Paul Goble
Vienna, November 2 – Russian observers and academics have filled newspapers and websites in Moscow with commentaries on the implications of a possible Turkish incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan, something that if it happens would resonate not only in the Middle East but in the southern Caucasus as well.
Now, an analyst has recalled Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s attempt to use the Kurds in the late 1940s, an implicit suggestion given the continuing role of Kurds in some post-Soviet states that other Russian analysts and perhaps some policy makers are prepared to draw upon it should the Turkish-Kurdish conflict heat up
In an essay posted online this week, historian Artur Bagirov describes the tangled history of Moscow’s involvement with the Kurds during World War II and in the last years of Stalin’s reign, an involvement that touched on Soviet relations with Turkey, Iran, Eastern Europe and the West (http://rpmonitor.ru/ru/detail_m.php?ID=6605).
Bagirov begins his article by noting that even though Turkey was never formally a satellite of Nazi Germany, the USSR viewed it as a potential opponent from June 1941 when Hitler signed a friendship treaty with Ankara and the Germans invaded the Soviet Union.
According to some sources, Bagirov says, Germany and Turkey agreed at that time that the latter would intervene in the war against the Soviet Union once Nazi forces approached the Transcaucasus and Caspian, and as a result, Stalin kept significant forces in the region to counter 26 to 28 Turkish divisions across the border.
In April 1945, just before the end of the war in Europe, Moscow denounced the 1931 Soviet-Turkish non-aggression pact that among other things ratified the borders between the two countries, thus setting the stage for Moscow to demand that Ankara “return” to the Soviet Union the territories it had seized during the Russian Civil War.
Stalin also demanded that Turkey agree to international control of the straits of the Bosphorous and Dardanelles and the transfer to Greece of the central and southern islands that had been part of an Italian colony. Ankara was not willing to meet either, and by the end of 1946, the two countries were moving toward an open military clash.
The Soviet Union placed 30 divisions opposite the Turkish border and opened naval bases in both Romania and Bulgaria in support of a possible strike against Turkey. At the same time, it slowed its withdrawal of forces from Northern Iran, and it marked “the 31st anniversary of the Turkish genocide of Armenians.”
Given British and American support for Turkey and pressure on Moscow to withdraw from Iran, Moscow arranged for Kurdish rebels with their leader Mustafa Barzani to cross into the Soviet Union in the spring of 1947, thus giving the USSR in Bagirov’s words “a new lever” against Turkey.
With their appearance on Soviet territory, the historian continues, Stalin assigned the development of “a new policy on the Kurdish question” to the leaders of Azerbaijan (Dzhafar Bagirov) where there had been an autonomous Kurdish district and of Uzbekistan (Usman Yusupov) to which many of the Kurds from abroad were sent.
In August 1947, Stalin told Yusupov to form the Kurdish emigres in his republic into military detachments for possible use in Turkey and Iran. And he directed to take steps to reestablish the Kurdish national district that had existed in his republic between 1922 and 1931.
Soviet secret services also established close contacts with the Kurdish partisans in Turkey, something that ultimately led to the formation of the PKK, and also with the anti-communist” party of Armenian nationalists, the Dashnaktsutyun” and its underground organizations in Turkey.
By the end of the year, Azerbaijan’s Bagirov proposed creating the new Kurdish autonomous region not in the place where it had been (the Lachin corridor) but rather in the northern portions of the Nakhichevan ASSR that borders both Armenia and Turkey.
Such a location, he said, would make it easier for Soviet-based Kurds to maintain and develop ties with Kurds in Turkey and could open the way to an extension of Soviet borders into Turkey if the Kurdish rebels there were successful in fighting the forces of Ankara.
(Curiously, and Bagirov the historian does not mention this, in the late 1980s, several Armenian samizdat writers suggested that reestablishing the Kurdish region in Lachin could be a means to resolving the conflict between Baku and Yerevan over Nagorno-Karabakh.)
Any plans Stalin may have had in this area, however, were checked by American and British support for Turkey, including the placement of military bases there and ultimately the inclusion of that country in NATO, steps that limited but did not stop Soviet interest in using the Kurds to further its interests.
After Stalin’s death in March 1953, the new Soviet leadership backed away from the Kurds, with Nikita Khrushchev at one point even apologizing to the Turks for what his predecessor had done when he got involved in the Kurdish issue. But if the Soviet government placed this project on hold, it never forgot it.
Not only did Moscow continue to maintain contacts with Kurdish radicals in the PKK, but it also exploited Azerbaijani interest in the issue. There were tens of thousands of Kurds in Azerbaijan in the late 1940s, and there are a minimum of 150,000 now, with many occupying key posts in Baku.
Among the most prominent of these, Bagirov says, are the head of the state oil company, the mayor of Baku, the head of the presidential security detail, the president of the state radio and television corporation, and the head of that country’s largest non-petroleum corporation, Azersun.
By pointedly linking what Stalin did 60 years ago with the situation today, Bagirov is clearly suggesting that if relations between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan deteriorate, Moscow has its own long-considered plan for what to do, one that could further destabilize the situation in Turkey and the Middle East.
Friday, November 2, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Is the FSB Assuming the Functions of the KGB’s Fifth Chief Directorate?
Paul Goble
Vienna, November 2 – The attempt by the FSB in Novosibirsk to have the election commission there ban anecdotes about Vladimir Putin as “illegal agitation activity,” a step that body refused to take, has sparked fears that some in the FSB want it to assume the functions of the KGB’s notorious Fifth Chief Directorate.
In an article posted online in Karelia today, Anatoliy Tsygankov, who writes frequently about the Russian security services, said that the FSB’s Department for the Defense of the Constitutional Order seems to want to harass opponents of the government much as the KGB’s Fifth Chief Directorate did at the end of Soviet times.
And while the regional FSB section was rebuffed in Novosibirsk, he continued, the fact that its officers tried to assume this role there should be “a warning sign for the entire country” because in some places, other officials are likely to defer to this power agency (http://www.politika-karelia.ru/cgi-bin/articles_print.cgi?id=1234).
Indeed, Tsygankov suggested, it was a matter of good fortune that “the chairman of the [Novosibirsk] oblast election commission did not forget in what time we are living” and basing his decision on existing Russian law, “refused to react to political anecdotes” in the way that the FSB hoped.
Were this the only example of the KGB’s efforts in this regard, there might be less cause for concern, but Tsygankov continued, the FSB is very much involved with “the current attack on the Constitution of Russia” in another way, through its sponsorship of those who want Putin to remain president in violation of Constitutional norms.
Putin himself “has asked them not to do this,” Tsygankov noted, but the FSB officers have continued to organize meetings, marches, appeals and other measures intended to keep the current Russian president in the Kremlin long after his legally permitted two terms.
Such contempt for the explicit provisions of the Russian Constitution and Russian laws by officers of the country’s largest security service with regard to this issue, Tsygankov suggested, inevitably leads to other and even more threatening actions, steps that recall some of the worst features of the Soviet past.
That such dangers are all too real now in turn is highlighted by three other reports this week. First, human rights officials have noted that some of the prisoners who took part in prison violence in recent months have died in unexplained and unexamined circumstances when Interior Ministry officials were moving them to distant prisons.
According to officials, such prisoners are simply being put in “neighboring” penitentiaries in order to better control them, but reports from the parents of those whose children have died in this process suggest the authorities are misrepresenting the situation, again in violation of the law (http://ikd.ru/node/4255).
To try to stop this violence, these human rights organizations have organized a public appeal demanding that the Interior Ministry and prison officials obey Russia’s laws and Constitution rather than assuming that because they represent the power of the state, they can act with impunity even to the point of killing those in their charge.
Second, the Moscow newspaper Gazeta reported yesterday that the Social Chamber’s Commission on Tolerance and Freedom of Conscience has prepared a pamphlet to guide militia officers in their dealings with members of religious groups (http://gzt.ru/society/2007/11/01/220201.html).
The guide, which is to be published in December in 100,000 copies, is designed for the officer on the beat, but whatever the good intentions behind it, both its specific injunctions and the reactions of Interior Ministry officials and activists to its provisions are cause for concern.
On the one hand, the pamphlet includes materials only on the four traditional faiths, thus implying that followers of others are not subject to its provisions, and it provides advice such as – “it is prohibited to take dogs into churches, mosques and synagogues” – that raises questions about how serious militiamen will take it.
And on the other, the reaction of Interior Ministry officials and religious rights activists suggest that this much ballyhooed pamphlet is unlikely to have any serious effect beyond propagandizing Moscow’s ostensibly good intentions in dealing with Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Jews and Buddhists.
Interior Ministry officials told “Gazeta” that they would act with regard to religious leaders just as they act toward anyone else because except for the confidentiality of the confessional, they said, priests and mullahs do not have any special rights or protections.
And Ranik Amirov, the head of the Association of Muslim Journalists, told the paper that the pamphlet was unlikely to affect the behavior of the militiaman on the street. The booklet is a “plus” compared to the situation now, but if there is to be real change, he said, the Interior Ministry must include its provisions in its training schools.
The third development reported this week suggests that the willingness of at least some officers in the FSB and other security agencies to ignore the law is undermining public confidence in at least some regions not only in them but also in the central Russian government as a whole.
According to the results of a poll taken in Nazran, Ingushetia, 38 percent of the people there believe that Russia’s “special services” are behind the wave of murders and kidnappings there, almost five times the number (8 percent) who blame Islamist extremists for these crimes (http://www.caucasustimes.com/article.asp?id=13469).
Unless the FSB and its allied agencies are reined in and reined in soon, there is a very real danger that the illegal actions of these bodies will cost Moscow even more public trust and that in turn will lead the organs to take even more illegal actions, pushing Russia into a vicious cycle from which it will be difficult to escape unharmed.
Vienna, November 2 – The attempt by the FSB in Novosibirsk to have the election commission there ban anecdotes about Vladimir Putin as “illegal agitation activity,” a step that body refused to take, has sparked fears that some in the FSB want it to assume the functions of the KGB’s notorious Fifth Chief Directorate.
In an article posted online in Karelia today, Anatoliy Tsygankov, who writes frequently about the Russian security services, said that the FSB’s Department for the Defense of the Constitutional Order seems to want to harass opponents of the government much as the KGB’s Fifth Chief Directorate did at the end of Soviet times.
And while the regional FSB section was rebuffed in Novosibirsk, he continued, the fact that its officers tried to assume this role there should be “a warning sign for the entire country” because in some places, other officials are likely to defer to this power agency (http://www.politika-karelia.ru/cgi-bin/articles_print.cgi?id=1234).
Indeed, Tsygankov suggested, it was a matter of good fortune that “the chairman of the [Novosibirsk] oblast election commission did not forget in what time we are living” and basing his decision on existing Russian law, “refused to react to political anecdotes” in the way that the FSB hoped.
Were this the only example of the KGB’s efforts in this regard, there might be less cause for concern, but Tsygankov continued, the FSB is very much involved with “the current attack on the Constitution of Russia” in another way, through its sponsorship of those who want Putin to remain president in violation of Constitutional norms.
Putin himself “has asked them not to do this,” Tsygankov noted, but the FSB officers have continued to organize meetings, marches, appeals and other measures intended to keep the current Russian president in the Kremlin long after his legally permitted two terms.
Such contempt for the explicit provisions of the Russian Constitution and Russian laws by officers of the country’s largest security service with regard to this issue, Tsygankov suggested, inevitably leads to other and even more threatening actions, steps that recall some of the worst features of the Soviet past.
That such dangers are all too real now in turn is highlighted by three other reports this week. First, human rights officials have noted that some of the prisoners who took part in prison violence in recent months have died in unexplained and unexamined circumstances when Interior Ministry officials were moving them to distant prisons.
According to officials, such prisoners are simply being put in “neighboring” penitentiaries in order to better control them, but reports from the parents of those whose children have died in this process suggest the authorities are misrepresenting the situation, again in violation of the law (http://ikd.ru/node/4255).
To try to stop this violence, these human rights organizations have organized a public appeal demanding that the Interior Ministry and prison officials obey Russia’s laws and Constitution rather than assuming that because they represent the power of the state, they can act with impunity even to the point of killing those in their charge.
Second, the Moscow newspaper Gazeta reported yesterday that the Social Chamber’s Commission on Tolerance and Freedom of Conscience has prepared a pamphlet to guide militia officers in their dealings with members of religious groups (http://gzt.ru/society/2007/11/01/220201.html).
The guide, which is to be published in December in 100,000 copies, is designed for the officer on the beat, but whatever the good intentions behind it, both its specific injunctions and the reactions of Interior Ministry officials and activists to its provisions are cause for concern.
On the one hand, the pamphlet includes materials only on the four traditional faiths, thus implying that followers of others are not subject to its provisions, and it provides advice such as – “it is prohibited to take dogs into churches, mosques and synagogues” – that raises questions about how serious militiamen will take it.
And on the other, the reaction of Interior Ministry officials and religious rights activists suggest that this much ballyhooed pamphlet is unlikely to have any serious effect beyond propagandizing Moscow’s ostensibly good intentions in dealing with Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Jews and Buddhists.
Interior Ministry officials told “Gazeta” that they would act with regard to religious leaders just as they act toward anyone else because except for the confidentiality of the confessional, they said, priests and mullahs do not have any special rights or protections.
And Ranik Amirov, the head of the Association of Muslim Journalists, told the paper that the pamphlet was unlikely to affect the behavior of the militiaman on the street. The booklet is a “plus” compared to the situation now, but if there is to be real change, he said, the Interior Ministry must include its provisions in its training schools.
The third development reported this week suggests that the willingness of at least some officers in the FSB and other security agencies to ignore the law is undermining public confidence in at least some regions not only in them but also in the central Russian government as a whole.
According to the results of a poll taken in Nazran, Ingushetia, 38 percent of the people there believe that Russia’s “special services” are behind the wave of murders and kidnappings there, almost five times the number (8 percent) who blame Islamist extremists for these crimes (http://www.caucasustimes.com/article.asp?id=13469).
Unless the FSB and its allied agencies are reined in and reined in soon, there is a very real danger that the illegal actions of these bodies will cost Moscow even more public trust and that in turn will lead the organs to take even more illegal actions, pushing Russia into a vicious cycle from which it will be difficult to escape unharmed.
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