Vol. 28 No. 22 · 16 November 2006
pages 38-39 | 2634 words
Diary
Tariq Ali
It was barely light in Istanbul as I stumbled into a taxi and headed for the airport to board a flight for Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city in eastern Turkey, not far from the Iraqi border. The plane was full, thanks to a large party of what looked like chattering students with closely shaved heads, whose nervous excitement seemed to indicate they’d never left home before. One of them took the window seat next to my interpreter. It turned out he wasn’t a student but a newly conscripted soldier, heading east for more training and his first prolonged experience of barrack-room life, perhaps even of conflict. He couldn’t have been more than 18; this was his first time on a plane. As we took off he clutched the seat in front of him and looked fearfully out of the window. During the flight he calmed down and marvelled at the views of the mountains and lakes below, but as the plane began its descent he grabbed the seat again. Our safe landing was greeted with laughter by many of the shaven-headed platoon.
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Letters
Vol. 28 No. 24 · 14 December 2006
From Sabah Salih
Tariq Ali does not try to understand why the Kurds – both the grass-roots and the leadership – decided so overwhelmingly to back the American effort at removing tyranny from Iraq (LRB, 16 November). He faults them for their blind nationalism, even accusing them of wanting Iraqi Kurdistan to become an ‘American-Israeli protectorate’. He fails to recognise that in a world still largely defined by the nation-state, the liberation of a people as oppressed as the Kurds can come about only through nationalism. So far the Kurds have overturned their subjugation in much of southern Kurdistan (Iraqi Kurdistan) without bringing harm to others, and it is this that gives the Kurds of Diyarbakir reason for optimism. That this has happened in spite of US objections shows that the Kurds are first and foremost looking after their own interests.
Sabah Salih
Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania
Vol. 29 No. 2 · 25 January 2007
From John Lovering
When Sabah Salih insists that the liberation of Turkey’s Kurds can only come through nationalism, which Kurds does he mean: Alevis or Sunnis? Secularists or fundamentalists? Agas or peasants? Workers or business-owners? Men or women (Letters, 14 December 2006)? It is simply not true that all Kurds are oppressed. Both in Istanbul and the rural south-east of Turkey many are extremely rich and powerful. Kurdish nationalism, like all others, involves the imposition by an elite of an ideology in which only particular interpretations, interests and people prevail.
Why do so many of those who would look askance on a politics of ethno-nationalism if it was Irish, Serbian, Russian or Jewish smile on it when it is Kurdish? This patronising neo-Orientalism seems to owe much to the long media campaign by groups in Europe and the US associated with the PKK which has captured the imagination of much of the diaspora and many romantic well-wishers. It has benefited, too, from a lot of dewy-eyed Western journalism from the left and noisy anti-Turkish and anti-Iranian propaganda from the right. What poorer Kurds need, like everyone else, is more multiculturalism, more democracy, real economic development, and above all, a radical improvement in the position of women.
John Lovering
Cardiff University
