TURKEY: Kurdish plans to set up their own state in northern Iraq risk a Turkish military response, reports Michael Jansen
In northern Iraq, Kurdish hopes may be high. In Turkey, however, there is a stated determination that the same hopes will not be realised.
Prior to Friday's historic meeting of the Kurdish parliament in northern Iraq, the Turkish Prime Minister, Mr Bulent Ecevit, warned that Ankara would "intervene with all its weight" if the Kurds attempted to transform their regional assembly into "a state parliament".
Ankara is not reassured by Iraqi Kurd claims that they are seeking to establish an "autonomous" region in a federated Iraq rather than an independent state. Ankara considers the very existence of any Kurdish governmental institutions in the US-protected Kurdish area of northern Iraq as a threat to its own internal security
Indeed, Turkey regards Iraqi Kurdish autonomy as more threatening than full-scale independence.
Once the Iraqi Kurds have achieved autonomy, Turkey's own Kurds, who fought a protracted separatist war with Ankara, could be exepected to demand self-rule within the Turkish republic.
This is the main reason Ankara refused for 80 years to permit its own Kurds, who account for 20 per cent of the population, to educate their children in Kurdish and listen to Kurdish-language radio and television broadcasts.
Under strong European Union pressure, these rights were grudgingly granted this summer.
But this did not change the Turkish official and popular mind-set. One of Turkey's leading analysts, Mehmet Ali Birand, made the point in a commentary published on Friday in the Turkish Daily News that Turks suffer "from a division paranoia" and put all Kurds into the same basket - Turkey's defeated Kurdish rebels, its legal Kurdish political parties and Iraq's Kurds.
By speaking of a federal Iraq, the Kurds have adopted the very same route to separatism the Turkish Cypriots, under Ankara's guidance, took in 1975 when they split the Mediterranean island and set up their own state of Northern Cyprus, as yet recognised by none bar Ankara.
The Iraqi Kurds who want autonomy for their part of northern Iraq in any post-war situation have included in their area the oil city of Kirkuk.
Both Mr Ecevit and senior Turkish army officers have repeatedly said Turkey would use force to prevent the Kurds from taking over either Kirkuk or Mosul, to which Ankara has Ottoman era claims.
Baghdad has also rejected the federal constitution approved by both the main Kurdish factions, the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.