An exercise in disinformation: linking Kurds to NKR

by Yelena Osipova and Emil Sanamyan

Published: Saturday August 02, 2008

Background

Allegations linking Armenia to Kurdish political activism in Turkey are not new. Azerbaijan’s motivation for this is to win and maintain Turkey’s support and to position itself as fighting a “common enemy” in Karabakh.

Turkish nationalists, in turn, seek to portray the PKK as a non-Muslim and even anti-Muslim entity, appealing to religious and ethnic biases in the fight for the hearts and minds of Turkey’s Kurdish population.

In the early 1990s, frequent Turkish claims that Armenia provides support to PKK also helped build up an excuse for Turkey’s potential intervention in the Karabakh war on the side of the losing forces of Azerbaijan.

At one point in 1992, that campaign was inadvertently facilitated by Armenia’s own propaganda, which suggested, falsely, that the mostly ethnically Kurdish population of areas between Karabakh and Armenia proper welcomed Armenian forces as liberators. (Yezidi Kurds from Armenia proper were even reported to have been bused to Lachin for that purpose.)

In fact, by the 20th century, most of Azerbaijan’s ethnically Kurdish population was thoroughly Turkified and they now mostly self-­identify as Azerbaijanis.

Azerbaijan’s ethnic Kurds reportedly include such well-known characters as Azerbaijan’s late national leader Heydar Aliyev, as well as wartime chief of national police and local Grey Wolves franchise Iskender Hamidov, who famously promised to wipe out Yerevan and Stepanakert with two nuclear strikes.

First salvos

In August 2007, Yusuf Halaco?lu, head of the Turkish Historical Society, ultranationalist and Armenian Genocide denier, announced that his studies on the origins of Anatolian tribes showed many Kurds, particularly Kurdish Alevis, were originally Armenian. As events unfolded, Mr. Halaco?lu’s comment appeared to have been motivated primarily by politics.

In an interview with Uluslararas? Haber Dergisi in October 2007, Mr. Halaco?lu said many “people” who think they are Kurds may be mistaken, and the case is the same with “the terrorist groups who tried to be identified as Kurdish Alevis or Kurds.” (Incidentally, after 15 years at the helm of Turkish official historiography, Mr. Halaco?lu was replaced by the Turkish government this week.)

Somewhat unexpectedly, this line of reasoning was reflected in the remarks made by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an of Turkey during an official visit to  the United States in early November 2007.
After being questioned by an Armenian Embassy staff member on Turkey’s Armenia policy in a public meeting hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Mr. Erdo?an demurred on the need to distinguish the terrorists from the Kurdish population at large, saying, “In the terrorist organization [PKK], there are Kurds, Armenians, others.” (He said this even though no ethnic Armenian member of the PKK was ever identified dead or alive, at least in the last decade.)

More importantly, during his visit, Mr. Erdo?an and Turkey’s friends in the U.S. government, succeeded in having President George W. Bush declare the PKK to be America’s enemy.

“They are an enemy of Turkey, they are an enemy of Iraq, and they are an enemy of the United States,” Mr. Bush declared that November, while also authorizing U.S. forces in Iraq to assist Turkey in their attacks against the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Azerbaijan jumps in

On November 30 Zaman, a newspaper close to the Turkish government, quoted the Federation of Turkish-Azeri Associations’ Secretary General Mehmet Azeriturk as claiming, “Armenia is making an effort to bring PKK militants into the cities of ?u?a [Shushi], Lacin [Berdzor] and Fuzuli, to be able to keep these cities it has occupied.”

No reference was made as to where Mr. Azeriturk acquired that information. The Zaman article also said that Armenian officials have denied any such contacts with the PKK.

But just days later, Azerbaijan’s deputy foreign minister Araz Azimov, apparently citing the “Zaman report,” declared that Azerbaijan is ready to perform “counter-­terrorist” operations against PKK military units “positioned” in Karabakh.

Azerbaijan’s Zerkalo reported Mr. Azimov saying that the PKK’s presence in the occupied territories “shows the international community that we were right in our earlier statements [making the link between the PKK and Karabakh].” Armenians had always had a penchant for terrorists, he added.

The international echo

On December 11 the Azerbaijani allegations were promoted by the Russian journalist Aleksei Baliev. Writing for RPMonitor.ru, an online political journal, he compared “the Lachin corridor” linking Armenia and Karabakh to “Iraqi Kurdistan” as a safe haven for the PKK.

An Armenian Yezidi community leader had, earlier in December, endorsed the presidential candidacy of then-Prime Minister Serge Sargsian. Mr. Baliev linked this endorsement to Kurdish hopes for Armenia’s support for establishing “a Kurdish autonomy” in areas between Karabakh and Armenia proper.

(Although Mr. Tamoyan’s endorsement came in a joint press conference with a Jewish-­Armenian community leader, Rimma Varzhapetian, who also backed Mr. Sargsian, Mr. Baliyev did not suggest that the Jews of Armenia were also hoping to establish themselves in Lachin.)

The nonsensical nature of the argument did not stop Paul Goble, a former U.S. official now employed as research director for the Azerbaijani Academy of Diplomacy, from indirectly endorsing the claim in his personal blog the next day, suggesting that “the Kurdish initiative in Armenia provides those opposed to any settlement [over Karabakh] with yet another means to block it.”