Even Allies Must Be Accountable

On March 16, 1988, the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabjah lost 6,000 of its inhabitants in a single day, the victims of an Iraqi bombardment with nerve gas and other poison agents. World condemnation of that attack was not lacking, and yet in real terms the attack cost Saddam Hussein, then as now Iraq’s leader, very little.

For the West and, above all, the United States, he was then a valued ally. In line with the adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Iraq, the enemy of Iran, was then the friend of the United States. The tilt to Iraq, begun during the Reagan Administration, continued, as abundant evidence now proves, during the Bush Administration.

Iraq has been a greater military menace than Iran, and in neutralizing this menace, the United States has few allies more important than Turkey.

Turkey provides a vital base for reconnaissance flights over northern Iraq. Scarcely less important, Turkey, which has a secular tradition unique in the Muslim world and is a member of NATO, provides a promising cultural and political alternative to the Turkic republics of Central Asia, all of which are being actively courted by Iran.

This being the case, it is dismaying to hear reports of Turkish atrocities against the Kurdish minority in eastern Turkey.

British and other Western diplomats as well as the human rights monitoring group Helsinki Watch have reported the deaths of about 60 Kurdish civilians, including nine journalists. A recent victim was Musa Anter, 74, a Kurdish writer and newspaper commentator, gunned down Sept. 20 on a street in the city of Diyarbakir in Kurdish Turkey.

Tragically, Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, whose territory ethnic Kurdistan straddles, have all been willing on occasion to exploit Kurdish unrest to destabilize one another. It is by no means to be ruled out that some of Turkey’s Kurdish inhabitants are being used against Turkey by Syria or Iraq, and yet we find official U.S. silence on these deaths regrettable.

The history of Kurdish oppression within Turkey is undeniable. The long-term interests of the United States are never served by turning a blind eye to human rights abuses simply because they occur on an ally’s territory.