"During the racist attack of December 23, three members or sympathizers of the PKK were killed."
This is how the Turkish ambassador, Ali Onaner, reacted to the massacre in the rue d'Enghien: "The first elements communicated by the French judicial authorities have definitively put an end to the propaganda of the PKK trying to insinuate a link with A strange country."
This intransigence no doubt explains why the funeral of one of the victims, the singer Mir Perwer, which was held Thursday in Mus, in eastern Turkey, was marred with tension.
On December 2, Mir Perwer and two other people were killed at the Ahmet Kaya cultural center in Paris.
An establishment that houses the headquarters of the Kurdish Democratic Council in France (CDK-F), known for its proximity to the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party.
"How can terrorists who openly claim to belong to the PKK benefit from such impunity in the heart of Paris, in a place about which French justice has taken a decision to dissolve because of links established with terrorism?" asks the diplomat, stationed in Paris since December 2020.
>> To read also: Fighter, musician, political refugee: the three Kurdish victims of the attack in Paris
Founded in 1978 by Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK is an armed political organization considered terrorist by Turkey but also by the European Union, and therefore France.
On 14 December, the Court of Justice of the European Union rejected the PKK's request to be removed from the list of terrorist organisations, considering that it could not "call into question the Council's assessment relating to the persistence of a risk of terrorist involvement by the PKK".
Members of this group have been worried by French justice for extortion, criminal association or financing of terrorism.
However, if the researcher Didier Billion, deputy director of the Iris (Institute of international and strategic relations) specialized in Turkey, considers that it is necessary "to dissociate the Kurdish question from the question of the PKK", the image of the group remains associated with that of the Kurds in general in French public opinion.
"Mistrust vis-à-vis Turkey, for reasons which may be entirely justified, has led French public opinion to take up the cause of the Kurds, to the point of sometimes considering members of the PKK as combatants. freedom who fight for our values."
The leader of the left-wing La France insoumise (LFI) party Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the LFI deputy Éric Coquerel, arrive at the rally of the Kurdish community, Place de la République in Paris on December 24, 2022, the day after the attack on a Kurdish cultural center which killed three people.
© Julien de Rosa, AFP
Feminism, secularism, federalism or socialism are part of the ideological lexicon of the PKK, which explains why the French left can regularly display its proximity to the group, but the values claimed hide another reality: attacks, revolutionary tax, drug trafficking, conscription obligatory, desire to create a "new man" which is reminiscent of a certain fascist rhetoric, prohibition for professional executives to marry or have sexual relations, cult of the personality of "Apo" (nickname of 'Abdullah Öcalan).
The structure of the group, the indoctrination it practices, the actions it claims are far from the values in which most French people can recognize themselves.
Some may not know it, others probably prefer to close their eyes by focusing on what they perceive as a common enemy: Turkey.
In Turkey, the group is accused by the authorities of being solely responsible for the 40,000 deaths in the violence linked to the insurrection since 1984. Some may have considered excessive the summons, on December 26, of the French ambassador by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
But for Ali Onaner, such a reaction was natural: "Imagine for a second the shock and indignation that the images of the French Minister of Justice welcoming three terrorists provoked in Turkish opinion."
The rocker of 2015
The Turkish ambassador urges the French to dissociate "the Kurds with a capital K from the PKK" and assures that thanks to the initiatives of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Kurds of Turkey today benefit from rights which they did not have before.
The official Turkish discourse unfolds as follows: there is no longer a Kurdish question, only a security problem with the PKK, which does not represent the Kurds.
Ankara initiated a peace process with the PKK with the aim of diluting the terrorist organization into a legal political movement, the People's Democratic Party (HDP).
But the maneuver failed due to the radicalism of some PKK executives, who put the HDP under guardianship.
As a result, the Turkish government sees the HDP as the political window of the PKK and seeks to ban it.
The second opposition party and third group in Parliament, which represents 6 million voters, is in the hot seat.
On Thursday, Turkey's highest court of justice decided to block the movement's bank accounts, in which aid from the public treasury had been deposited, in order to deprive it of state funds allocated to political parties.
> To read also: Interview: "The Kurd is the ideal scapegoat that Ankara and Tehran currently need"
“Obviously there is a Kurdish question in Turkey,” sighs Hisyar Özsoy, HDP spokesperson for Foreign Affairs.
"Pretending there isn't one today, or reducing it to a purely security issue is a sign of the government's inability to address it."
For the man who is also a member of the Turkish National Assembly, "addressing this historical subject head-on, which is in fact Turkey's biggest political problem, can of course have security consequences. But you have to have the courage to s engage in a democratic and peaceful process, as was the case in the past".
Didier Billion recalls that the breakdown of peace negotiations in 2015 came after the failure of the AKP to obtain an absolute majority in the elections.
Faced with the inability of the opposition to form a government, a new ballot had to be organised.
And during this new campaign against a backdrop of attacks and insecurity, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made the choice to bite into the nationalist electorate and to "favor his short-term electoral interests".
Three years later, the AKP officially allied with the MHP, the nationalist action party, violently hostile to the Kurds.
The window for a political resolution of the conflict had closed.
Northern Syria
Apart from the complacency of part of French public opinion vis-à-vis the PKK, what Ankara does not forgive in Paris is having chosen to ally itself with Syrian Kurdish groups to fight the terrorists of the Islamic State group.
Because for Turkey, these groups such as the PYD, its armed wing, the YPG, or the FDS of which the YPG are the bridgehead, form only one and the same entity with the PKK.
Ali Onaner assures him: "We understood very well that in 2015, you wanted to prevent a new Bataclan by all means, which prompted the Hollande presidency to attempt a 'low cost' fight using the PKK terrorists. But you must understand that coming to our border, arming,
In a report published by the American think tank New Lines Institute, Elizabeth Tsurkov defines the YPG as follows: "The YPG is part of the global öcalanist movement, whose dominant Turkish branch, the PKK, has led an insurgency against Turkey since the 1980s. ".
The researcher mentions, for example, networks "loyal to the PKK in the ranks of the YPG".
That links exist is also what Paris thinks, which considers these movements to be ideologically close but organically different.
As for the FDS, they are also made up of Arab fighters, including moreover former members of the Free Syrian Army, whom Turkey had itself tried to train.
To this, however, we must add the ambiguous role that the PYD may have played in
agreeing with the Damascus regime against the interests of the Syrian revolution.
In 2013, the Syrian Deputy Prime Minister confirmed the existence of an "unwritten cooperation agreement between the Syrian government and the YPG".
The question that any observer is entitled to ask is the following: why did France prefer to ally itself with groups of which it knew the links with an organization which it recognizes itself as terrorist , rather than with Turkey, a sovereign, legitimate state, with which it has maintained diplomatic relations for hundreds of years and which is a historical ally within NATO?
The answer lies in one word: trust.
There is a consensus here: Turkey did not make a credible proposal to fight against the Islamic State organization in northern Syria in 2014. Its wait-and-see attitude during the battle of Kobané (Ayn al-Arab, in Arabic) , its complacency towards candidates for jihad who happily crossed the Syrian border from its territory or even sought treatment in its hospitals, have remained in French memories.
About the Turks, Paris always wonders: "in which camp are they?".
The Turkish ambassador recognizes this himself: "Before 2016, we may not have been able to carry out satisfactory counter-terrorism actions and convince our allies that we were their best partner."
Ali Onaner puts this failure down to "
The Gülenist Brotherhood – or Fetö, for the Turks – is an organization that was once an ally of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan before he broke with it and accused him of being behind the coup. missed in 2016. It has since been considered a terrorist organization in Turkey.
For the Turkish ambassador, since these disastrous years, Ankara has had the opportunity to demonstrate its resolution to fight against the Islamic State group: "From 2017, we showed that we were ready to fight hand-to-hand against terrorists from Daesh, we lost many soldiers, including 72 officers to AI-Bab, when we disabled 4,000 IS terrorists."
At the time, Ankara had mobilized significant resources and the violence of the confrontations had earned it the tenacious resentment of the Islamic State group.
#Syria with kamikaze attacks the #EI takes over the positions of the Turkish army & the rebels / #Turkey deplores 4 dead
— Wassim Nasr (@SimNasr) December 21, 2016
At the end of December 2016, the Islamic State group published a 19-minute video in which two men presented as Turkish soldiers were burned alive.
For Ali Onaner, there can no longer be any doubt about the reliability and credibility of Turkey in the fight against the Islamic State group, the quality of the anti-terrorist cooperation between the French and Turkish services constitutes additional proof of this.
He therefore criticizes Paris for not "having had the courage to put the men and the means necessary to face the threat of Daesh".
He continues: "Our determination to render harmless any individual who has committed terrorist crimes is total. Our targeted operations in Syria will continue if necessary, until our allies do not
In the American wheel
With this type of speech, Ankara seeks to convince France to work with it rather than with the Kurdish militias.
But it's too late.
Because in reality, this decision does not belong to Paris – or rather, no longer belongs to Paris – since the day Washington chose the PYD, for lack of an alternative, after the failure of the Army's training programs free Syrian.
France remains in the American wheel and will therefore end up abandoning the Kurdish groups itself if the United States decides to leave.
What will happen, Ali Onaner is convinced: "The Americans left, from Iraq or Afghanistan, in a sometimes very unsatisfactory way, but they always left".
The ambassador wants to believe that "every day they realize a little more that their collaboration with the terrorists of the PKK/PYD/FDS cannot last. And when they leave, do you think that the French will be able to remain alone in supporting these groups? ?"
The story of France's de facto alliance with these Kurdish armed groups in northern Syria, to the detriment of its relations with Ankara, is in reality that of the failure of the Syrian revolution, of the appearance and rise in power of the Islamic State group, the procrastination of Turkey, and an American choice.
There remains the fundamental problem, that of the political resolution of the Kurdish question, which Hisyar Özsoy sums up thus: "40 million native people of the Middle East do not feel safe anywhere, neither in Turkey, nor in Syria, nor in Iraq or Iran. Where will we be safe? Who will protect us?"
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