Moment of Truth for un-Iraqi Turkoman Front

By: Adil Al-Baghdadi

adil_al_baghdadi@hotmail.co

Brussels

14 Feb 2005

It is official the un-Iraqi Turkoman Front has only managed 18.4  percent of over all votes in Kirkuk.

Even if the ballots of 100,000 ethnic Kirkuki Kurds, which Turkey and its lackey are contesting, were to be discounted then this will leave the front with only 23 percent of the vote.

No wonder many believe the result in Kirkuk is a nail in the coffin of the standing of Turkey's surrogate in South Kurdistan.

For more than two years the un-Iraqi Turkoman Front other than trumpeting for Turkey's interference in the internal political affairs of Iraq and Kurdistan, has also bragged about massive numbers of followers and exaggerated figures of the population of Turkomans.

That's why the elections in Iraq and South Kurdistan have been considered as a measure of the real popular support of each ethnic group and political party.

The election results will perhaps make every political group in Iraq examine their position with this organization, which has always been on the fringes of Iraqi politics and only concerned itself with undermining efforts by Kurds to reclaim their rightful capital of South Kurdistan, the fraternal city of Kirkuk.

Since when it was created by Turkish intelligence, the un-Iraqi Turkoman Front put out exaggerated figures about the size of Turkoman community and claimed swathes of Kurdish areas as Turkomaneli or Turkoman land.

These unfounded claims have surfaced after the former Ba’thist racist regime emptied many regions from its original Kurdish inhabitants who never yielded to criminal policies of the regime which were aimed at Arabizing Kurdish areas.

These claims were further enhanced by Turkish Red Crescent which was assigned to carry out charity work by US and UK following the establishment of safe haven in parts of South Kurdistan.

Turkey’s main charity NGO not only scooped millions of dollars form donations but also ran a clandestine and unlawful racist operation on behalf of Turkish Intelligence Service, which is known with the Turkish acronym of MIT ¹.

This supposedly charitable organization, which works hand in glove with MIT ², was more concerned with conducting an unofficial census of the Turkoman population in South Kurdistan rather than carrying out genuine charity work..

Against its mandate and certainly its internal constitution, which has been modeled on its parent organization the Red Cross, the Turkish Red Crescent only distributed food provisions and other materials to those who wrote their ethnicity as Turkomans.

This has led many Kurds, who were eager to get some food and other provisions in an area strangulated by four hostile regimes and by economic embargo including that of the then Ba’thist regime, to register themselves as Turkomans in order to survive harsh economic conditions and extreme poverty.

This sort of practice is considered anywhere else but Turkey as an overt racism and a clear breach of charitable mandate, which sadly went largely unreported at the time, barring an article by the friend of Kurds the writer Sheri Laizer.

Subsequently, these records were taken back to Turkey and later were given to the un-Iraqi Turkoman Front to further its grandiose claims and disrupt the political process of rebuilding the state of Iraq.

That explains why the un-Iraqi Turkoman Front has been instructed to cite the figure of 3,5m as a number of the population of Turkomans and to repeat the unfounded and implausible claim that Kirkuk is a city with Turkomani characteristic.

With this un-Iraqi organization, Turkey sought to upset the orderly process of reincorporating other parts of Kurdistan and to drive a wedge between the two fraternal ethnic groups.

Undoubtedly,  the election results is a triumph of truth over falsehood and good over evil, and defeat for Turkey's apparatus for interfering interference in South Kurdistan, the un-Iraqi Turkoman Front.

At long last the world's largest stateless ethnic group, who have suffered untold misery, oppression and humiliation at the hands of four of Middle East's most brutal racist regimes,

namely Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iraq, are now taking confident strides towards establishing the first federal republic in South Kurdistan.

The hope is this will herald similar moves in North, East and West Kurdistan to follow the same path and realize the aspirations of 30m or so Kurds who are still suffering from ultra-nationalistic and criminal polices in Turkey, Iran and Syria respectively. 

1. MIT in Turkish stands for Milli Istihbarat Teskilati, which are made out of three Arabic words meaning National Intelligence Service).

2. In April 2003, a Turkish Red Crescent convoy was found to be carrying weapons and explosives, identified as humanitarian supplies, at a checkpoint