The meaning of Turkey's reaction to the independence referendum

It is clear that the referendum the KRG under Barzani has insisted on holding, at the risk of setting all of its neighbors against it, will have serious repercussions for regional and global politics. Before getting to that, though, we should not forget to note that this referendum itself came about as a reflection of those same global and regional politics.

We said earlier that Barzani's insistence on this step despite so many actors in the region and the world opposing it stems from his trust in the courage that those who appear to oppose it have secretly given him. Barzani presumably knew what might befall him once he took this step, yet he calculated that the support secretly promised to him could keep him standing.

Yet the sociology and the geography of the matter make a separation impossible within the framework that Barzani imagined and put to the referendum. The issue has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the Kurds have the right to establish a state.

In fact, this geography has been telling us for a century how wrong it is to build a state on an ethnic basis in this region. Where the states founded on this basis, on the Sykes-Picot concept imposed on us after World War I, have brought us is plain to see. We had to overcome this concept, and Türkiye, at least, has recently made a great effort in that direction.

By describing its own internal diversity as a source of wealth, Türkiye has moved a good distance away from this concept; it has recognized the Kurds as well as the other ethnic groups, and has successfully given real substance to a principle of citizenship under which all ethnic elements benefit equally from all rights. Today the Kurds are spread across every part of Türkiye because they have all the rights that Turks or any other ethnic element enjoy.

This spread is the result of the Kurds not being subjected to any discrimination in their rights to travel, education, settlement and property ownership. Like everyone else, they can benefit from these rights. At this point, to try to hand over any geographical region in the name of one ethnic group would be an act of oppression, a great injustice, against the 80 million people living in Türkiye. Naturally, that oppression would not pass over the Kurds among those 80 million.

Perhaps in Iraq the Kurds did not, in practice, enjoy the same ease, but the conditions to remedy that had begun to take shape in abundance, and a broad horizon had opened up for overcoming the divisive, separating framework imposed on us a hundred years ago. Through the advantages it has gained over time, the Kurdish autonomous administration has acquired a high capacity to represent the Kurds within Iraq as well.

No one could object to gaining these advantages, because the discriminatory policies of the past justified a kind of positive discrimination.

Yet the independence referendum move represents a return to a century ago, in place of a further, more unifying, more integrating, modern horizon of equal citizenship that had opened before the peoples of the region.

The framework put before us a century ago is an occupying, imperialist framework that separates the peoples of the region from one another on one basis or another, divides their lands and tears their countries apart. Instead of trying together to break and overcome this shackle-like framework, trying to revive it today will profit no one.

The fact that the map of Kurdistan used in the referendum campaigns was not limited to Iraqi Kurdistan alone but also covered the territory of four countries shows how justified Türkiye's reaction is.

Even if the matter concerned only Iraq, this referendum would not be justified; its claim, which threatens Türkiye's sovereignty and security, is what causes Türkiye to raise its reaction. It is precisely in this context that it has become obligatory for Türkiye to remind this entity, which voices a claim to independence, of its limits. The fact that, were Türkiye to close its doors, its valves, its facilities, it would have no chance of standing on its own is, above all, an invitation to reflect on how real (or realistic) this claim to independence is.

Yesterday our friend Ömer Lekesiz brought to his column a testimony shared on social media by the esteemed journalist Mehmet Akif Ersoy, who has followed the referendum process in the KRG from the very beginning: "We are in Erbil. Our driver voted 'yes' and came. He says, 'If things get out of hand, I will immediately take my wife and children and cross into Türkiye.'"

Doesn't this anecdote alone sufficiently show that the Kurds' homeland is Türkiye?

The Kurds have no need at all to take personally the justified reactions displayed against Barzani in this process. If they do, it is an unnecessary touchiness. The reaction to the referendum is never directed at the Kurds or at the Kurds' prospect of gaining something; it is directed at the irresponsibility displayed in drawing imperialist interventions onto these lands in which we all live together and which belong to all of us.

Otherwise, all of us are obliged to shield with our own chests against every kind of oppression that would target the Kurds for being Kurds, the Arabs for being Arabs, or any ethnic group for being that ethnic group. In essence, if this referendum makes any of the peoples of the region lose, it means it makes the Kurds lose more.