In fact after the Turkish incursion of northern Iraqi Kurdistan to crush PKK havens was abruptly curtailed by Washington, US Vice President Richard Cheney made a detour to the Iraqi Kurdistan capital of Irbil during his visit to Baghdad earlier this month. He went there to warn President Masoud Barzani it was time to put a stop to PKK terror operations against Turkey and deny them sanctuary in Kurdistan.
If the Iraqi Kurds did not take action before the spring thaw in the Kurdish mountains, Cheney could not promise PKK bases would be safe from further Turkish incursions.The Kurdish leaders understood him to be advising them to undertake the task themselves, rather than leaving it to Turkish troops.
Turkey’s high command has a precise breakdown of the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party’s sources of revenue. According to this, the PKK has a yearly income of 400-500 million euros, which is obtained from drug dealing, human trafficking, money laundering, smuggling and donations, mainly in Europe.
Thus while the US has provided real-time intelligence for Turkish attacks on PKK bases in northern Iraq, little attention has been paid to its activities on the European continent, where most of the funding for the Kurdish Workers’ Party’s attacks is raised by fronts and criminal networks.
According to recent NATO figures, the illicit narcotics trade is the most profitable. It ranges from production in Pakistan and distillation in Iraq to street sales in Europe. This recalls the Taliban of Afghanistan and the Hizballah of Lebanon, both of which makes a pretty penny off their countries’ poppy fields.
According to Turkish authorities, the PKK’s second most profitable activity is human trafficking– especially in Germany – to raise funds through legitimate or semi-legitimate commercial activities and donations.
The network includes affiliate or sympathizer organizations, such as the Confederation of Kurdish Associations in Europe (KON-KURD, headquartered in Brussels) and the International Kurdish Businessmen Union (KAR-SAZ, in Rotterdam).
The PKK also has a vast European propaganda and fundraising network that includes two news agencies, four television stations, thirteen radio stations, ten newspapers, nineteen periodicals, and three publishing houses.
Revenues from its activities and fronts pay the group's weapons purchases in Europe. Between 1984 and 2006, Turkey confiscated a total of 40,045 PKK weapons, on most of which identifying marks had been deleted. Nevertheless, some were traced to Italy, Germany, Belgium, Hungary, and Russia.
Moreover, of the 8,015 mines captured by Turkey, 4,857 came from Italy and 2,268 from Russia and the ex-Soviet republics.
Such large quantities of weapons, often stored in military depots, should not have disappeared without alerting the authorities. The British Foreign Office acknowledged in January 2008 that the PKK and its affiliate organizations had been active in Britain and other European countries since 2001. As a result, London announced that "foreign terrorist organizations would not be allowed to exploit the territories of the United Kingdom to fundraise any more."
Most European states have also officially recognized the PKK as a terrorist organization. Accordingly, they are taking some concrete steps against the group. For example, in January 2008, a local Berlin court found a Turkish citizen guilty of leading an underground PKK cell in Bavaria since 1994 and sentenced him to nearly three years in prison.
A momentary resolution on the PKK issue does not solve the underlying issue for Turkey, the Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, which Ankara opposes. See:
