by Antonia Juhasz, Oil Change International

WORLD WAR 4 REPORT editor Bill Weinberg led another modestly-attended presentation this evening about the Iraq Freedom Congress, this time at a meeting of the New York chapter of the Socialist Party USA. An announcement for the event, which featured a screening of the Japanese-produced video Go Forward Iraq Freedom Congress!, sparked this predictable exchange on the always-reliable NYC Indymedia site:

From AP, Oct. 27:

SAN FRANCISCO - Thousands of people called for a swift end to the war in Iraq as they marched through downtown on Saturday, chanting and carrying signs that read: "Wall Street Gets Rich, Iraqis and GIs Die" or "Drop Tuition Not Bombs."

With all the focus on the crisis over Kurdish separatist rebels taking refuge in northern Iraq, largely overlooked are the multiple reasons that Turkey's Kurds have to be discontented. We noted two years ago the pressures on eastern Turkey's peoples from the Ataturk Dam. Now more Kurdish lands are being expropriated for the Ilisu Dam, as noted by a recent European fact-finding mission to Anatolia. From Kurdish Media, Oct. 23:

With an Iraqi delegation in Ankara to discuss the standoff over PKK rebels in northern Iraq, Turkish war planes and helicopters reportedly bombed guerilla bases within Iraq's borders Oct. 26. However, even as the state-run Anatolia news agency reported the air-strikes, top military commander Gen. Yasar Buyukanit said that day that Turkish leaders will wait until Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan meets President Bush in Washington on Nov. 5 before deciding whether to mount a cross-border offensive into Iraq. "The armed forces will carry out a cross-border offensive when assigned," private NTV quoted Gen. Yasar Buyukanit as saying. "Prime Minister Erdogan's visit to the United States is very important. We will wait for his return." Turkey's deputy prime minister Cemil Cicek said his government has demanded the extradition of Kurdish rebel leaders based in Iraq's north. Asked what the US military was planning to do, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, commander of US forces in northern Iraq, said: "Absolutely nothing." (AP, Oct. 27)

This Patrick Cockburn report is entitled "Baghdad may be unable to stop attacks by PKK fighters," but the more relevant question may be whether the regional Kurdish government which is the real power in northern Iraq has any real desire to—or if they don't have more sympathy for the PKK than for Turkey (or USA). From the UK Independent, Oct 24:

On the heels of the outcry over the Blackwater massacre, comes another atrocity by a private contractor in Iraq. A particular ugly irony is that this time the victims were members of one of Iraq's threatened minorities—the Armenians, whose very precarious existence in Iraq largely goes unnoticed by the outside world. The painful irony is compounded by the Bush administrations' ongoing betrayal of the historical memory of the World War I-era Armenian genocide, which is once again in the headlines at the moment. From AP, Oct. 11:

Just a week after Baghdad and Ankara made a public show of pledging cooperation against the PKK, Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his military staff Oct. 9 for the first time formally approved unilateral incursions into Iraqi territory to route the Kurdish separatist guerillas. “To put an end to the terrorist organization operating in Iraq, the order has been given to take every kind of measure, legal, economic, political, including also a cross-border operation if necessary," said an official statement issued after the security summit in Ankara. The decision came after 15 Turkish soldiers were killed in guerilla attacks Oct. 7 and 8. The White House reacted by again stressing the need for co-operation between the US, Turkey and Iraq. (AKI, Italy, Oct. 9)