Lecture touches on Kurdish issues

Turkey's decision not to assist the United States in military campaigns against Iraq in 2003 echoed a similar course of action taken by Turkey in the colonial period, said Robert Olson, University of Kentucky professor of Middle Eastern history and politics, in a lecture Friday night.\nOlson, delivering the fifth annual Wadie Jwaideh Lecture in Arabic and Islamic Studies, gave a talk titled "Parallel History and Diplomacy: Turkey's Position Toward the Kurdish Question in 1925 and 2003" in the Dogwood Room of the Indiana Memorial Union.\nTurkey was involved in a conflict with the British Empire in 1925 over control of the province of Mosul, in today's northern Iraq. Control over local oil fields has long been considered the root cause of this conflict. However, Olson said nationalist sentiment among the native Kurdish population was perhaps more important to the decisions the Turkish government made.\n"Oil was an important issue but not as important as territorial concerns were to both the Turks and the British," he said. "The Turkish government was more interested in security with regards to the Kurdish population in the border region."\nUltimately, Turkey decided not to go to war with Britain over control of the province of Mosul and signed a treaty in 1926 that ceded the province to the British and established what is still, with minor modifications, the Turkish-Iraqi border.\nIn 2003, the Turkish government made a strikingly similar decision not to become involved militarily in Iraq, even though the threat of Kurdish nationalism was then much stronger.\n"In 2003, unlike in 1925, the Kurds of Iraq had, for all intents and purposes, attained independence," Olson said. "At the time, Turkey faced the challenges of both increased (Kurdish insurgent) activity in Turkey and heightened Kurdish nationalism in Iraq."\nOn this issue, the recently elected Islamic government was in rare agreement with the secularist military leadership.\n"The government had to consider its constituency. (At the same time, the armed forces feared intervention would prompt the Kurds of Iraq to assist the Kurds of Turkey in a war against the Turkish military and government," Olson said.\nIn the past several years, Turkey has begun a policy of economic engagement with Kurdish communities within Turkey and in neighboring countries in an attempt to spur economic development and thus limit nationalist-motivated violence, he said. However, given the unstable situation in Iraqi Kurdistan, the official U.S. policy of maintaining a united Iraq and the hostility of other regional governments to Kurdish independence, the effects of economic incentives may be minimal.\n"The adversaries of Kurdish nationalism are ever at the ready," Olson concluded.\nThe Wadie Jwaideh Lecture, sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures in memory of its founder and first chairman, brings scholars of Middle Eastern studies to speak at IU each year.\n"It is not a requirement that the topic relate to current events in the region, but with the Middle East, historical topics are usually relevant in some way," said John Walbridge, NELC chair and director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program.\n"This was a timely and important topic," said graduate student Christopher Bork. "It's an extremely important issue for the U.S. to consider in future planning for the region"