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) A EZINE FOR POOR AND WORKING CLASS PEOPLE. WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS. It is time that the poor and working class people have a voice on the Internet. Contributions can be sent to <malecki-AT-algonet.se> Subscribtions are free at <malecki-AT-algonet.se> Now on line! Check out the Home of COCKROACH! http://www.algonet.se/~malecki How often this zine will appear depends on you! Back issues of Cockroach and my book at http://www.kmf.org/malecki/ -------------------------------------------------------- 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check Out My HomePage where you can, Read or download the book! Ha Ha Ha McNamara, Vietnam-My Bellybutton is my Crystalball! And Now the International Communist League Page! Just push on the "Soartacist" Button. Or Get The Latest Issue of, COCKROACH, a zine for poor and working-class people. NEW! "RADIO TIME" In cooperation with Stratfacts, Bob Malecki will be giving occasional reports to Stratfacts Radio audiences in the United States. Text for these reports now on line. http://www.algonet.se/~malecki Back issues of Cockroach and my book at http://www.kmf.org/malecki/ -------------------------------------------------------- --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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