The “Huge” Difference Between Terrorism in Turkey and Hamas in the Middle East

The conflict between Palestine and Israel has been on the agenda of the whole world for a long long time.

Indeed there have been several wars in the region between the Jewish State and Arabs, to end with the victory of Israel.

Turkey on the other hand has been facing terrorism for the last few decades that has cost the country tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billlion dollars. Neither of said conflicts have come to an end and parties are still engaged and even more deeply.

Most recently as Turkey has started to get more involved in the political matters in the Middle East, to protect the rights of Palestinians like with the case of Blue Marmara incident (aid flotilla raided by Israeli soldiers), people have started making analogy between the situation with Israel and Hamas (considered to be a terrorist organization) and Turkey and PKK (outlawed terrorist organization which claims to be operating to protect and get the rights of the Kurds in Turkey.

On the surface one could see similarities between the two but when you get down to “IMPORTANT” details, there is a huge difference between the two. Then one could even say/think “They dont even come close”.

The prominent Turkish journalist Mustafa AKYOL has written a very striking and informative article about this issue. We believe when one reads said writing it would/should be impossible to put both cases in the same basket.

Editor
BUSINESS TURKEY TODAY

ARTICLE: Turkey vs PKK = Israel vs Hamas?
written by Mustafa aKYOL

Every time I write on Turkey’s war on terror against the PKK, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, some readers remind me of Israel’s war on Hamas. If I support Turkey’s right to defend itself, they ask, why do I have a problem with Israel’s defense? Some even sarcastically ask what I would have done if Israel had sent a “Free Kurdistan Flotilla” to Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast.

On a superficial level, I admit the parallelism: The PKK is a militant organization with popular support, and it uses terrorist tactics against Turkey. Hamas is another militant organization with popular support that has used terrorist tactics against Israel, which I certainly condemn. But a deeper analysis shows that there are actually huge differences between these two cases.

First, the nature of the conflicts is very different. According to U.N. Security Council decisions, Israel is an occupying force in the West Bank and Gaza, in which Hamas operates. Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast, however, is a part of Turkey’s internationally recognized borders. Turkey, in other words, is not an occupier in historical Kurdistan, unlike Israel is in actual Palestine. (It is also worthwhile to mention that Kurds joined modern Turkey willingly in 1923, as Kurdish parliamentarians in Ankara clearly expressed.)

Second, Turks and Kurds do not belong to two separate nations as Jews and Arabs do. Kurds used to be a part of the “Muslim nation” of the Ottoman Empire, and Republican Turkey partly preserved that bond created by a common religion. As a result, there are millions of Turko-Kurdish families in Turkey. Kurds are equal citizens and have the exact same rights as Turks with regards to public services. No wonder polls show that the overwhelming majority of Kurds wish to remain in Turkey and only ask for more recognition in varying degrees, from simple cultural rights to regional autonomy.

That is why, unlike Israel, which has struggled with a whole Palestinian nation, Turkey only fought with militant nationalists among the Kurds, the latest one being the PKK. Moreover, many Kurds have sided with the Turkish state against the PKK. Since the late 1980s, more than 70,000 “village guards” have been armed and employed by Ankara to help the counter-insurgency in the southeast. These are the Kurds who dislike the PKK for its totalitarian Marxist ideology and prefer to live under the Turkish government. (In return, the PKK condemned these village guards as “traitors” and killed not only many village guards but also massacred their whole families.)

What also matters is how the “war on terror” is conducted by Turkey and Israel. Here, admittedly, there has been a strong parallelism between the two: Both countries have been brutal. From Deir Yassin to Sabra and Shatila, from the bombings of Beirut and Gaza, Israel has a shameful history that its peaceniks and refuseniks commendably decry. Turkey, with its torture chambers, extrajudicial killings and forced expulsions has another shameful history that its liberals have always decried.

But, here is a crucial point: Although Israel remains very much the same (as evidenced in its 2009 war crimes in Gaza), Turkey has changed dramatically. Thanks to both the European Union accession process, and the more civil mindset of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, most human rights abuses are now a thing of the past. Torture, “state of emergency” and bans on Kurdish culture and language are all gone. (And they are also gone thanks to the defanging of the Turkish military, for which many Israeli politicians seem to have a heart.)

Hence the Turkey of today is not bombing downtown Diyarbakır or Arbil while targeting the PKK and takes great pains to avoid any “collateral damage.” That is really not the same thing with what the Israeli military does when it coldly kills several Palestinian children in order to take one Hamas militant down. We see the Kurds as our own people, after all. Many Israelis, however, seem to see the Palestinians as their enemy.

September 27, 2011 Mustafa Akyol SOURCE: HURRIYET DAILY NEWS