Juan Cole - Not Just Ethnicity: Turkey v. Kurds and the Great Divide over Political Islam v. the Secular Left

By Dilip -
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Turkey’s incursion into Syria has roiled the Middle East and NATO countries, demonstrating one key polarizing divide on both sides of the Mediterranean. As far as I can tell, that divide is between supporters of political Islam and its opponents. By political Islam I mean movements like the Muslim Brotherhood that make Islam more than a matter of private worship and belief, seeking to turn it into a political ideology that aspires to come to power and rule a country. Political Islam in the Middle East is analogous to the Christian Right in the United States.

The Turkish invasion of northeast Syria began on Wednesday, with 14 said to be killed, 8 of them civilians, in heavy Turkish aerial and artillery bombardment of 6 Kurdish towns along a 290-mile stretch of the Syrian border with Turkey such as Tel Abyad. Thousands of Kurds were said to have fled their homes, heading south away from the border. Turkey’s president Tayyip Erdogan plans to occupy a swathe 30 miles deep and to send in large numbers of Sunni Arab Syrian refugees now living in Turkey, who had fled the government of Bashar al-Assad.

Although Turkish propaganda advertises that Ankara is returning displaced Syrians to their homes, it is doing no such thing. Turkey is displacing hundreds of thousands of indigenous Kurds and then stealing their land and homes and giving them to Sunni Arab refugees who were originally from elsewhere in Syria entirely. Erdogan seeks to establish a Sunni Arab buffer zone between the Syrian Kurds and the Turkish border. To the north of the Turkish border are millions of Turkish Kurds that Erdogan suspects of having separatist tendencies, and whom he is afraid the Syrian Kurds will infect with their Bookchinite leftist ideology and strong Kurdish nationalism.

Erdogan is behaving in Syria, in other words, precise as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had behaved in the significantly Kurdish province of Kirkuk, to which he brought in large numbers of Arab settlers from elsewhere so as to dilute Kurdish political claims. In both cases authoritarian leaders used ethnic cleansing and population displacement as a political tool...read more: 
https://www.juancole.com/2019/10/ethnicity-political-secular.html





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