Kurdistan – A Marxist-Leninist Framework Part Two
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Dedication to Garbis Altinoglu
While this work - Part Two Theses on Kurdistan - was being completed, the sad news came of the death of Garbis Altinoglu, a veteran Marxist-Leninist. He died as an exile in Antwerp in October 2019. We dedicate this work to his memory.
Garbis was born an Armenian. He became closely associated with the revolutionary movement of Turkey. His career began as a follower of Mao. After close scrutiny he became aware of Hoxha and the Albanian struggle against Soviet revisionism. Garbis became an anti-revisionist of Hoxhaite persuasion. Coming to fascist military attention, he was imprisoned ten years of prison.
Garbis was taken under custody on December 31st, 1981 in Istanbul, where he was subjected to various torture methods for more than a month. Later he was taken to the city of Maraş, i.e. to the infamous torture chambers in the Maraş prison. There he spent an entire week inside of a then-newly invented torture device called “the turtle cage” as its very first subject. When he was taken out of the cage in which he could not move any of his muscles, he had become hunchbacked and was almost unable to walk. Such details have come to the surface a few years later via the confessions of a police officer who participated in the torture sessions. Garbis was sent from one prison to another upon custody. During and after every transfer to a new prison during his detention, he was subjected to lethal tortures and cell confinements. Between 1982-1983, he almost died due to severe tortures in the L-Type-Prison in Antep. The prison administration was obliged to airlift him to the Adana Cukurova University Hospital upon verdict. After receiving a long-term treatment there, he had once again narrowly escaped death.
After a while, he was transferred to the Sinop Prison, a city in the north coast of the country. In 1987, he spent 204 days in the underground cells that were infamously called “prison inside the prison”. These cells were pitch-dark, completely closed and freezing-cold in winter with the extreme humidity of the coastal climate. His lawyer was able to visit him occasionally, therefore these inhumane conditions were brought to the public attention via media coverage with his lawyer’s help. Subsequently, there was a national and international awareness campaign with the name “the prisoner who shared his bread with rats”, through which Garbis’ name became known to the Western European revolutionary and democratically minded people.
He withstood torture inside the Turkish fascist jails. He went on to play important roles in welding a Marxist-Leninist unity in Turkey. Although the latter part of his life was spent in exile in Belgium, he remained active and important in Turkish movements.
Dedicating this work to Garbis is particularly fitting since his pithy analyses of Turkey, are fundamental to this Part Two. He had closely read and corrected some historical errors in the draft of Theses Part One. His death preceded the completion of Part Two, which would have benefited from his vigilant eye. However – that was not to be. Nonetheless Part Two incorporates Altinoglu’s analysis of Turkey and the war, the establishment of the Safe Havens, and the disruptive role of the PKK in Turkish revolutionary politics. We believe that he would have agreed on the essential points in this report. Moreover, he would approved of the intent – to provide progressives and Marxists with a clear history of these complex recent events in the Middle East. Altinoglu’s life will be more fully commemorated elsewhere. Many of his articles are already on the Alliance web-site, and are referenced extensively in this work. For posterity, a page of Garbis Alintoglu articles has been placed on the Marxist Internet Archive, eventually that will archive all his available English translated works.
Preface
1. Summary of the Major Relevant Parties in Iraq and the Kurdish Movement
The intersection of the four countries of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, lies in Kurdistan. As Kurdistan is within these borders, all these must be considered, in any sensible work on the Kurdish national movements. Iran and the Mahabad Republic, in relation to the Kurds, were discussed in Part One. Here in Part Two, we will focus upon Iraq and Turkey, highlighting history relevant to the Kurdish national movement. Part Three will focus upon Syria.
In assessing the Kurdish struggles, it is impossible to avoid the details of what now makes up the entire Middle East battle-ground. This term - ‘battle-ground’ - is not hyperbole. For the Middle East now embroils both major imperialists (USA, Russia), and the hitherto client states. The latter are now capable of exerting their own agency to varying extents. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Gulf States, Turkey – while generally subservient to a dominant state (For most of these it is the USA, or in the case of Iran and Syria, it is a co-equal status with Russia) – also have their own separate interests that they pursue. Disentangling these knots is difficult. Hence any history of modern day Kurdish struggles – appears to drown in details of the “Middle East”.
We saw in Part One of this work, that the years up to 1946 were bitter for Kurds. But they were to be no less bitter, in the remainder of the 20th century. The prior era set the Ottoman, Russian Imperial and British Empires upon the Kurds. But after World War II, the full weight of the even more rapacious USA was laid on the Kurds. The Kurdish people died amidst a tragic and repetitive cycle of massacres such as Halabja, neglect, and betrayed promises. Even after the Kurds obtained a semblance of a ‘homeland’ – in the so-called Safe Havens, with USA aid – they were not secure. For the Kurdish national movements then became trapped in the Muslim sectarian, fundamentalist strife. Truly the Kurds were in the cockpit of the Middle East.
Who were the Kurdish leaders in this often-burning cockpit? Tragically, they were not up to countering the imperialist forces at play. Each of the three main parties of the Kurds, served comprador positions for various imperialisms, mainly that of the USA. Furthermore, each had serious problems. Despite tempering of the completely feudal character of the Kurdish chiefs, old feudal social ties dominated, in the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). In Part One, we have already briefly discussed the KDP and PUK, but here we expand on their shabby history.
Finally, the third leading Kurdish party, the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK), fell into an early opportunism, and then most recently plunged into anarcho-naivete. In the final part here, of Part Two, we discuss the early history of the PKK. This is a preface to the episode of the Rojava Republic in Syria. The Syrian Civil War and the most recent events in Iraq will be separately covered in a third and final part. Suffice a summary statement for now, that in Syria the Kurdish protagonists came to be the warriors for USA imperialism, yet again. This time in conflict with the rawest and most extreme Islamic fundamentalism.
Marxist-Leninists will see in this saga of the Kurds, the utter futility of relying on imperialism to obtain justice – or even nationhood. This is quite in keeping with the classics of Marxism-Leninism. But reciting these is not adequate. We prefer to show from the historical facts, that these classics are completely relevant today.
But, in order to do this, requires detail. Following the current-day contending fundamentalisms in the Middle East is bewildering. Especially, without a grounding in the history of Iraq. We argue that events in Syria today, can only be understood after first discussing Iraq between 1920-2003. We acknowledge that describing this adds both length and detail. Moreover, the Kurdish question itself, may seem at times to become drowned in a plethora of other Middle Eastern questions.
Nonetheless, in a Marxist-Leninist history of the Kurdish struggle, evaluating Iraqi history is necessary, for four reasons.
Firstly, Kurdish people and fighters died in their masses in Iraq, yet failed to establish a homeland. Only after the intervention of USA imperialism in the 201st century did a foothold of a nation get established.
What accounts for this failure, and the long and unremitting tragedy?
Further, once the Kurdish Safe Havens and the Kurdish Regional Governments were established, with USA imperialist assistance, did that help the Kurdish people?
What bargains with the USA did the Kurdish Regional Governments make, and how did they fit into the plans of USA imperialism?
Secondly, The USA led invasion on Iraq was the ground where the ambitions of the dominant USA imperialists and their sub-imperial agents played out.
What was their intent in physically entering Iraq?
How and why did they inflame the sectarian antagonisms latent within the Iraqi people? In a post-war Iraq, why did a resurgent Turkish state repeatedly try to shove its way in, clutching “their Ottoman history”, to renew their repressions of Kurds?
Finally, did the USA achieve its goals and ambitions?
thirdly, the Kurdish story is bound up with the story of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), which carries important lessons on national liberation struggle.
Why could the ICP not ‘solve’ the Kurdish national problem, through solving the massive class contradictions in Iraq?
What were the failures of the ICP?
Finally, as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, all pointed out that nations both come into being and die. Iraq is a dramatic example. An astonishing feature of the Iraqi position of the Kurdish saga, is the Iraqi national history. Even though “Iraq” was a fiction of convenience to British imperialism, an Iraqi consciousness arose. It was first seen even under the comprador monarchy established by the British. For it formed the background of the struggles of the Iraqi CP. The Saddam Hussein era, brutal as it was – did further weld a common ‘national’ consciousness. Even more recent events firmly reinforce an ‘Iraqi’ view.
After the intense sectarian fire-storms set after the 2003 imperialist invasion of Iraq; the Iranian had effectively taken control of the Iraqi shell of a state. Iraq was now a neo-colony of Iran. But - a non-sectarian ‘Iraqi’ nationalism is reasserting itself.
How else can the events of November-December 2019 in Baghdad be viewed:
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In light of this, does a purely Kurdish national entity still have relevance?
All this must be considered in a relevant history of the Iraqi dimensions of the Kurdish struggle. If this then also becomes a synopsis of the history of the ICP, this is not a bad thing. The story of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP). is a potent reminder that revisionism carries consequences. In 1963, an Iraqi revolution was essentially destroyed and sabotaged. This failure ultimately led to Saddam Hussein’s fascist state. Understanding the revisionism of the ICP, and what mistaken paths it took, and their consequences – is not idle academicism. While several histories events relate the Kurdish saga, we are not aware of any Marxist-Leninist analysis coupled to examining the failures of the ICP.
Iraqi history is like any other - complex, and requires dissection. To do this, we will start from the rise and fall of the British comprador Iraqi Monarchy. One critical question is:
‘how did British imperialism weld a tribal based comprador class?’ The class war on behalf of the urban and rural proletarians - the mud-hut dwellers (shargiwiyyas) and landless peasants, during this time - was led by a bold ICP. We examine why the ICP failed. This inevitably leads us to the attitude of the ICP to Iraqi nationalists and pan-Arabism. During this period the seeds were sown of the rise of the Ba’th state of Saddam Hussein.
We end the history of Iraq with the wars of the USA imperialists against their ex-comprador, Saddam Hussein. Previously we discussed and condemned the Iraqi wars led by the USA coalition of imperialists. But here, since the social rubble of the Iraqi wars forms our current landscape, we examine the post-war descent of Iraq into civil war. The Safe Havens established by the USA for the Kurds became an embryo ‘nation’. But it was far from secure, in the middle of the post-war sectarian strife – and with Turkey hovering at its Northern edge.
We also discuss in a little detail, Turkey. Naturally Turkish ruling class maneuvers were just as complex as in Iraq. Erdogan’s Turkey viewed the so-called Safe Havens, as a grave threat. Indeed they became later the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). Turkey as a regional capitalist power, was long subservient to either USA or latterly, to the EU imperialists. This had developed the strong link to Israel. But Turkey under its military, and then civil fascist leaders – especially Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – nurtured dreams of re-acquiring former Ottoman territory and power. Hence the Turkish ruling class voiced unhappiness and opposition to the Kurdish infant state of the KRG.
Turkish ‘Ottomanite dreams’, insisted that Kurdistan was only a part of Turkey. To the Turkish state, Kurds were not an independent peoples worthy of independence. This was a sophisticated position of the Turkish ruling class. They denied any distinct status to the Kurds, even their name. ‘Kurds’ were simply re-labeled “mountain Turks”:
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Hence both recent Turkish history, and post-war Iraqi history - are necessary to understand events regarding Kurdish national aspirations. But this is a complex story. What anchors, can help to avoid drowning in the facts and waves of events? We propose there are three central anchors.
First: There are some who insist that in the Middle East, religious labels are the causes of events. We believe these ‘analysts’ are misled by superficial symptoms, they avoid probing to the underlying causes. Enver Hoxha, and his Party of Labour in Albania, had to confront Moslem reactionaries. It is worth noting his comments:
We Marxist-Leninists always understand clearly that religion is opium for the people. In no instance do we alter our view on this and we must not fall into the errors of “religious socialism”, etc. The Moslem religion is no different in this regard. Nevertheless, we see that at present the broad masses of the Moslem peoples in the Arab and other countries have risen or are rising in struggle against imperialism and neo-colonialism for their national and social liberation”.
Today, Marxist-Leninists and progressives should reject false charges that the ‘primary’ and ‘insoluble’ problems in Iraq or Syria, result from “Sunni and Shi’ia sectarianism”.
These antagonisms are real, but they are not the cause of modern events. For example in the post-Iraqi invasion civil war, these antagonisms were deliberately fanned in Iraq and later in Syria. The simplistic allegations made conveniently ignore several firebrands who lit sectarian violence for their own ends. Firstly the role of Saddam Hussein and the Assad family; and later George Bush and Paul Bremer. All deliberately ignited these sectarian fires.
We do not ignore the parties of the Shi’ia movement, and in Part 3 (forthcoming) the many-headed hydra of the Sunni fundamentalists. But they must be placed within the picture, they are not the whole picture. How they arose in Iraq is key to how they then engulfed Syria. It is very relevant that today in Iraq, a wide-spread unity of Shi’ia and Sunni are fighting against sectarian labels and the post-war order imposed. This was imposed by both the USA and Iran.
A very important second anchor, we believe, can be found in the principles of the national liberation struggle. Therefore the history of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) is entirely relevant. For there was no consistent understanding by the Iraqi CP (or that of Syria and Lebanon) of the revolutionary tasks in colonial and semi-colonial type countries.
The ICP fell repeatedly into one of two polar extreme errors, shuttling between them. These two errors were:
An ultra-leftist refusal to join a United Front with revolutionary elements of the national democratic bourgeoisie; and,
The complete sublimation of their Communist goals at the service of the national democratic bourgeoisie and refusing to lead that struggle.
Both these errors were performed by the ICP, which proved fatal to events in Iraq between 1924-1963. They led to the massacres of the best elements of the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples. A substantial ICP had once exerted considerable influence, but it was destroyed before the Ba’thist state take over following the 1963 coup. After this the ICP was largely physically destroyed as a major functioning force. It is likely that the lack of a principled Kurdish leadership might have been solved through a strong Marxist-Leninist presence. As it was, the ICP was unable to assist the Kurds in solving the national problem.
The reader can likely guess the ending of this article. Undoubtedly the presence of a solid Marxist-Leninist party in Iraq or any of the four countries encircling Kurdistan, would have benefited the Kurdish people. But there was no effective communist party in the Middle Eastern cockpit. This is not to deny the intense sacrifice and heroism of many of its leaders, or that of the masses. Nor do we minimize the difficulty of finding the correct path in the heat of the battles.
To follow the contours of Iraqi struggles, the ICP must be considered in detail. One guide is the fascinating account of Hanna Batatu in two separate books, one on Iraq and one on Syria 3. We do not eschew other sources, but these two sources are illuminating. Both books resonate with Batatu’s sympathy for the masses, and shargiwiyyas (the ‘easterners’ of Baghdad, the mudhut dwellers). He was not a Marxist-Leninist. But he does locate the vacillations in the ICP.
As well as the ICP, the Ba’th Party must be considered in detail. Again, Enver Hoxha closely followed events in the Middle East. He offered this:
“A somewhat more advanced and revolutionary uprising against the monarchy took place in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq in 1958. It ended with the killing of King Faisal and his prime minister Nuri Said. The ‘communists’ took power there together with General Qaseem, a representative of the liberal officers. Only five years after however, in 1963, there was a coup d’état and Qaseem was executed. He was replaced by another officer, Colonel Aref. In 1968 General Al-Bakr came to the head of the state and the Baath party, a party of the reactionary feudal and comprador bourgeoisie, returned to power.“
Hoxha’s parade of Iraqi Generals, is revealing. But it misses adequate detail on the Ba’th. This is forgivable in a summary. But in fact the Ba’th Party went through several phases. Fuller analysis shows that the Ba’th displayed quite different class characteristics at different times. We show this in Part 2, but it is explored more fully in the Syrian development of the Ba’th Part 3 (forthcoming).
Discussing the Ba’th, means to confront Pan-Arabism. We note that communist Parties did not confront Pan-Arabism, only when Michel ‘Aflaq raised the issue. ‘AFlaq started the Ba’th Party in Syria in the 1930s. But Marxist-Leninists first met an earlier version of Pan-Arabism as first raised by Sultan-Galiyev, in the USSR. This was reviewed by W.B.Bland. 4 The essential tenets of Sultan-Galyev-ism were:
“A belief that Muslim people are ‘proletarian peoples’, so that national movements among them are movements of socialist revolution”, and that “in areas inhabited by Muslims, the Communist party ‘must integrate with Islam”. These were coupled with Sultan Galiyev’s wish of a “pan-Turanian ambition… to create a cast Tartar-Turkish state stretching from the Volga over Central Asia”.
Pan-Arabism was rejected by the communists of the CPSU(B) in the 1920s. Even so, it retained appeal to some democratic forces in Syria, Iraq and Egypt. The ICP however, never developed a consistent Marxist-Leninist relationship to pan-Arabism. This reflects its vacillations on the approach to the national democratic revolution.
The third anchor to steady us in the details, is the strategic aim of the USA.
The ever-present interference and provocations of the imperialist powers from the Sykes-Picot Agreement onwards, made their calculations imperative. The Rogers Plan of 1970 was the prelude to a major shift in the Middle East, whereby the USA would wean over client states away from the USSR. But it was in 1979, that many USA plans came together. For example, finally installing Saddam Hussein into sole power in 1979, was USA work. The USA came to this, because of the removal by the masses of the Shah of Iran, and the emergence of Iran as an anti-Western theocracy. This change of guard, blew a blast that surged through the Middle East, making 1979 a pivotal year.
Another example is the invasion of Iraq to then remove Saddam Hussein, in 2003. Simply put, the USA wanted to redraw the Middle East map, dating from the First World War imperialists. The new USA ambition aimed at no less, than a so-called “New Middle East”, which was casually revealed by 2006 Secretary of State, Condolezza Rice:
“What we’re seeing here [in regards to the destruction of Lebanon amidst Israeli attacks on Lebanon], in a sense, is the growing—the ‘birth pangs’—of a ‘New Middle East’ and whatever we do, we [United States] have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the New Middle East [and] not going back to the old one.” 6
This plan matured, before, during and after the invasion of the USA imperialist led the infamous “Coalition of the Willing” into Iraq. The USA and their long-time partners Israel and Saudi Arabia, tried to re-draw the map of the Middle East to their own favour.
Some progressives minimize or deny this aspect of the Gulf Wars, that culminated in the 2003 invasion. For example, Muhammed Idress Ahmad proposes a narrower neo-conservative game. He argues that the Israeli state ‘played’ the US state. 7 But this makes the tail wag the dog. Undeniably the Israeli state manipulated sections of USA leadership (and does today). But this manipulation was never unknowingly, or simply
‘accepted’ by the USA ruling class. The USA ruling class was never ‘played’. The dice were always played loaded to the benefit of the USA.
Perhaps, at the start of the Iraqi wars, the end-game was not entirely clear to the USA ruling class itself. However the strategy of “re-drawing the map” of the Middle East quickly emerged. Whether this was a pre-planned deliberate policy, or whether it evolved out of a mix of incompetence, some imperial insights of a ‘divide and rule’ mentality, or sheer inability to control events, will continue to be debated.
At the very least, USA role in reigniting sectarianism cannot be denied. It was this that would put Iraq into a deep civil war. It is entirely possible that the full extent of the demons this USA policy would raise were not understood. However in due course, the demons emerged as ISIS. This is all reminiscent of the fueling of the Afghanistan Taliban by the USA. Then the USA used the Taliban as a spear against the revisionist USSR.
How did the USA operationalize its strategy? How after the USA led invasions of Iraq, and the fall of Saddam Hussein, did the USA inflame sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shi’ia in Iraq?
Even more pertinently, did the USA succeed in its strategic aims?
For the USA - as for the earlier Vietnam war – Iraq was a failure.
In fact the USA was forced by its weakness, to cede Iraq as a neo-colony to Iran.
This debacle for the USA evolved as the civil war in Iraq became too intense to allow the USA to remain so visible an occupying force.
Iran also wished to splinter the Iraqi state. But ultimately Iran saw a virtue in retaining single state, within which shell all meaningful power was exerted by the Shi’ia compradors it had nurtured.
Moreover, the USA had raised the demons of fundamentalism which rebounded on Western imperialist countries.
Finally, the USA saw the renewed influence of the Russian state.
In fact however it maneuvered, the USA could not win the sole imperial authority it desired in the Middle East. This remains so now.
Understanding this context, makes ‘sense’ of the subsequent sordid war of the Assad fascists upon the Syrian revolution. In this, the nascent Syrian revolutionary movement from below, was first marginalized, then butchered. As the medieval reactionary fundamentalists were deliberately enabled by outside imperialists, they swarmed and suppressed the revolutionaries. In fact as we show, they were first set on their way by sectarianism in Iraq in the post-invasion period. Thereafter, the Syrian state released imprisoned fundamentalists into the fermenting violence, to attack the Syrian anti-Assad revolutionaries.
Into this maelstrom, were drawn inexorably, other contending powers.
Both Turkey and Iran had already been drawn into the Iraqi civil war.
But now into the Syrian mess would enter a newly resurgent, revanchist Putin-ite Russia. We cover the Syrian revolutionary civil war in Part 3.
The final somber conclusion for Marxist-Leninists, is that unless there are united communist parties free of revisionism, the peoples of Iraq, Kurdistan, Iran, Syria and Lebanon - will not be able to resolve their anguish. The formation of these parties is an urgent task.
https://ml-today.com/2020/01/01/kurdistan-a-marxist-leninist-framework-part-two/
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