The "Middle East and the Kurds" Workshop

At the beginning of last week, following Prime Minister Erdoğan's meeting with Mesut Barzani in Diyarbakır on November 17, a workshop was held at the Institute for Strategic Thinking (SDE) to discuss the future horizon of the Middle East and the position of the Kurds in building that future. In the workshop, moderated by Orhan Miroğlu, SDE's Coordinator of Historical Confrontation Studies, care was taken to ensure the representation of every segment that has something to say, a thesis, a claim, on behalf of Kurdish politics. With a number of politicians, partisan or otherwise, known for their closeness to Barzani, from the AK Parti, the BDP, Hüda-Par and HAK-Par, as well as academics and literary writers in attendance, forecasts about the Middle East of the future were discussed, in a sense, under the new climate that the Diyarbakır meeting had produced.

Without a doubt, the Diyarbakır meeting, in many of its dimensions, has been an event that will have important consequences from here on, both for the resolution process and for regional integration. In fact, it must not be considered apart from certain regional developments that facilitated this meeting and, in a sense, even made it necessary. Iraqi Kurdistan, which until now we have preferred to describe as "Northern Iraq," in fact faces Ankara rather than Baghdad. This reality has to do with Turkey's interest in this region as much as with the fact that Turkey is this region's only, or most important, path of opening out.

The fact that this meeting took place at a time when Turkey is putting its relations with the Baghdad government, with which ties had been strained because of this rapprochement until now, on the path of repair, heralds beneficial results for the region, after the debris on the road has been cleared.

The opening of Iraqi Kurdistan's gas and oil to markets via Turkey is undoubtedly a development that will bring important gains both for the region and for Turkey. However, there are also actors who will calculate possible losses for themselves from these gains. One also needs to try to foresee what these actors will do and what kind of reaction they will show. The coming days will probably be days in which it can be assessed whether these side developments will turn from possibility into reality.

At the workshop, it was emphasized that the Kurdish question has different aspects, both in its historical and in its geographical dimension. In its historical dimension, after the partition that came onto the agenda with the Sycos-Picos division following the First World War, the Kurds each lived through histories on different tracks in different geographies, yet histories that at times affected one another.

Although it is true that the situation of the Kurdish population, dispersed across four separate countries, presents on the surface an image of fragmentation specific to the Kurds, it is also a fact that this is not exclusive to the Kurds alone. For it is not only the Kurds who today are dispersed across four or more countries. Turks, Arabs, Shiites and Sunnis too are scattered across many countries. Each of the series of Baath regimes that were established contains a mosaic of similar character.

This is as far as the borders drawn with a ruler by Sycos-Picot, without taking into account any cultural or sociological characteristic of the region, have brought these regions through the hands of closed regimes. Toward the end of the century, the sociology and political economy of these structures are forcing these countries toward new formations and new alliances.

On the other hand, serious differences between the needs and demands of the peoples of the region and the roles that global actors have assigned to the peoples of the region also make themselves felt. The tensions produced by the differences between these roles largely feed the instabilities in the region. This confusion of roles can be addressed separately for Arabs, for Shiites, for Kurds. Without a doubt, the tension between the own needs of the Kurds, spread across four separate countries, and the roles that certain parties try to draw for the Kurds will be one of the most determining factors in the future of the Middle East.

The upheavals recently taking place in the Middle East present for now an image of serious instability. Just as instabilities are a sign of a crisis environment, like all crises they also express a search for a new order.

Of course, one beneficial aspect of treating the Kurds across the whole Middle East comparatively is the horizon of solution that the reality now emerging for the Kurds in Turkey holds for the entire region. The common discourse of all those who took part in the workshop and discussed the resolution process for Turkey was a democratic political model rather than a separate structure for the Kurds.

There is nobody other than the PKK that has an imagination of a confederal Kurdistan, and it becomes clear as day in such meetings that this imagination of theirs remains a very anachronistic demand even for the totality of the Kurds dispersed across four countries. Because, owing to the weapon power it holds, it would also assume the inevitable tutelage of a confederal structure, and nobody even wonders what this would mean for the other Kurds. Its practice already exists in Diyarbakır, on whose streets not even Şivan Perwer or Kemal Burkay, the wise man who devoted his life to the Kurdish question, can walk freely, or in Rojawa, where it shows the other Kurds, apart from itself, only the road of emigration.

Another phenomenon that stood out at the workshop is that the Kurdish question has become something that can be discussed with all its options, without the shadow of weapons and the tutelage of the official ideology. In my opinion, the fact that no view remained unexpressed, yet nobody harbored the slightest worry, is another indication that the Kurdish problem has largely been resolved. It has been resolved, because it has been opened up to politics all the way.

Undoubtedly there is still much to be done, but the rest is left either to time or to convincing the other actors and parties of politics.

As a first horizon-scanning after the Diyarbakır meeting, it was voiced as a proposal that the continuation of this workshop also take place in Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Diyarbakır.

Why not?