An unusual new friendship

AN AUDIENCE of Turks and Kurds, gathered in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital, waited with bated breath as the Turkish consul-general took the stage. He was to address a gathering organised by followers of Turkey’s most powerful Sunni cleric, Fetullah Gulen, who has long preached friendship between Turks and Iraqi Kurds. During his short speech, the Turkish envoy, Huseyin Avni Botsali, uttered the word “Kurdish” only twice: a measure of how edgy Turkey still feels about the Iraqi Kurds’ autonomy and the impact it may have on its own 14m-odd Kurds. That is also why Mr Botsali is based in Mosul, a dangerous city in Arab Iraq, rather than in Erbil, in the safety of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Yet Mr Botsali’s public appearance before the Kurdish flag marks a shift in Turkey’s approach to Iraq’s Kurds. Until recently Turkish generals would mutter warnings about invading the Kurdish enclave “if need be” to strike rebels of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a group of Kurdish Turks who attack Turkey’s forces from bases in Iraqi Kurdistan. Iraq’s Kurds suspect that Turkey’s real plan is to end their 17-year-old experiment with self-rule.

Nowadays, even Turkey’s chief of the general staff, Ilker Basbug, admits that military might alone will not fix Turkey’s Kurdish problem. Turkish officials, who used to dismiss Iraq’s Kurdish leaders as “tribal upstarts”, privately concede that part of the solution is to co-opt Iraq’s Kurds. In the past year Turkish intelligence men and diplomats have held secret talks with Nechirvan Barzani, the Iraqi Kurdish region’s prime minister, to get the PKK to call off its fight, even as Turkish aircraft continue, with America’s blessing, to pound rebel strongholds near Iraq’s mountain border with Iran. One idea is that rebels untainted by violence might be coaxed home and their leaders offered cash inducements to move to any European country that would take them in. Turkey could perhaps then formalise ties with Iraqi Kurdistan, among other things by opening a consulate in Erbil.

That would make a virtue of necessity. The chamber of commerce of the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir in south-east Turkey reckons there are about 50,000 Turkish citizens and 1,200 Turkish companies based in Iraqi Kurdistan, doing trade worth some $7 billion a year.

America is lobbying both sides to mend fences, while nudging Iraq’s Kurds into squeezing the PKK. President Barack Obama has telephoned his Turkish counterpart, Abdullah Gul, to praise “the growing Turkish-Iraqi relationship”. Friendship with Turkey would enable Iraq’s Kurds to export their oil and gas and to check Iran’s influence in the region. It might even give the Iraqi Kurds a security umbrella once America leaves.

The last big sticking-point is the disputed oil-rich province of Kirkuk, which hosts a large minority of Turkmens, cousins of the Turks who settled there under the Ottoman empire. Turkey wants the Kurds to renounce their desire to incorporate it into their region—something they will not do in a hurry, if ever.
Economist