Margaret Owen, the Director of Widows for Peace and a Patron of Peace in Kurdistan, who travels to Turkey and Syria on a regular basis, does understand the Kurds, and tells us what is really happening in Turkey.
Margaret starts off with a very brief history 101 about the Kurds in Turkey: “The Kurds are the largest stateless ethnic group in the world and number some 40 million people. They lived in relative peace under the Ottoman Empire, since then their population straddles four countries: Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran, and they have been suppressed, unable to use their mother tongue, and discriminated against…The Kurds in Turkey, however, have never wanted to change international borders, they are not separatists, but Turkey sees them as terrorists, always associating them with the PKK – the Kurdistan Workers Party, – whose leader has been imprisoned for 18 years…The Kurds in Turkey have been subjected to horrific human rights violation, and the UK and US governments are watching this and not doing very much about it, because Turkey is a NATO country and important strategically.”
Margaret sees the coup as “having strengthened Erdogan’s position as it has taken away any focus on the terrible human rights violations that have been perpetrated in the South East. This has given Erdogan the opportunity to completely destroy any vestiges of democracy in Turkey by arresting all the judges, prosecutors, and he now wants to bring back the death penalty. The most terrible thing he has a done is that he has taken away the immunity of the members of parliament…This coup is not just about the Kurds but about any minority living in Turkey, of which the Kurds are the biggest. Women’s rights are also being curtailed because of the gradual reintroduction of fundamental Islam.”
The question is why is Turkey, which once was a progressive country and strove to fuse Islam and modern European democracy, is now returning to clericism.
“There is a deeply conservative ‘deep’ state, which has always been very Islamic, and Erdogan has managed to exploit this…There appeared to be a conflict with this deep state in the context of Turkey’s application to join the EU, which amongst other things, involved the abolishment of the death penalty… but now Erdogan doesn’t really care about the EU.”
Turkey’s attitude to Turkey is indicative of Turkey’s underlying attitude to the Kurds, Margaret stresses: “There is a lot of evidence that has been gathered by journalists who are now in prison, about Turkey’s close relationship with ISIS. We know that there are ISIS cells all over Turkey, that Turkey’s hospitals look after ISIS fighters, but worse still, we know that when NATO supported Turkey, to fight ISIS, in fact more attacks by Turkey were focused on the Kurds in Northern Iraq and the PKK than ISIS. There are lots of questions about oil revenues and the border being used to smuggle arms over to the ISIS troops and so on. We often say that Turkey is using ISIS to do its dirty work against the Kurds.”
As far as NATO is concerned, Margaret is unequivocal:
“Many of us think that it is a paradox, an anomaly, that Turkey is a member of NATO, and of the Council of Europe. Both these organizations consider the rule of law and democracy to be fundamentally important….When thousands of people are being suppressed it is extraordinary that Turkey is able to use NATO support to get at the Kurds. The US needs its airbase in Turkey, and it is interesting that the US is using that to support the Syrian Kurds in their attacks on ISIS whereas we [the EU] are not. A lot of us are saying that at least we should start considering the process of expelling Turkey from NATO, to try to bring Turkey to heel. We are supporting an autocratic, murderous, Islamist dictatorship, because what Erdogan really wants to do is to bring back the next Ottoman Empire and be the next Caliph.”
Did the UK and the US governments know about this, and if so, surely they have blood on their hands? Margaret answered: “Yes, I think they knew everything, and Gulen has nothing to do with it.”
