File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1997/marxism-general.9707, message 244


Date: Sun, 27 Jul 1997 02:08:59 -0400
From: malecki-AT-algonet.se (Robert Malecki)
Subject: M-G: COCKROACH! #77 (Turkish Regime Invades Iraq, Slaughters Kurds)


COCKROACH! #77 (Turkish Regime Invades Iraq, Slaughters Kurds)

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U.S., Germany Back Ankara's Bloody terror raid

Turkish Regime Invades Iraq, Slaughters Kurds

The following is translated from Spartakist (No. 128, June-July 1997), 
published by the Spartakist Workers Party (SpAD), German section of the 
International Communist League.

In the early morning hours of May 14,  50,000 Turkish troops bombers and 
Cobra helicopter gunships poured across the Iraqi border. During Turkey's 
12-year war against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), 2,000 villages have 
been destroyed, 25,000 people killed and two million people turned into 
refugees, including some 15,000 who have fled to northern Iraq-but this 
invasion far exceeds, in scale and firepower, any previous one. Ten thousand 
Kurdish and Turkish political prisoners throughout Turkey went on a hunger 
strike at the end of May in protest against the invasion.

While Bonn competes with Washington in providing military and financial 
support to its NATO allies in Ankara, the ruling Christian Democrats (CDU) 
and "oppositional" Social Democrats (SPD) have brought this murderous war 
home by ruthlessly banning the PKK and other organizations (as well as 
Turkish left groups), or even such elementary expressions of national 
identity as showing the Kurdish national colors. Despite our sharp political 
differences with the petty-bourgeois nationalist PKK, we of the Spartakist 
Workers Party stand with it militarily against Turkey's "scorched earth" war 
and defend its supporters against state repression here. Our comrades 
participated in a demonstration of 10,000 mainly Kurdish and Turkish youth 
in Hamburg against the Turkish invasion. We say: The Fourth Reich is the 
godfather of the bloody war against the Kurds! Down with the ban on PKK and 
(Turkish Leftist) Devrimci Sol! Turkish Army: Get out of Kurdistan!

U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns immediately gave U.S. 
approval. Doing the dirty work for Washington in the region, Israel refitted 
the U.S. built Turkish air arsenal so it could carpet bomb previously 
inaccessible Kurdish villages in the mountainous regions bordering Iraq. The 
president of the European Union issued a tepid statement of "deep concern" 
that the Turkish invasion remain within "appropriate boundaries" (!), even 
as German-made tanks and armored vehicles transported Turkish divisions into 
Iraqi Kurdistan.

The imperialist powers are the enemy of working people throughout the world. 
As revolutionary internationalists, we stood with the peoples of Iraq 
against imperialist aggression during the 1991 Gulf War and the U.S. air 
strikes against Iraq last year, while stating that Saddam Hussein should be 
dealt with by his own working class for his crimes against them. We 
demanded: "Down with the imperialist embargo against Iraq!"  Meanwhile the 
SPD, the Party of Democratic Socialism and the Greens in Germany embraced it 
as the "bloodless" way to starve Iraq into submission to its imperialist 
masters.

The imperialists have repeatedly used the Kurdish people as pawns for their 
great-power ambitions while stabbing them in the back. Following the 1991 
Gulf War, the strategic region of Iraqi Kurdistan bordered by Turkey, Syria 
and Iran and the near the oil and gas fields of Kirkuk was declared to be a 
"safe haven" for Kurds and off-limits to the Iraqi army - to be policed by 
the U.S. and its allies, under a UN fig leaf, as part of Washington's "New 
World Order." We warned at the time that such control by U.S. and other 
imperialists "peacekeepers" would create a situation as bad as that in Gaza 
and the West Bank. This "safe haven" has been repeatedly invaded by the 
Turkish army to round up and kill supporters of the PKK

The feudalist and bourgeois misleaders of the Iraqi Kurds, Massoud Barzani's 
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Jalal Talabani's rival Patriotic Union 
of Kurdistan (PUK), have long histories of sacrificing the Kurdish national 
struggle for illusory support from the imperialists and their regional 
lackeys, while killing each other. During the Gulf war, they both sided with 
the U.S. and joined the CIA-backed "Iraqi National Congress." Both groups 
have been ruthlessly policing their "own" people, as well as collaborating 
with Ankara in hunting down PKK supporters inside of Iraqi Kurdistan. When 
the PUK, backed by Iranian troops, appeared to be getting the upper hand 
last year, Barzani got help from Saddam Hussein. The U.S. used this as a 
pretext for a major show of force in the Gulf-mobilizing its Pacific and 
Persian Gulf fleets as well as deploying B-52 bombers from as far away as 
Guam. Now the Turkish army is using Barzani's "invitation" for its pretext 
for the invasion, and the American imperialists are overjoyed. But it means 
nothing but death and devastation for the Kurds in both Turkey and Iraq.

With the USSR gone, the U.S. wants to show that it is the world's No.1 
military powe, and it will use this power to exert its control over the oil 
and gas fields of the region, which are of vital concern to Germany and 
especially Japan. U.S. trade sanctions against Iran and Iraq are in turn 
aimed against its imperialist rivals. When Turkey signed a 20 billion-dollar 
gas deal with Iran last year, the Frankfurter Allegmeine Zeitung exulted 
that "it was a slap in Washington's face." And on the eve of its invasion, 
Ankara signed a deal with Baghdad for a 1,300 kilometer (800 mile) gas 
pipeline to run to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. But in both cases, the 
pipeline pass through Kurdish territory, which has to be "secured" before 
they can be built. The sharpened interimperialist rivalries in the Near East 
are the harbinger of a future world war, this time fought with nuclear weapons.

At the same time, Turkey is also extremely unstable and ripe for class 
struggle. Massive social oppression and dislocation caused by the war and 
capitalist austerity measures generated the mass public workers strikes, 
which shook Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir last year. Even the conservative 
British Economist (17 May) bluntly warns that Turkey's war on the Kurds is 
"unwinnable." The parliamentary facade of what is in effect a military 
dictatorship is rapidly disintegrating: the country's top prosecutor is 
seeking to have the ruling party, Necmettin Erbakan's Islamic fundamentalist 
"Welfare" (Rafah) banned, while members of parliament from its corrupt 
coalition partner, Tansu Ciller's "True Path" are defecting like rats 
deserting a sinking ship.

For semicolonial countries, the collapse of the Soviet Union has meant the 
loss of what room to maneuver they had by playing off the Soviet Union 
against the imperialist countries. In this context, the PKK's call on the UN 
and imperialist powers to bring about a "political solution" is a dead end. 
At best, it would mean the kind of "autonomy" that exists in the West Bank 
and Gaza, where PLO police assist the Israeli armed forces in brutal 
subjugation of the Palestinian masses.

The 25 million Kurdish people in the Near East, partitioned among Turkey, 
Iraq, Syria and Iran, constitute the largest nation in the world without a 
state of its own. Because genuine national emancipation of Kurdistan 
requires the revolutionary destruction of four capitalist regimes-and 
accompanying imperialist domination-in this strategic region, the solution 
to the Kurdish question must be revolutionary, proletarian and 
internationalist. As we wrote in "For a Socialist Republic of United 
Kurdistan!" (WV No. 651, 13 September 1996): "The motor force for the 
struggle for Kurdish independence is to be found in the proletariats of the 
countries which oppress the Kurds. The workers of Turkey,Syria,Iran and Iraq 
have their own scores to settle with their exploiters." In turn the Kurdish 
working class exists in diaspora, not only in the major industrial centers 
of the region, but together with Turks in the coal mines, metal plants, and 
chemical works of Germany and West Europe. Immigrant workers here are the 
living bridge between struggle for the emancipation of the Kurds in a 
socialist Near East and proletarian revolution in imperialist West Europe.

This is the perspective of Trotsky's permanent revolution for countries 
whose capitalist development has been retarded by imperialism-the tasks of 
the bourgeois-democratic revolution can be achieved only through the seizure 
of power by the proletariat, supported by the peasant toilers, and the 
extension of proletarian revolution to the advanced capitalist countries. It 
can only be realized by winning Turkish, Arab and Persian workers to 
champion the emancipation of the Kurdish nation and other oppressed peoples 
of the region and to be mortal enemies of the great-power chauvinism of 
"their" respective bourgeoisies. This internationalist perspective is 
counterposed to every variant of petty-bourgeois nationalism, no matter how 
"socialist" its rhetoric. In "Fortress Europe,"  a first step in forging 
revolutionary unity is combating the poisonous anti-immigrant racism that 
serves as the battering ram for the allsided assault on living standards and 
the ideological preparation of new imperialist wars. This perspective can be 
realized only by building vanguard parties of the working class in the Near 
East and Europe as part of a world party of socialist revolution. This is 
the task to which SpAD and the International Communist League are dedicated.
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