Three Kurds Murdered in Paris: Turkey-Kurd Conflict Heating Up?
Three female Kurdish activists were murdered in Paris last week.
The execution-style killings took place at a Kurdish information office on the quiet Rue Lafayette, near Paris’s Gare Du Nord. One of the three women, Sakine Cansiz, was a founder member of the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) movement, and a close associate of its jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan. The other two, Fidan Dogan and Leyla Soylemez, were activists in civilian movements supportive of the PKK.
These killings have shocked the Kurdish political world. This is the first time that Kurdish political figures have been targeted in Europe since the murder of four Kurdish nationalist leaders in a restaurant in Berlin in 1992 by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
The tragic murder of the three women activists is also the latest explosive indication that things are on the move for the Kurds. Too quickly for some, it would appear.
The Kurds seemed once to have been passed by in the geopolitics of the Middle East. The state borders that divided them looked set in stone, presided over by brutal and rock-solid dictatorial regimes.
The edifice of these regimes is now in ruins. And as Arab dictators fall to Islamist insurgencies and popular unrest, so the ambitions and national aspirations of the Kurds are returning once more to relevance and to the realm of the achievable. This is leading to political action — and reaction.
The investigation into the killings has begun, and Kurdish and Turkish media outlets are speculating as to the possible identity of the perpetrators. Many in the Kurdish nationalist movement believe Turkish far-right paramilitaries, possibly in cooperation with elements in the Turkish state, are most likely to have been responsible. Turkish officials, meanwhile, are seeking to portray the killings as the result of an “internal feud” within the PKK itself.
A third possibility cited by some analysts: the killings were carried out by an outside power with a reason to prevent any progress toward peace between Turks and Kurds. Syria and Iran have been mentioned as possible culprits in this regard. Both countries would stand to benefit from stirring up the conflict between Turks and Kurds, and both countries have a track record of using murders of this type as a tool of policy.
With the investigations into these killings just beginning, only speculation is possible regarding the likely perpetrators. More concrete conclusions, however, are possible regarding the political environment in which these killings took place.
January 2013 saw the surprising announcement of talks between imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan and a representative of the Turkish state — Hakan Fidan, head of the Turkish external intelligence service MIT. The talks came after a year of intensified PKK activity following the collapse of a ceasefire in 2011.
Ocalan and the Turkish representative, according to media reports, succeeded in reaching a series of understandings intended to launch a diplomatic process that would bring an end to the conflict between Turks and Kurds.
Whether or not these talks produce a resolution of the Turkish-Kurdish dispute, that they are happening at all is testimony to how much things have changed.
Kurds murdered in Paris…cinematographer Theo vanGogh slaughtered in Amsterdam….Catholics savaged in the Philippines…Ahmadiyya brutalized in Indonesia…infidels and Hindus blown up in Bali (twice)…rape epidemic in Sydney… journalist Daniel Pearl decapitated…Buddhists in Thailand routinely assassinated…Hindus and Sikhs ravaged in India…religious apartheid in the Maldives…Jews attacked in Mumbai/Toronto/Seattle/Caracas//Buenos Aires…gays, women, Zoroastrians, Christians & apostates subjugated in Iran…Chaldeans persecuted in Iraq…civilized humanity savaged in Afghanistan…
Jews threatened with extinction in Israel…Copts ravaged in Egypt…embassies attacked in Libya/Kenya/Tanzania…animists and Christians slaughtered in Sudan/Somalia/ Mali/Uganda…Christians mass murdered in Nigeria…train commuters blown up in Spain…tube commuters blown up in London…soldiers assassinated on a bus in Frankfurt…airport blown up in Scotland…Jews slaughtered in Munich Olympics…office workers blown up in New York (twice)…pedestrians in Times Square targeted…defense workers in Washington killed…recruiters in Little Rock gunned down…soldiers at Ft. Hood assassinated by a traitor…
All of these attacks have one thing in common….ISLAM….Muhammad’s sociopathic ideology of devolutionary hatred and violence.
By any objective standard this would be classified as a world war…in fact and truth that is what it is. But this isn’t a numerical world war like World War 1 or World War 2…no…this is THE ISLAMIC WORLD WAR.
THE ISLAMIC WORLD WAR….inspired by Allah, mandated by the anti-Christ Muhammed, commanded in the Koran…an existential conflict against all non-Islamic peoples and civilizations in very corner of the globe…Islamic intolerance, violence, terror and subjugation wherever the followers of Islam live…not for the advancement of human dignity and individual liberty but to force submission of the entire world to the anti-god Allah.
History shows that Islam is savage and relentless, and is only stopped when it is stopped. We must stop it.
THE ISLAMIC WORLD WAR – it’s real.
~ The Infidel Alliance
Our political an military leaders are lying to us….It’s not ‘The War on Terror.’
It’s an ideological war waged with guerrilla tactics on a global scale.
Our enemy is Islam.
The war is with Mecca.
It is THE ISLAMIC WORLD WAR.
Islamo delende est…..or we lose….
~ The Infidel Alliance
You forget the French convert to Islam with Al Qeada ties who shot up a Jewish school in France. Of course, “Islam had nothing to do with it” declared Sarkozi.
Crap, I missed it. I was wrong, you did cover it.
Why the surprise? All conflicts have an ending. All conflicts are based on different political goals. In today’s world, violence as a means of conflict resolution is not seen as legitimate in the civilized world. Moreover, using military force to impose one’s will on the other are mostly self defeating when one of the parties involved is a nonstate actor: It provides political legitimacy to the use of violence by the nonstate combatant. Turkey’s conflict with PKK is complex. Internally, PKK has evolved into a marxist leninist party representing the kurdish poor. Rich kurds vote for AKP. Thus, for domestic legitimacy PKK can no longer count on violent resistance. Poor kurds want what rich kurds have. Politics is the only means of achieving that. Externally, PKK represents tougher challenge for turkish governments. Externally, PKK is part of a kurdish national movement which aspires for international recognition of kurdish rights. Kurdish national movement is not uniform: it is riddled with linguistic, tribal and economic rivalries. Kurds of Syria speak mostly the same dialect as those in Turkey and western iraqi Kurdistan. Syrian kurds are not ideologically or economically a force in kurdish movement. Some ally with PKK, some with KRG and some with Baath. Bulk of PKK’s core cadre are old socialist turkish kurds. PKK’s guerilla force however are mostly from Syria, Iran and Iraq and europe. PKK thanks first and foremost to the US and then Iraqi kurds for the safe haven they provided. But, that is changing. The US has left Iraq so it does not need PKK to pester Iran, Turkey and Syria. When US left Iraqi kurds have rediscovered that they need turkey for access and protection. Again, that makes PKK presence in KRG area a difficult proposition. These days PKK is externally isolated. They opt for Erdogan+Barzani route to subsuming into BDP or look for a new patron. In the old days, Iran and Syria used to give them refuge and paid for it. These days there does not seem to be any takers for PKK. We’ll see.
So much for strict gun control laws in France. Had these women been better protected (either by being armed or by being with guards that were armed), maybe they would be alive today. If this does represent a new crime wave in France, they may want to re-think their objections to guns. But I doubt that will happen. This is not the first example of political assasinations being caused by Muslims or radical Islamists. The Iranians, especially, are famous for doing this in France. Well, I guess the French don’t mind seeing criminals killing people, rather than having their own citizens defend themselves. Pay attention, America. This is where we are headed.