.
Where the students at Lal Masjid thought Pakistanis would rise up behind them, or, lord only knows, the army would turn against Musharraf and in their favor, or that their martyrdom would turn the country toward an Islamic Revolution akin to that in Iran, nothing of the kind happened.
Similarly, the colonizing Fatah al-Islam at Nahr al-Bared, intending to save the Palestinians, destroy Israel, and reconfigure the Middle East similarly failed to lead latent and imagined legions into battle against the Lebanese Defense Forces.
This too with the PKK has that structure. If the PKK turns an army or creates a widespread "people's war", it will break a pattern established elsewhere.
The two most glaring failures of guerrilla forces anywhere: 1) failure to become without question an overwhelmingly popular cause; 2) failure to at some point stand and survive as a conventional force.
For the most part, and most troubling, "success" where contemporary guerrillas operate has come to mean sustained political chaos and senseless (random) death and economic misery for noncombatants unlucky enough to have found themselves sharing the same relative geography.
# # #
1. "Iraq says to help Turkey crack down on Kurd rebels." Reuters Alert Net, October 23, 2007.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
Comments