The Kurds fighting for their survival, Turkey is not helping much
Over the past decade, Turkey has pursued a "break and
dent" strategy against the Kurds, by which the Turkish government seeks to
dismantle Kurdish groups and push resistant factions into neighboring Syria and
Iraq. Turkey has now come to
rely on this strategy outside its border, particularly in the northern
Syrian region of Afrin. Based on this
approach, Ankara aims to “cleanse” all northeastern Syrian
territories held
by the People’s Protection Units, or the YPG. Yet this "break
and dent" strategy is futile, and the Mahkmour refugee camp in
Iraq, set up by Turkish Kurds banished from their native villages more
than two decades ago, is an example of its futility.
On Dec.
13, a day after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced plans for a
military operation east of the Euphrates in Syria, Turkish jets targeted
Sinjar and Makhmour in Iraq. According to Ankara,
the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) — considered a terrorist
organization by Turkey and much of the international community — is using
the Makhmour camp as a base. Officials of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the dominant political
force in Iraqi Kurdistan, pointed out that UN rules require the camp to not
harbor armed elements.
The camp is hardly an ordinary camp. Discussing its links
with the PKK is meaningless, for its residents are families who have lost
children fighting in PKK ranks. Armed units have taken up positions in self-defense
in the area to protect residents from the Islamic State (IS). The Makhmour camp
is essentially a lab demonstrating the failure of Turkey's
security-centered policies.
More than 12,000 Kurds live in the camp, located on a slope
of the Qarachokh Mountains. How they ended up there is a long and tragic story, which began in the
'90s, when Turkey emptied 4,000 Kurdish villages as part of a military
campaign to “root out” the PKK.
The story of Sakir Tong, a 37-year-old resident of the
camp, is more or less the story of the camp itself. In an interview with
Al-Monitor, the father of six, who makes a living as a construction worker in
Erbil and Sulaimaniyah, recounted how his family fled their village in 1993 and
crossed into Iraq.
Tong was born in 1981 in southeastern Turkey, in the small
village of Isikveren, known as Bileh in Kurdish, located a stone’s throw
from Uludere and the Iraqi border. In the early '90s, the Turkish government
escalated its extrajudicial killings of PKK members and sympathizers in
the region. During that period, the PKK raided a military outpost in the
nearby village of Tasdelen, which marked the onset of a harsh government
crackdown, Tong recounted.
The Turkish government “branded everyone terrorists,” he
continued. “The road to Uludere was already closed for a year. We were meeting
our needs from Zakho [in Iraqi Kurdistan]. The villages were shelled almost
every night. We could not sleep and people got killed. Once a week, they would
surround our village and search the houses for [PKK] guerrillas.”
The villagers, Tong said, came under pressure to join the
village guard, a government-armed militia backing the army against the PKK.
“They would keep people out in the snow and torture them. ‘You’ll choose either
the mountain or the state,’ they would press. When the villagers refused to
join the village guard, they said, ‘Then you go away.’ The village had 75
households, and all of them, except seven or eight, fled in September 1993.
Bileh was the first village to be emptied,” he said, adding that other villages
shared the same fate the following year.
The villagers went to Zakho across the border, where two
camps were set up to harbor them, with the United Nations providing aid, Tong
said. The refugees, he explained, had to move four more times until May 1998,
when they settled outside Makhmour, a town 62 miles south of Erbil.
The location of the camp in Makhmour was not without
reason. Turkey did not want the refugees near the border because it believed
they would abet the PKK. The Kurdistan Democratic Party also saw the
refugees as an extension of the PKK. The refugees then moved southward, toward Makhmour,
out of the control of Iraqi Kurdistan but still within the boundaries of the
US-enforced no-fly zone, which protected the Kurds from Saddam
Hussein. In short, the place was a buffer zone. The UN High
Commissioner for Refugees, which had already granted the group refugee status,
was responsible for running the camp. Provisions came to the camp as part of
the UN Oil for Food program. In 2011, the aid was reduced before being
terminated in 2013. The Iraqi government began sending monthly flour supplies.
That assistance was scaled down to once every three or four months in the wake
of Iraqi Kurdistan’s independence referendum in 2017. Apart from that,
charitable people continue to provide food and fuel to the refugees.
The residents of the camp, which once resembled a prison,
established committees to deal with all their affairs. Thus, the “democratic
self-rule” promoted by the Kurdish movement was for the first time put into
practice here, rather spontaneously and under the strain of harsh
conditions. The camp is run by the following entitites: a local
administration based on neighborhood assemblies; a popular assembly
selected every two years; a three-member council selected by the
assembly; and an executive body. In other words, Makhmour became a
pilot scheme for democratic self-rule, even before the effort in
Rojava in Syria.
According to information Al-Monitor obtained from the
Makhmour administration, nearly 3,000 pupils attend four kindergartens, five
primary schools, a secondary school and a high school built by the UN. Their
diplomas are certified by the Iraqi Ministry of Education. Textbooks from
Turkey are used in the curriculum. Volunteers from the camp serve as teachers.
Those who wish to pursue higher education go to universities in Erbil,
Sulaimaniyah and Dahuk. Graduates of medical schools work in the camp’s
hospital, replacing the doctors appointed by Baghdad. The imams of the two
mosques are also from the camp.
The Makhmour camp came under the spotlight when
Ankara expressed its desire to open up peace talks with the Kurds. In a gesture of support for
the peace process, a 34-strong group, including PKK militants from the Qandil
Mountains and residents of the Makhmour camp, crossed to Turkey from Iraq in
October 2009. The gesture, which was coordinated with Ankara, backfired and
seven members of the group were eventually sent to prison on charges of
affiliation with the PKK. The incident showed how risky the way
back home could be, even with a greenlight from Ankara.
Among the camp's residents, only about 20 elderly people
hold Turkish passports. They managed to renew their ID cards during trips
to Turkey, before the peace process collapsed in 2015. Without a passport,
a series of bureaucratic and legal procedures become impossible for camp
residents. The camp residents received three-year residence papers from
the Iraqi government in 2013, but the documents have yet to be renewed. Many
work on construction sites in Kurdistan, while others raise livestock.
When it comes to the issue of armed men in the camp, the
PKK sent guerrillas from Qandil to help rescue the camp after it was captured
by IS, along with the town of Makhmour, in August 2014. The camp’s liberation
was followed by the creation of a 300-strong self-defense force, and the PKK
took defense positions in the mountain pass. The UN, which closed its
office at the entrance of the camp in 2014, is now under pressure from Ankara
to crack down on the camp. Ankara argues that the camp has been taken over by
terrorists.
According to Tong, Turkey’s Dec. 13 air raid hit a farming
area adjacent to houses, killing a 14-year-old girl and three women, among them
a woman in her 70s. “About 75% of camp residents are women and
children," Tong said. "All people here are relatives. There is
great pain and anger.”
Tong added that military officials came from Makhmour to
examine the damage. “They promised protection and went away," he
said. "UN officials are coming every other day and saying they will
reopen the office. There is indignation toward the UN for doing nothing.”
According to Tong, “The guerrillas came in 2014, but they
left in 2016. Camp residents are now maintaining the security. People aged 18
to 60 are keeping watch, including women without children.”
The round-the-clock watch in the camp stems from fears that
IS might return. “Daesh is still active in the Gani Hazali area, which is 3
kilometers from the camp,” Tong said, using the Arabic acronym for the jihadi
group. “The US forces occasionally bomb Daesh targets. In 2016, Daesh
attacked again, killing two people. The Daesh threat is not over.”
The Makhmour camp holds a mirror to Ankara's failed Kurdish
policies. In pursuing the break-up of the Kurdish regions in northern
Syria, Ankara will reach yet another dead end.
Author:
Fehim Tastekin
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