HyeOctane

Last Thursday, November 8, David L. Phillips—the architect behind the State Department’s discredited Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission (TARC)—gave a talk on Turkey and the PKK at American University in Washington, DC. The title of his presentation was “Turkey in Crisis: Strategies for Disarming, Demobilizing, and Reintegrating the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK)” and was based on a recent report he prepared for the National Committee on American Foreign Policy.

Although his presentation failed to highlight the heart of the problem between the Kurds and Turkey—namely the latter’s repression and refusal to recognize the rights of the former—it did urge Turkey to come to terms with (and embrace) the reality of an Iraqi Kurdistan being formed to its south. At the moment, such an outcome doesn’t seem so likely given the latest Turkish bombardments of Kurdish villages and the fact that Turkey has not only refused to recognize the Kurdish Region of Iraq, it has threatened to invade it if a referendum on the oil-rich city of Kirkuk takes place, as scheduled, later this year.

And all this time, the administration thought our “ally” Turkey would make trouble in Iraq over reaffirmation of the Armenian Genocide. As usual, Ankara has its own plans.