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March 21, 2008
NEWS
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Using A Sledgehammer to Crack a Nut, The Turkish Assault on PKK
Kurdishaspect.com - By Peter Stitt
Throughout history there are many examples of a powerful nation using disproportionate force against an enemy and failing miserably. If I were ever in a “tricky situation” I would rather have one of my peshmerga friends with me rather than a battalion of soldiers from a country with little experience of real war. Sometimes numbers do not amount to strength, sometimes numbers are a disadvantage.
Back in 480 BC Emperor Xerxes of Persia led a force of somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 men against Greece. Xerxes was so confident in success that, even when his generals told him the Spartans had occupied the pass at Thermopylae, he did not see cause for concern. For three days, the biggest army ever seen at the time was held up by 300 brave Spartans and around 700 other Greek soldiers. This gave the Greek army time to retreat and reorganise. Eventually they destroyed the enormous Persian army and its navy. Spartacus, the slave leader who led the rebellion against Rome also knew the benefit of dragging a conventional army into a confined place where the numbers were a disadvantage.
If the Spartans had faced the Persians on an open battlefield they would have been obliterated easily and the same is true of Spartacus and his slave army. For centuries Kurds have talked of the mountains as their “only friends” and, if you look back into my people’s history, you will find that the biggest Scottish successes over the English came in the mountains.
In attacking PKK in the Quandil mountains the Turkish military have achieved very little. If anything, they have created more support for PKK from Kurds and beyond. In real terms, the Turkish bombing and shelling has caused quite a bit of damage to some mountains!
Are the Turkish generals really so stupid? Many are extremely well educated and they also had advisors from all around the world telling them this exercise would not succeed in even damaging PKK. Those Turkish generals have studied the Spartan techniques at Thermopylae, they have studied Spartacus’ methods, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon and Wellington. They knew they would not and could not destroy or even weaken PKK by the recent action. So why did they do it?
Firstly, it was a “vote winner” with the Turkish people who are getting fed up with seeing their young men in uniform being killed by PKK. When the AK Party won the last election in Turkey so convincingly it was not the opposition parties who lost, it was the military who had opposed the AK Party and even hinted at a coup on its website over the issue of Gul.
Secondly, the Turkish military is still a Kemalist organisation and hates Kurds so it wants to perpetuate the conflict (so does the PKK). I do not know the figures but, given that Turkey has the second biggest army in NATO, a huge proportion of Turkey’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) must be being spent on maintaining the military. If there is no conflict then there will be no need for such a large and well equipped military. The generals would not like that. Similarly, on the Kurdish side, the PKK has shown itself to be completely bereft of political ideas and an ability to embrace and successfully practice political dialogue. If there were no conflict, the PKK would also be entirely redundant. The bottom line is that neither the Turkish military or the PKK wants peace because they would then cease to exist in any meaningful form. Without conflict, they would have no support from their constituencies. They would be finished.
What is required now is for Erdogen and Gul to press ahead with their plans to democratise the Kurdish areas within Turkey and increase the drive towards equality and acceptance of cultural and ethnic differences. The only solution here is through peaceful means. I have enough faith in those two gentlemen to trust they will do it even though their own military opposes them. Now that is real courage.
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