No democracy in Turkey – ‘insulting Kurdishness’: Interview with Sheri Laizer

iKurd.net | Editorial

“I have always believed that Kurds must achieve independence to protect the next generation from censorship, torture, massacres and attempted genocide. Their neighbours are violent and greedy and the West is duplicitous. The quest for self preservation is a universal right and does not equate with either ‘separatism’ or ‘terroism’ – that is a ludicrous pretext espoused by Turkey for “killing every last terrorist”,” Laizer says.

NEW YORK,— An Interview with Mrs. Sheri Laizer, a Middle East and North African expert specialist and well known commentator on the Kurdish issue, by iKurd News editorial after the banning of the Turkish translation of her book, Martyrs, Traitors & Patriots – Kurdistan after the Gulf War.

Q: As Turkey is on the verge of banning the HDP, what you think is likely to happen to Kurds, to freedom of expression and forming political associations in Turkey? As most of the Kurdish politicians are behind bars what is going to happen to the Kurdish voice?

Laizer: In the same period as the Turkish state prosecutor has taken steps to close down the People’s Democracy Party (HDP) the day before the Kurdish New Year (Newroz) other initiatives in the name of ‘insulting Turkishness’ are underway to deprive the Kurds and AKP opposition of their voice. The supreme arrogance of the Sunni Turkish nationalist stance of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is, as they say in slang, gob-smacking.

His latest restrictions and ‘judicial’ moves look set to leave the Kurds without legal political representation in Turkey. The basis, is as in the past, linking any legal pro-Kurdish party with the PKK by relying on the rhetoric of “terrorism”. This is the same rhetoric that Erdoğan has used in pursuing the Gulen (Hizmet) Movement. When I first lived in Turkey in 1985, the PKK’s armed struggle was in its infancy having been launched just months before. In this period, the Turkish media were still calling them eşkıya– bandits or brigands, a term from the 19th century when rival Kurdish tribes would raid the caravans, as well as each other. The word “terrorism” was not yet in vogue but soon found its use and took over from all other negative descriptions of the Kurds, including ‘mountain Turks.’

Through the extension of these tactics through to the present day, the AKP/MHP alliance seeks to prohibit the Kurdish deputies from resuming political life by criminalising them along with their support base.

For defence lawyers still trying to work in Turkey, there is scarcely any viable international norm upheld in Turkish laws to abide by! The catch- all of ‘insulting Turkishnesss’, ‘insulting the President’ etc. position Turkey on an equal footing with Iran – Erdoğan’s authoritarianism increasingly resembling that of the Ba’ath Party.

This week Erdoğan has gone after several high ranking navy personnel that signed a declaration against his plans for the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, abusing the term ‘coup’ just like he did of the dubious 2016 ‘coup.’ Al Jazeera observed: “Earlier on Monday, Turkish prosecutors detained 10 retired admirals and ordered four others to turn themselves in for signing the statement supporting the 85-year-old maritime accord governing the use of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits on grounds they were conspiring against the constitutional order…” [1]

Erdoğan, who has the blood of many thousands of civilians and Kurdish combatants on his hands is still being handed cash to “take care of” refugees, including, potentially the Yazidis from areas occupied by Turkey. These include the now submerged Hasankeyf, and centres in Batman and Diyarbakir. For example, Irfan Ortaç, appears to have appointed himself – and his organisation, the Germany based Central council of Yazidis, the Yazidis spokesman such as to go off and visit Turkey several times along with local governors and AKP officials. Their Facebook site, ZEDeutschland, has reported that Ortaç has been advocating in Turkey that Turkish Yazidis – and Yazidi refugees from Iraq left unprotected by Baghdad or Erbil – go to live under Erdoğan’s shelter. [2]

Such kind of kowtowing to Erdoğan plays further into his hands in boosting his legitimacy in the illegal occupation of NW Syria and his goal to further destabilise and undermine the KRG. Turkey has never ceased from bombing Kurds across the border since the 1980s. Now, however, it is so regular an occurrence that one Turkish military operation just rolls into another. It must not be overlooked that it was Turkey’s role that directly led to the unfettered incursion of ISIS into the Yazidi stronghold in Sinjar and then on to Mosul taking every other Kurdish village in their path. ISIS took Fallujah in the same manner.

Everyone could see the ISIS convoys of vehicles mounted with heavy machine guns and black flags rolling in from Syria. Erdoğan’s response was to refuse Obama the use of Turkish bases to stop their advance until 2015. ISIS then supplanted Al Qaeda in Iraq. [3] Erdoğan also left the Kurds of Kobani to face the Salafist cut throats. Now he threatens afresh to invade Sinjar himself. Secret deals are still being done out of sight. Funding marked for the Yazidis has been diverted elsewhere but once the Turkish military enters a disputed zone it is very difficult to make them retreat.

A commentary on the page of the European Council on Foreign Relations warned why Turkey should stay out of Sinjar noting:

“On 20 January, during a visit to Iraq, Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar sought Baghdad’s assent for Turkish operations to drive the PKK out of Sinjar, saying: “we have repeatedly expressed that our fight [against the PKK] will continue until the last terrorist is eliminated”. Two days after the trip, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned that Turkey might invade Sinjar “overnight, all of a sudden”, although he also characterised such an intervention as a joint operation with Iraq…[4].

It would be more useful if the European Council members, including those that just visited Ankara, [5] and NATO would finally take steps to bring Erdoğan to trial for war crimes before the International Criminal Court, but instead they prefer to remain in business – even directly with him, his family and AKP elite [6]. Economic interests take preference over democratic values, international law and human rights. [7]

However, bodies like the Atlantic Council and US Think Tanks like the Brookings Institution, are also at it, advocating improving relations with Erdoğan under the Biden Administration and condemning Kurdish independence in the same breath.

The following recent proposal by the latter is in my opinion a typical sell out, characteristic of the wealthy pro-Turkish lobby in the USA. The piece’s co-author, Ömer Taşpinar, was a former columnist for the Doğan group’s now defunct Radikal newspaper:

“The Biden administration should not leave Syria and abandon the Kurds as Trump contemplated. Instead, it should find more convincing ways to prove Ankara that the U.S.-Kurdish military cooperation is about fighting the Islamic State, not pursuing Kurdish independence. In return for a clear Turkish military commitment against ISIS and after making progress towards a trilateral peace understanding between Syrian Kurds, the Assad regime and Turkey, the United States could phase down its security cooperation with Syrian Kurds…” [8]

This smacks of the same kind of economic self-interest that led Trump to betray the YPG (the US’s Kurdish pawns) in the first place in favour of business with Erdoğan. It is advocating in short that the Biden administration, get closer to Turkey once more with a little smack on Erdoğan’s hand and distance itself from the Syrian Kurds and any notion of independence. Syria is not Turkey’s business: Assad does not have any say in what happens in Turkey.

Q. Will this war against freedom likely end with the end of Erdoğan in Turkey keeping in mind that the Turks in general are against the Kurds?

Laizer: Democracy does not operate in Turkey. The Kurdish pursuit of democracy in Turkey is doomed. I have ceased to believe in the concept altogether there for given the AKP’s near total control of the media and the judiciary, along with silencing the legitimate opposition, voting leads nowhere other than to identify the orientation of the vote caster and facilitates his or her subsequent pursuit by the state as enemies within. Party membership has to be declared and is then computerised along with other data concerning each citizen held in the gov.tr database. That includes warrants, charges and ongoing court cases.

The fallout from what is taking place before our eyes is potentially sweeping for the medium term: the full scale of the reactions that will follow from the Kurdish lobby being increasingly pitted against the Far right and Islamist Turks cannot be predicted. With one sweep the Kurds are once again being deprived of their democratic and judicial options for representation in Turkey. This takes freedoms back to the years of the military coups, but now with an Islamist twist that would have Ataturk writhing in his grave.

This is the same pattern that we have seen at work from the early days of the Cold War in undermining a popular and legally elected Prime Minister in Iran, like Mohammad Mossadegh, in the 1950s, through cynically arming both Iran and Iraq against each other and sacrificing the Kurds at the same time in the long running war between them in the latter part of the 1980s. Most recently, Trump’s betrayal of the Kurdish fighters in Syria by allowing Erdoğan to open the corridors to slaughter highlights the fickle drive of economic self-interest.

It has not been helpful that since Abdullah Öcalan’s capture in February 1999, the PKK leadership has been begging the Turks for ‘brotherhood’ – a relationship that the Turks neither recognise nor desire. As they do not recognise that there is even a war, relying on the rhetoric of terrorism, there can be no ‘peace’ either. Peace is a dirty word to the Turks. All past ceasefires and peace offerings like the failed peace missions of surrender are simply taken as weakness.

Turkish soldiers held as POWs in the Gare region of Kurdistan were reportedly being well treated even if used as a bargaining chip by the PKK, so the Turkish military was ordered to kill them and present this to the public as an atrocity carried out by the PKK. The exposure of the ruse cost prominent HDP MPs their seats in the Turkish parliament, foremost, the brave Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu. It has also helped Erdoğan deal the long-awaited death blows to the party itself. [9]

The Kurds of Turkey and Syria are in desperate need of powerful friends to stem the barbarous acts there of the Turkish military partnered by ISIS fighters recycled as Turkish soldiers and allied Islamic extremists. Erdoğan runs these jihadist forces in all the theatres of conflict which he has entered or intensified, including Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh where the Sultan Murad unit was deployed. The Institute of Armenian Studies has compiled an extensive list. [10] Many of these killers first gained their experience against the Kurds, Yazidis and Shi’a Arabs of Iraq and Syria.

Erdoğan’s ongoing pursuit of Sunni Islamist expansionism is popular with the religious masses in Turkey and suits the agenda of the Far right leadership that has given its support to him. The fruits of his nationalist policy were also seen in terms of the massive human rights abuses in the Kurdish enclave of Afrin and across north west Syria generally. In such style, Erdoğan has established a precedent for whoever succeeds him.

An extensive 2019 report produced by the Journalists and Writers Foundation, titled Erdoğan’s Policies: A Threat to Global Peace and Security noted the following crimes the Turkish leader is guilty of as I also adduced in my articles at the time [11]:

*“Kurdish civilians were exposed to a sarin gas attack by Turkish forces.
* Reports by Member States, Turkish whistleblowers and captured ISIS members clearly indicate that the Turkish government has deliberately over years sponsored and supported the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), as a geopolitical tool to expand Turkey’s regional influence and sideline his political opponents at home. Among other disturbing revelations reports by many sources indicate that:

• Turkey’s intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan is named as member of terror group linked to al-Qaeda and ISIS
• Turkish intelligence directly supplied military aid to ISIS for years 68
• Turkish government siphoned military supplies to ISIS through humanitarian relief agencies
• ISIS fighters, including al-Baghdadi’s deputy, received free medical treatment in Turkey and “protection” from Turkish police
• The Head of ISIS in Turkey received “24/7 protection” under the personal order of the Turkish President
• Turkish police investigations into ISIS are being systematically quashed
• ISIS oil is sold with complicity of authorities in Turkey and Kurdish region of northern Iraq

The totality of the evidence, both in Turkey and in the battlefields, unmistakably points out to very close connections between the Turkish authorities and terror groups in both Syria and Iraq. It is improbable that these links would have been established without the active support and encouragement from President Erdoğan…” (p.22).[12]

Q. Avesta Yayinlari (publishing) prints Kurdish and world literature and was not ever controlled by the PKK. What are the reasons behind banning your book?

Laizer: It is correct that Avesta Yayinlari publishing house has never been a PKK fiefdom. The advancement of Kurdish language and culture remains a key prerogative of its director, Abdullah Keskin, whom I first met back in 2005 when he had printed my book and had begun to distribute it. Avesta’s challenge to the Turkish prosecutor’s attempt to ban the book in 2007 was successful and it was spared, so why, ten years later, has it now been banned? Why also take more than three years to inform Avesta of the decision? To deny them the legal right to appeal because any appeal would be out of time? Perhaps… But the key answer lies in Erdoğan’s broad Kurdish crackdown and adventurism in Syria and Iraq.

The timing of the ban I also find interesting as looking into it I found out that the court sat in Mersin in November 2017 – this is just one month after the Kurdistan Independence referendum took place in Iraqi Kurdistan bringing in a positive vote of 93.7% in favour – far higher than the 53% BREXIT vote that divided the UK, the Kurdistan Independence Referendum unified the Kurdish nation. I had been writing positively on that issue, albeit observing that the ‘independence’ envisaged only concerned a small enclave13 of the vast Kurdish historical lands and did not represent any wider Kurdish state or united Kurdish states so long dreamt of. That article came out in June. It was a satirical piece likening the reactions to the child’s game of ‘Simon Says ‘– where a ringleader has everyone obey his orders instantly or be knocked out of the playing field. I also predicted Trump’s betrayal there. You do not have to be clairvoyant to see what is coming next. The Independence vote took place on 25 September 2017. Erdoğan’s actions in that time have led to where we are now. The book was also quietly banned in November 2017. Neither Avesta nor I knew about it. Did that article’s publication – and other of my criticisms made of Erdoğan himself, including exposing the deep collusion of Turkey, the Netherlands and UK in the Baybasin case,14 raise my profile for Erdoğan’s regime to go after the book afresh? Probably not. I believe that Avesta generally is being targeted for its advancement of Kurdish culture. I am just another of of its authors in translation.

Q. You were an eye-witness to events since 1985 in Turkey, Iraq and Syria, and you compiled this in a book that addresses the period between 1990-2005 in the Turkish edition. It also criticised Öcalan’s performance in court. Turkey has recently banned your book? How you view that?

Laizer: My name had been on the Turkish state’s list of foreign ‘undesirables’ ever since the mid 1990s – a period when Turkish political and cultural repression was intensifying, peaking with the Kurdish fight-back in founding MED TV – the first Kurdish satellite television station when the public use of the Kurdish language was banned. The Kurdistan Parliament in Exile was established in Brussels after the DEP MPs faced prison sentences in Turkey and several of them ended up behind bars whilst the others jumped off the sinking ship in time to save their skins. Virtually every gain achieved by the Kurdish movement in Turkey has been undermined since then by Erdoğan’s regime.

Between 1985-1987, I lived in Turkey and constantly visited the Kurdish region. Thereafter I visited every year, witnessing events, filming subjects, interviewing writers, political figures and ordinary people, commenting on the destruction of villages, forcible expulsions and migration, unfair trial, torture, and the murder of Kurdish conscripts and civilians. Year after year I saw and recorded it all. I spoke in UK parliamentary group meetings, made films for Amnesty International and just about every international news broadcaster. I nominated Kurds for human rights awards, winning the 1989 Reebok Human Rights award season with Akram Mayi, after the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan. I suceeded in having him obtain permission to travel out the Diyarbakir refugee camp. I was a participant and not just an eye witness.

For example, I was detained without charge, threatened, and warned in Turkey as early as 1987, “Abandon this Kurdology: it is a dark subject.” Twelve plainclothes police officers working for Turkish MIT had come and taken me from my hotel along with all my baggage for searching. They detained me after watching me speaking with ordinary Kurdish villagers at a commemoration of Turkey’s ‘liberation’ from the French forces in Urfa in 1920. That incident found expression in my first book on the Kurdish experience, Into Kurdistan – Frontiers Under Fire (Zed Books, 1991). Plenty more such incidents would follow over the years when I was constantly being followed, filmed on video at HADEP and Newroz rallies, where the crowd was intimidated by MIT, and Özel Tim (Special Team contraguerilla) operatives backed by state-paid village guards. I was more fortunate than several of my colleagues with whom my path crossed like Rosanna Della Casa, Lissie Schmidt, Roddy Scott and James Miller, who all lost their lives prematurely and violently in this region or in other conflict zones.

From September 1989 onwards, I was constantly in Iraq and Syria, as well as crossing back and forth into Turkey. Incident after incident I was there. I walked with the fleeing civilians from Dohuk to the Turkish border. I sheltered from gun battle with the UN guards when the KDP and PUK turned their weapons on each other on Mayday 1994. I interviewed Jalal Talabani at his UK home at the same time as MED TV filmed him in 1995. He would never answer a hard question like those about brakuji directly.

I went on to update the English original version of the book that was published by Zed Books in 1996 to include the key developments after 1995 to 2005. One of the most momentous was the international conspiracy that led to the capture of Abdullah Öcalan. I had just visited him in Rome at the villa secured by the Italian secret service.

Abdullah Öcalan was frightened by the Turks when they got hold of him. He did not cope effectively with the show trial in which he was cast as the leading actor – the so-called “Baby Killer” as the Turkish press sought to brand him. His best lawyers began to forsake him for undermining the opportunity presented to him to speak out for the Kurdish cause. Instead, he was used to unravel the movement. The truth had to be told after so many people had lost their lives since the armed defence got underway in 1984 and were still doing so.

Q. Are you a persona non grata in Turkey?

Laizer: Not only in Turkey, but since 2011 in Iran after working on a court case exposing criminal activities of the clerics, and alas, on and off in the KRG for criticising the leaders’ complicity in bloodshed.

Although I never supported one party over another I have supported Kurdish rights on a moral basis and as if I were born a Kurd. It is easy to identify with the persecuted and feel outraged. Of course, that readily makes you a persona non-grata for every party strongman or big wig female that you dare criticise who set their own interests above those of their people.

Deja-vu is the order of the day, however since the 1990s, the Kurds of Turkey have acquired political acumen along with familiarisation with international law. The bullet and the ballot both appear to have failed but Kurds in Turkey can never accept to be belittled as ‘mountain Turks’ or kowtow to the arrogance of Turkish nationalism. Turks refuse to identify with what it is like to be Kurdish and deprived of the right to view life from that natural perspective, casting the merest hint of Kurdish nationalism as ‘terrorism’, whereas the expression of Turkish nationalism has always been the basis of the Republic.

Erdoğan has no real respect for the West. He sees himself as Allah’s deputy, whilst embracing the Turkish Fascist values of the late MHP founder, Alparslan Turkeş. Erdoğan prefers jihad to ethical politics.

We should remember who he was when he was first setting out on his Islamist course as a disciple from the knees of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Taliban ally of Hizb-e Islami and of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan [15].

Related posts:

Distorting the Kurdish Question in Turkey Can Apo Save The Kurds? The Shiladze’s Fury and the KDP—Turkey’s Common Concerns Beheadings and Bikinis – The New Dark Ages Kurds of Iraq want to vote for their independence Turkey: Nato’s Islamic State Member Letter to UN Secretary-General over Turkish deforestation in Iraqi Kurdistan Letter written to President Biden over Turkey’s military operations in Iraqi Kurdistan