Posts Tagged ‘Kurds’
Has Obama brought us to a new beginning for Iraq?
Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and President Barack Obama
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Iraq is today a shattered society, shaped by two major international wars, bombings, debilitating sanctions, civil war, emigration of millions of its best-educated people, deadly insurgency and counterinsurgency and foreign occupation over 20 years.
While Iraq never achieved full unity after it was cobbled together by the British in 1920 from three large and mutually alien communities — the Sunni Muslim Kurds in the northern highlands, the Sunni Muslim Arabs in the central plains and the partly Farsi-speaking Shia Muslim Arabs in the southern lowlands — Iraq had made great social and economic progress. By 1990, it was the most advanced of the Arab countries. Now that is all gone.
Yet, even today, there is a memory of collective statehood, or Iraqiyah. Some of us who have lived among the Iraqis believe they have a chance to invigorate a new beginning of Iraqiyah but that the return to something like the state that existed before will take years.
How is the American withdrawal regarded? My hunch, from having known Iraq and Iraqis of all persuasions for more than half a century, is that most will be happy to see us leave. But, at the same time, they have learned to fear one another, so their politically effective attitudes will vary from one community to the next.
Ankara favors human rights bill, homecoming, for Kurds
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
Measures under consideration in the Turkish government deal with discrimination and human rights for the Kurdish minority community, the interior minister said. Ankara is considering a series of provisions aimed at finding a political solution to lingering issues with Kurdish minorities and guerrilla separatists.
Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, called recently for PKK rebels in Iraq to form so-called peace groups who would surrender to Turkish authorities. Ankara, for its part, is considering a series of amnesty offers and cultural considerations as part of a broader reconciliation plan.
Turkish Interior Minister Besir Atalay said the government was preparing a human rights bill and anti-discriminatory measures to send to lawmakers for their approval, Turkey’s leading English-language daily newspaper Today’s Zaman reports.
Atalay added there were plans for a trilateral committee of U.S., Iraqi and Turkish officials to discuss the resettlement of PKK members from camps in northern Iraq to compounds inside his country.
The interior minister estimated that there were around 11,000 members of the PKK in Iraq. “I think more than 50 percent of them would return to Turkey,” he said.
Surely, Cheney and his brown shirts teabaggers will find some reason to whine about this bit of diplomacy in the Middle East.
Kurds returning home? Declarations of peace? Civil rights? Not the kind of change Republicans favor.
