Turkey seeks to abolish Kurds’ existence: Expert

Press TV has interviewed James Petras, a Middle East expert in New York, about Turkey imposing a curfew in a region in the southeastern province of Sirnak as Ankara goes on with its operation against militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Turkey claiming 660 PKK militants killed but perhaps there is a lot more civilians who have been killed based on some reports. Are we looking at Kurdish extermination by Turkey?  

Petras: Well I think this has been going on for a long time. There have been tens of thousands of Kurds that have been killed over the past decades. This is a continuation of the effort by the Turkish state to completely ethnic purge of the Kurds as any representation other than the Turkish language, the Turkish culture, the Turkish history. I think it is an attempt to abolish the existence of the Kurds as an identity.

The victories of the Kurds in Iraq, in Syria is seen by the Turks as a very harmful example for the Kurds in Turkey. The fact that the Kurds have established autonomous self-governments in Syria and Iraq is seen by the Turks as some kind of moral threat. Of course it is if you have a conception of Turkey as a homogeneous entity but I think that goes against the realities, the realities which spelled out the initial effort by Erdogan to arrange some kind of settlement and now he is going back to more primitive view of the relationship between Turkey and its minorities.  

As you remember, it has a very notorious record, the genocide of the Armenians represents the ideal for the Turkish regime as it exists today and I think that is an impossible reality, you cannot go back to the 20s. I think that this is going to lead to a violent explosion. I think sooner or later the Turkish armed forces will cross the border and engage the Kurds and then of course the Russians and of course the Syrians in a general conflagration unless the NATO powers put some controls and that does not seem to be the case.

I think today Merkel is lining up with the Turkish regime, its call for a border region.  A no-fly border region is really a signal for Turkish control and patrolling of northern Syria and that is totally unacceptable to the major players in the region.  

Press TV: So you think that Germany has sided with Turkey and you think that Turkey is going to get engaged with Russia? That is how you are projecting this?

Petras: Well I think that the Turks are assuming that the Russians will abide by whatever Merkel says. I think this is a calculation that is misplaced. I think in particular circumstances Russia is not going to tolerate a territory in which ISIS (Daesh) and the terrorists can operate, particularly in light of the ISIS terrorism that has taken place recently in Russia, in particular in Dagestan just a couple days ago.

They see the Turkish sanctuary for ISIS as a trampoline for training, arming and orienting Islamic terrorists to attack Russia and I think that is totally unacceptable and Merkel should understand that but apparently she is overwhelmed by the domestic problem of the refugees, she has no answer to the critics in the country, so she has to find a distraction which is to side with Turkey in the hopes that this will prevent the refugees from coming across the border.

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