Friday Front: Christopher de Bellaigue on Turkey, in The New York Review of Books
It’s true that I had a wonderful week in Istanbul in 2005. It was a quite unexpected business trip for Kathleen, and I’d never have gone along if it hadn’t been for Remicade, which I hadn’t even been taking for a year at that time. My interest in Turkey, however, pre-dates that junket. Friends remember my muttering ominously that, whatever else happened in the event of a war in Iraq, the Kurdish question would probably prove to be intractable. If Iraq were partitioned, a minority of Kurds would finally have their own Kurdistan, and it would not be long, so one thought, before their Turkish brethren sought to join them, something that would happen, not to speak too frankly, “over Turkey’s dead body.” If nothing else, our geographically illiterate populace overlooks the fact that the headwaters of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers – sources of irrigation for Syria and Iraq, but also of hydroelectric power for Turkey – lie in southeastern Turkey, a/k/a Kurdistan.
The wonderful thing about political predictions – about negative, pessimistic ones, that is – is that the world turns so slowly (still) that dire previsions so often turn out to be wrong. It’s much too early to say that the Turks and the Kurds are going to work things out to mutual satisfaction, but, as Christopher de Bellaigue reports in the current New York Review of Books, there are some surprisingly promising signs on the horizon.
¶ Chrisopher de Bellaigue on Turkey, in The New York Review of Books.
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