Vladimir Putin, Godfather of Kurdistan? - THE NATIONAL INTEREST

Kurdish ambitions fit into Russia's plans for the Middle East.
Michael A. Reynolds
March 1, 2016

If Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan thought last November that by downing a Russian Su-24 bomber near the Turkish-Syrian border he could contain Vladimir Putin’s Middle Eastern ambitions, he is certainly regretting that now. An incensed Vladimir Putin vowed that Turkey would come to rue its actions. He warned that Russia would not settle its accounts with Turkey with mere economic sanctions, adding, “We know what we need to do.”

What Putin meant is becoming clear. Earlier this month, in what can only be described as a menacing signal to Ankara, the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (or PYD) formally opened a representative office in Moscow, its first in a foreign country. Meanwhile, inside Syria, the PYD’s armed wing has been using Russian arms and Russian air support to aggressively expand the amount of territory it controls along the Syrian-Turkish border. Ankara is alarmed, and rightly so. Despite possessing its own acronym, the PYD is a subsidiary of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane), or PKK, which is currently intensifying the insurgency it is waging in Turkey’s southeast. There, PKK activists have declared Kurdish self-rule and PKK fighters are holing up in cities, digging trenches and taking on Turkish security forces with everything from snipers and rocket propelled grenades to improvised explosive devices.

AKEL Leadership's New F.ck-Up

AKEL is a party that is driven by big ideals. In search for perfect justice, as if it exists anywhere but death. In the 20th century your big idea was communism. For over 70 years you (AKEL leaders) served that ideal as diligently and loyally as one could expect of you. You knew things were far from perfect, yet you opted to keep the ugliness away from public view so that socialism could be allowed to prevail in the end. Until it collapsed under the weight of its own non-sense and you could not hide it any more. Then you re-invented yourselves, calling what for so long you so obediently served 'bad socialism'.

Nowadays, with the same zeal and indisputable passion you lead the way for making bizonality, a novel concept that bears the hallmarks of apartheid, a success. You believe it is the right course. You believe it with a passion that cannot be challenged. The same passion and conviction you have for your version of socialism. The young at heart will listen to you. I would too if I were younger. It all sounds so perfect. Peace and justice, at last. At least in your minds.

BUT DO TELL ME, if you were so massively wrong on socialism (version 1*) for almost a century what makes you believe you are right on bizonality? And how much credibility do you think you have to carry bizonality through? At the very least, do you see in "Turkey" the same monster you so criminally failed to see in the USSR? After your last f.ck-up the USSR was gone but Russia at least remained. A possible new f.ck-up will leave nothing except a once predominantly Greek Christian Cyprus in the history books.

* I presume now with a few free-market tricks your socialism is fixed? Or not?