Interview with #Hamit Bozarslan#
Hérodote: What is the current geopolitical situation in the Kurdish space?

Hamit Bozarslan: The regional context prior to 2010 was marked by the radicalization of Kurdish space on two fronts. [2] Firstly, relations between its various components and the governments of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria grew more radical. Secondly, the cross-border dimension of Kurdish space also became more radical, giving rise to multiple interactions between various political actors. In June–July 2012, the regional situation took a violent turn. Here, violence refers to a principle of action that, while not necessarily able to alter the status quo on a macro level, no actor—whether state or non-state—can relinquish. As a result, Kurdish actors must operate in a context that is militarized and highly uncertain and spans a large area from Mali to Afghanistan. Although many reference points changed in the region in 2011 and 2012, in some respects, the Middle East of today mirrors that of the 1980s and 1990s, which witnessed three wars, frequent shifts in alliances by state and non-state actors, and the emergence of the Kurdish question.

The core of the Kurdish space—a term preferable to Kurdistan because it better captures the ramifications and complexity of the Kurdish issue in the Middle East—is now composed of Iraqi Kurdistan, which is recognized as a federated state and has the potential to form the nucleus of a future Kurdish state. Clearly, this entity gives Kurds as much cause for hope as it gives the states they live in cause for worry. It is a powerful symbolic marker that can account for the radicalization of the entire Kurdish space. Iraq’s current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who supports the Syrian and Iranian governments, is strongly opposed to Kurdish political leaders within Iraq making policy independently, particularly with regard to the exploitation of oil resources. Tensions mounted between the armed forces of Baghdad and those of federated Kurdistan, which has a 100,000-strong army. However, other armed forces, comprised of Turkish or Iranian Kurds, also operate in these two countries as well as from the rear bases they possess in Iraqi Kurdistan. While a truce was reached between the exiled forces of Iranian Kurds of the PJAK [3] and Tehran, we should not assume that the prospect of armed conflict has fully receded.

Throughout the 2000s, the Turkish, Iranian, and Iraqi governments formed a security alliance that saw all three countries adopt a repressive policy toward the PKK [4] or its regional allies, such as the PJAK in Iran and the PYD [5] in Syria. In Iraqi Kurdistan, by contrast, they had a narrower margin of action. Although many internal conflicts occurred between the Kurdish organizations of various countries in the 1980s and even the 1990s, a regional Kurdish political structure now exists in which the federated Kurdish government plays the role of primus inter pares. Of course, the various Kurdish groups cannot ignore each other and as a result, relations between them have been formalized. Iraqi Kurds played an important role in negotiating the truce between the PJAK and Tehran and acted as mediators between the National Kurdish Council and the PYD in Syria.

Clearly, significant differences exist within Kurdish society due to the existence of borders between states, which are often heavily militarized, and attempts by states to force Kurdish integration through education, military recruitment, and policy decisions. The influence of tribes must also be examined if we are to understand the divisions that have marked the history of this society. However, as a result of rural exodus hastened by the destruction of thousands of Kurdish villages in Iraq and Turkey, urban populations have experienced growth and renewal, and tribal influence has been on the wane for the last two decades.

Similarly, Syrian Kurds have also become much more urbanized. Tribal conflicts do not account for the division between the National Kurdish Council, which is partially composed of the middle class, and the PYD, which identifies with the symbols of the armed struggle of the PKK and whose military forces are primarily composed of young people. Nonetheless, relations between the two forces are now peaceful, with both being viewed as legitimate actors by the Kurdish population, a shift that may stem from mediations by Iraqi Kurds. It is also widely known that the authorities in Erbil and more generally the entire Kurdish political class of Iraq wish to see the PKK turn away from armed resistance and focus its efforts on an exclusively political struggle.

All actors are involved in a dual strategy. On the one hand, they are undergoing a process of Kurdistanization. On the other, each group pursues its own goals inside the borders of the national territory where it is located. Thus two processes are unfolding simultaneously: one of dense interactions, a source of legitimacy for Kurdish demands no one can overlook, the other a process of re-Iraqization, Turkishization, or Iranianization. In my view, most reject the prospect of secession, the exception being some Iraqi Kurds, who were upset when Baghdad failed to respect the clauses on the exploitation of oil resources in the 2005 Constitution. What most Kurdish parties are seeking is political, administrative, and cultural autonomy.

Hérodote: What are the driving forces behind Kurdish unity? Can we speak of a Kurdish nation?

H.B.: Kurds share a common history. For example, what happened in Turkey was integrated into Iraqi Kurdish history. They share a common pantheon as well as a map of Kurdistan. Iraqi Kurdistan is viewed as being shared by all, and for this reason, everyone wants to have a say in its affairs. From a symbolic perspective, national unity has been achieved, but not from a material perspective since the national territory is not unified. This accounts for the constant back-and-forth between fragmentation and unification. Kurdish discourse is identical across all the countries involved, the national discourse is highly homogenous, and Kurds share a common national narrative. Each process of radicalization has two sides: on the one hand, each occurs within the borders of a state, while on the other, each invariably crosses these borders via numerous symbolic as well as material interactions, thereby implicating the entire Kurdish space. Although for the last two decades, the media and social networks have also been powerful factors for unity, traditional communication remains important, with thousands of people crossing the Turkish-Iraqi border daily, which creates a feeling of belonging to a shared community, which is also a trade community since borders, whether crossed legally or illegally, always foster exchanges and therefore greater wealth. Some have even referred to the “Turkish colonization” of the Kurdish economy within Iraq since the yearly trade volume totals 3 billion. However, this “colonization” can be attributed to Turkish Kurds despite the fact that products are often labeled in Turkish.

Since the late 2000s, Iraqi Kurdistan has been mutating into a rentier society. It lost its agricultural self-sufficiency, and the widespread destruction of villages in the 1980s devastated the agricultural economy, with farmers fleeing to cities and remaining there. With oil income, consumption is increasing, and only a few intellectuals and political leaders warn of the dangers of transitioning to such a society, seconded in this by international organizations such as the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the World Bank.

Hérodote: Do the different dialects impede the feeling of national unity?

H.B.: No, or only very little. There are three dialects: Kurmanji, Sorani, spoken in a portion of Iraqi and Iranian Kurdistan, and Zazai, spoken in Turkey. The degree of intercommunication is high between the first two but is lower with the third. The first two are often mixed on radio and television in Iraqi Kurdistan, with commentators switching between the two in order to reach everyone. This occurs for practical reasons, not as a result of a political decision. In fact, all parties realize that language is an incendiary topic and that any attempt to impose one of the dialects would face stiff opposition. Yet creating a new language by combining ingredients from all of the dialects is not a viable solution because the result would be an artificial language. Self-identification as members of a common nation is what unites Kurdish people. Enforcing one dialect over another or creating a kind of “newspeak” would only divide them. As regards the written language, during much of the twentieth century, Kurdish was written using three alphabets: Arabic in Iraq and Iran; Latin in Turkey and Syria, and Cyrillic in the former USSR (now no longer in use).

Hérodote: What are your thoughts on the tensions between Ankara and Baghdad regarding Iraqi Kurdistan?

H.B.: One recent event that illustrates the tension between Ankara and Baghdad was Iraq’s refusal in December 2012 to let the plane carrying the Turkish Minister of Energy, Taner Yildiz, land in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. The plane, which was not granted clearance to land in Erbil, had to change course and land instead in Kayseri (in Central Turkey). Taner had been planning to attend an international conference on oil and gas and to meet with Kurdish leaders. The Anatolia press agency reported that the Iraqi government claimed that its decision was made for technical reasons. Clearly, this incident is related to the Turkish government’s refusal to extradite Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq’s Sunni vice president, who was sentenced to death in absentia, as well as to the Syrian issue. We should also keep in mind that for a dozen or so years, a status quo existed between Damascus, Tehran, and Ankara regarding the control of the Kurdish space. Today, the situation has changed and become violent, representing what Frédéric Gros calls “the end of discontinuities,” [6] in other words the end of boundaries between concepts such as “home front” and “foreign front,” “peacetime” and “wartime,” and “security-related” and “military.” If broadened, the concept of a state of violence can be defined as a highly tense or uncertain situation in which no actor can entirely avoid force or tensions, which are in principle regulated in the sense that they do not have the capacity to spark a chain of events none of the actors could control. In such a situation, states already unable to control their own territory and even less their border areas lose their traditional monopoly over the instruments of violence, which then become accessible to non-state actors such as Hezbollah or the PKK.

With the foreign policy of Ahmet Davutoglu (the well-known “no enemy” doctrine), Turkey tried to end violent relations and to set itself up as the hegemonic actor in its former imperial space. However, as crises unfolded, this policy of regional conflicts turned into a policy of confessionalization such that there are reasons to fear that the new regional map will be based more on religious lines than on political ones. While Ankara supported the Syrian opposition and even armed it, in Turkey’s eyes, it remained an Arab Sunni opposition. However, Erdogan’s government failed to see that this support would invariably implicate various other actors, including Kurds. In fact, Turkey’s support for the Sunni Arabs of Syria automatically implicated the Kurds, especially since Bashar al-Assad’s regime no longer controls a large portion of its national territory and has been forced to retreat to Damascus and the Alawite enclave.

The Syrian conflict broke out following a decade of close relations between Turkey and the al-Assad regime, whom Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan called his “younger brother.” In addition, as the 2004 riots and large-scale celebrations on newroz (the Kurdish New Year) illustrate, the Syrian Kurdish movement, which is heavily influenced by developments in Iraqi Kurdistan, also grew significantly more radical over this period. Starting in the summer of 2012, Bashar al-Assad’s regime was forced to back down and withdraw from Kurdish villages. Syrian Kurds received support from Iraqi Kurds, who called for the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, while their prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, supported him. This stance is one of the factors behind the threats Baghdad made against Iraqi Kurdistan and its aborted yet lethal attempts to establish a military presence in the Kurdish province of Kirkuk, which is controlled by Kurdish forces despite not being part of the federated state. As a result, since the start of the Syrian conflict but especially since the summer of 2012, we have witnessed a tense situation that, although it has not led to open war, requires the constant use of instruments of pressure and coercion.[1]

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