Ankara Pillories Iraqi Kurds
    By Laure Marchand
    Le Figaro

    Tuesday 10 April 2007

Statements by Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani have lit a powder keg ...

    Between Turkey and Iraq, verbal escalation has crossed the threshold of intimidation. "Mr. Barzani has crossed a line, (...) northern Iraq, which is a neighbor, is in the process of making a mistake; the price to pay will be very high," threatened Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday. This menacing tone responded to warnings from the leader of Iraqi Kurdistan concerning the city of Kirkuk. The warnings were perceived by Ankara as a declaration of hostility. "Turkey has no right to intervene in Kirkuk, and, if it does so, we will involve ourselves in the problems of Diyarbakir and other Turkish cities," that count a Kurdish minority of about 15 million people, warned Massoud Barzani Saturday on television channel al-Arabiya. These exchanged warnings from both sides of the Turkish-Iranian border illustrate the sensitivity of the Kurdish question in the region.

    Seen from Turkey: "Barzani is lighting the dynamite fuse," summarized yesterday's Kemalist Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet. By declaring that the city of Kirkuk had "a Kurdish identity, geographically and historically" and that it "was part of Kurdistan," the president of autonomous Kurdistan touched a sensitive issue in Ankara.

    Complaint in Washington

    The rich, oil-bearing city in northern Iraq shelters a small Turkmen minority that, in the eyes of Turkish authorities, legitimates their right to interfere in the region. The reattachment of this multi-ethnic city to Kurdistan, which is to be decided by referendum this autumn, is Ankara's obsessive fear.
The government fears that the constitution of an independent Kurdish state in Iraq will fuel the temptations to independence of the Kurds on the Turkish side. Barely a few hours after the Iraqi leader's statements, Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Abdullah Gul telephoned American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to complain. The subject will be on the menu today at the Turkish National Security Council. The Turkish military sometimes threatens to intervene in Kirkuk.
A harbinger of Turkey's difficulties imposing itself in the regional diplomatic game: the ministerial conference on Iraq - which is supposed to bring neighboring states and global Great Powers together - will take place next month in Egypt, Baghdad announced Saturday. Yet, Washington had proposed Istanbul as the site. The only thing missing was the approval of Iraqi President Talabani, a Kurd. Just to make things more interesting, battles between the Turkish armed forces and the PKK, the Kurdish separatist party, have resumed: ten soldiers and seven Kurdish fighters died this weekend in Turkey's South-East. Ankara accuses Iraq of sheltering PKK troops - who profit from the spring snowmelt to conduct incursions into Turkish territory - in the country's northern mountains.