With the arrest of Abdullah Ocalan in Rome and his subsequent request for political asylum, following the Pinochet incident, yet another Pandora’s box was opened in the world of international diplomatic relations.
Abdullah Ocalan is the leader of the PKK, or the Kurdish Worker’s Party, which has been using terrorist tactics to fight for an independent state of Kurdistan since 1974. He is a resolute Marxist-Leninist and makes no apologies for it. His organization is banned in France and Germany where his band has been known to turn its rage even on fellow Kurds who don’t agree with the PKK’s methods and creed. Thirty thousand people are said to have lost their lives in the numerous terrorist attacks organized by the PKK which finances its activities by wheeling and dealing in every aspect of the production and distribution of opiates. (Ten times the number of victims under Pinochet’s regime, by the way. It is worth noting that the very people who advocate political asylum for Ocalan are the same ones who were so adamant about seeking Pinochet’s extradition. No wonder it is so hard to believe the sermon they preach of their concern for human rights when those rights seem to be applied with two different standards depending on whether the wrongdoings come from the left or the right.)
Ocalan is being passed around like a hot potato. Expelled from Syria at the beginning of October when Turkey began making threatening overtures toward Damascus for harboring the PKK leader. He was then ushered into Russia where the Duma requested his asylum. However, there the government was divided, Yeltsin was quiescent, and Primakov, no fool, was loathe to risk the western economic aid his country so desperately needs and so Ocalan was shipped off to Rome. Why Rome of all places? Although the government is denying any pre-arrangements with the Russians or with the Kurd leader, it is no secret that many Italian Communist parliamentarians have a weakness in their soul for the Kurdish cause, especially for the one that is carried out with a revolutionary creed, and have met with Ocalan on several occasions.
Turkey has requested Ocalan’s extradition. However, that option is not even being considered by the Italian authorities since, in Turkey, Ocalan would in all likelihood receive the death penalty which for Italians is not only considered inhumane but unconstitutional. The Turkish government has been in crisis and like many a government in crisis, it is using this incident as an antidote to ignite the country’s nationalist sentiments and distract it from the problems at home. Anti-Italian sentiment is growing by the minute.
The diaspora of Kurds in Europe includes 500,000 in Germany, 100,000 in France, 80,000 in Austria, 20,000 in Holland, 15,000 in both Belgium and Switzerland, and 8,000 in Italy. Germany has had its fill of PKK activity within its borders. In fact, the Italian government probably thought that Germany would help it untie this Gordian knot by requesting Ocalan’s extradition. However, although the German judicial system is anxious to get their hands on the terrorist which has reeked so much havoc in Germany, the new social democratic government led by Schroeder is pusillanimously washing its hands of the matter and has already annulled two requests for Ocalan’s extradition, leaving Italy to wallow alone in the quagmire. So much for efforts at creating a united European foreign policy. There is no doubt that the Kurds do indeed have a grievance that deserves to be addressed. They have been struggling unsuccessfully since World War I for independence and self-determination in the various countries in which they live. The estimated total population of the Kurds is about 26 million, comprising about 13.7 million inhabitants in Turkey, 6.6 million in Iran, 4.4 million in Iraq, and about 1.2 million in Syria. A small number also live in Armenia and Azerbaijan. The British had promised them the creation of the independent state of Kurdistan when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1920. However, this part of the Treaty of Sèvres was never ratified.
The world has taken heed of the plight of the Palestinians in convincing Israel to give up some of its territory in order to create a Palestinian state. It is even considering the need to grant autonomy to the ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo, which is certainly a threat to Serbian national territorial unity. The Kurds are the largest ethnic group on the face of the earth that can claim no homeland. Certainly, the Kurdistan cause merits the attention of the international community.
Nevertheless, rubbing horns with Ankara is probably not the best way the Italians could have found to use this incident as a way of putting the plight of the Kurds on the international political agenda. No other country in the European Union has fought more adamantly to concede Turkey’s request to become a member of that Union. At the very least, this could have been an occasion to reopen that discussion as a way of convincing Turkey to have more respect for its minorities.
It’s hard to judge whether the Italian center-left government, led by the former Communist Prime Minister, Massimo D’Alema, is just irresponsible or downright suffering from delirium. Its members continue to manifest their permissiveness and sentimentalism toward revolutionary causes as if they were still part of the opposition. Someone needs to tell them that when you hold the responsibility of government, you have to act, well, responsibly. You can’t choose to take sides with the most violent and Stalinist of all the Kurdish groups in the name of nostalgia for Third World liberation movements. You can’t just forget that you are a NATO ally and that Turkey is also a very critical geo-strategic element of that alliance. Not to mention the significant commercial ties between Turkey and Italy and the hardship that a rupture of those relations will bring to Italian industries and services that have worked so hard to nurture those relationships and which are already witnessing thousands of canceled orders from Ankara.
It was bad enough that the Italian government received with open arms this imbroglio from their former Soviet comrades who have recently regained access to the higher echelons of power in the Russian parliament. However, the fact that it can even consider granting political asylum to a known terrorist and drug trafficker in the name of humanitarianism is an affront to the alleged 30,000 victims of his terror. What’s more, the former Communists now in power in Italy are acting with pure unadulterated dilettantism not only regarding foreign policy and relations with their allies, but in matters regarding national self-interest.
November 1998
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