Respect, the Kurds and joined up thinking

By Stan Crooke

I went to a ‘Respect’ meeting last night.

It’s not something I normally do. In fact, as a general matter of principle, I never go to ‘Respect’ meetings.

But when Cambridge ‘Respect’ announced a forum on Kurdistan — an opportunity to hear about “the situation faced by Kurds in occupied Iraq, and the wider Kurdish question” – it was too good an opportunity to miss.

The speaker was Welat Zeydan, who teaches in the intercultural studies department of Anglia Ruskin University. When George Galloway had spoken in Cambridge a fortnight earlier, Zeydan had criticised him for supporting for the “Iraqi resistance”: That ‘resistance’ was no friend of the Kurds.

Holding a meeting on Kurdistan with Zeydan as the speaker was therefore presumably Cambridge ‘Respect’s way of saying: “But look! We really do care about the Kurds! Provided you bring 20 of your friends from the local Turkish-Kurdish community, you can speak about Kurdistan to a meeting of 30 people!”

The meeting opened with a potted history of ‘Respect’ from the local branch secretary. It was not a history I recognised.

There was no mention of the Socialist Alliance, and no mention of the SWP’s decision to wind up the Alliance after Galloway’s expulsion from the Labour Party. Inevitably, there was no mention of ‘Respect’ trimming its policies (e.g. ditching the policy of ‘a worker’s MP on a worker’s wage’) to suit Galloway.

Instead, ‘Respect’ was presented as an off-shoot of the ‘Stop the War’ movement. Its membership growth had exceeded all expectations. (Its claimed membership is only half the SWP’s claimed membership.) So too had its electoral achievement. (In many seats, including Cambridge, ‘Respect’ did far worse in this year’s elections than the Socialist Alliance had in 2001.)

Curiously, the Cambridge ‘Respect’ secretary defined the role of ‘Respect’ as “calling the Labour Party to account, as the Labour Party is not doing a very good job of this itself.”

Then it was over to the speaker himself for a twenty minute summary of Kurdish history over the past century or so.

Given that the enemy was probably expecting an attack on its Iraqi front, I opted for a flanking manoeuvre and attacked through Syria.

The speaker had – rightly – said that Syria was a police state. Its majority Arab population was oppressed, and its Kurdish minority even more so. 200,000 Syrian Kurds had no right to own a house, land or a business, go to university or a hospital, work in the public sector, vote or stand for election, or be issued with a passport.

But ‘Respect’ MP George Galloway had recently publicly praised Syria as “the last castle of Arab dignity and Arab rights.” The people of Syria were “a free people”. Syria was “lucky to have Bashar al-Assad as her president.” His advice to the people of Syria was to “unite, stay together, and follow the leadership (of Bashar al-Assad).”

Were ‘Respect’ members on the side of the Kurds, or on the side of their oppressors and apologists for the latter? Was the left going to fall in behind Galloway or fight for independent working-class politics?

Although the questions had been directed at ‘Respect’, it was the speaker who was invited to answer them. To a ripple of applause from the audience, he sagely commented that it was possible to support the Kurds and oppose the Americans.

True enough – the AWL leaflet distributed at the Galloway meeting in Cambridge a fortnight earlier had been raising just that kind of argument.

Then came the ‘Life of Brian’ moment. Zeydan had mentioned in passing that the Iraqi Kurds had benefited from the war in Iraq. Could Zeydan, a member of the audience wanted to know, give examples of these benefits? Maybe it’s just me, but the question seemed to be asked in a rather peeved tone of voice.

Well, replied the speaker, there was the overthrow of Saddam, the removal of a regime which threatened Kurds with genocide, the economic boom in Iraqi Kurdistan, the election of over 70 Kurdish MPs to the Iraqi Parliament, the election of a Kurd as President of Iraq, the increased importance of the Kurdish Regional Government, and the greater profile the Kurds enjoyed in international politics.

Another question asked of the speaker was what would happen to the Iraqi Kurds if the US troops packed up their bags and pulled out tomorrow.

Firstly, said Zeydan, the Americans were not going to do that. Secondly, it would not make much difference in Iraqi Kurdistan itself, in the sense that there were only 300 US troops in the whole of Iraqi Kurdistan (where 20% of the Iraqi population lives).

(Maybe it’s just me again, but some members of the audience seemed to fidget in their seats when Zeydan said that. Presumably he should have said: ‘The Kurds will take to the streets to celebrate the removal of the US-Zionist-Nazi jackboot from their throats.’)

Thirdly, if the US did pull out tomorrow, then Iraqi Kurds could be at risk from the Turkish and Syrian authorities, and also from the more Arab-nationalist elements in Iraq itself.

The Cambridge ‘Respect’ secretary made a brave attempt to salvage the situation. ‘Respect’ was all in favour of the Kurds and everyone else in Iraq deciding their future. It was not for us to decide what the Iraqis should be doing. But the Iraqis could not decide their own future as long as they were an occupied country. So solidarity with the Kurds and the rest of the population meant campaigning for withdrawal of the troops (and nothing else).

Of course, the speaker at the meeting might have been completely wrong in everything he said. (Or did not say – he was certainly scarcely critical of the various Kurdish political organisations in different countries. And the KDP’s military alliance with Saddam Hussein and the Turkish government in the mid to late 1990s was passed over in silence.)

As a simple statement of the current reality, however, and as a summary of how Iraqi Kurds generally view the current situation, his lead-off and answers to questions struck me as being fairly accurate. In the late 1980s 100,000 Kurds had been murdered by the Saddam regime. Now that regime was gone. That was a step forward for the Kurds.

Insofar as one can generalise from a single meeting, ‘Respect’ members seem to suffer from a form of political schizophrenia. Or, given the level of debate and questioning at the meeting, from a form of apolitical schizophrenia.

One the one hand George Galloway is a man of the left. His election victory was “a fantastic result.” He is living proof of what a great organisation ‘Respect’ is. He is a Hero of Our Time.

On the other hand, once Galloway is criticised politically, then he is just some bloke in London with a ‘Respect’ membership card, a punter with no particular role to play in ‘Respect’, and certainly not someone against whom one can measure the politics of ‘Respect’.

The same schizophrenia applies to Iraq. On the one hand, Iraqis can never do anything for themselves until the troops are withdrawn. There is therefore nothing to campaign for apart from ‘Troops Out Now!’ (or by Christmas, or by March of next year, or whenever ….)

On the other hand, you invite a representative of Muqtada al-Sadr to a ‘Peace Conference’ in London (which suggests a certain degree of active solidarity this side of troop withdrawal, albeit with the wrong people), or you attend a meeting about Kurdistan and applaud a speaker who talks of the liberation of Iraqi Kurds from Baathist genocide, and who was certainly not calling for “troops out now”.

Is there anyone in ‘Respect’ capable of joined-up thinking?