ABSTRACT
In considering the armed conflict in southeast Turkey between Kurdish armed groups and Turkish armed and security forces one cannot ignore issues surrounding the legality of the conflict itself, which in international law is known as the jus ad bellum. Two major armed conflict issues are canvassed in this chapter: the first is whether international law prohibits wars of secession – are non-state actors prohibited in international law from resorting to force to compel rights of self-determination or to defend themselves against major abuses of human rights? Furthermore, there is the related question of whether other states can assist these non-state actors in their efforts to secure a new political arrangement. The second issue is to assess the legality of the several Turkish incursions into northern Iraq, the most recent one in February 2008, to pursue those same fighters. This involves considering whether other states in this case Iraq and the United States can assist a sovereign state in its struggle against an insurgency. Both of these important questions involve the same basic difficulty, the lack
of development of jus ad bellum within internal armed conflict. The collective security system in the United Nations Charter was developed in order to prevent those international armed conflicts that had threatened peace and security in the 20th century. However, the reality is that in the decades since the end of the Second World War, by far the greater number of conflicts (often called insurgencies) have been those waged within a state, between the governmental authorities and a group that seeks to secure its own political arrangement. There are many examples including Ethiopia/Eritrea, Pakistan/Bangladesh, Yugoslavia/ Kosovo, United Kingdom/Irish independence movement represented by the IRA, Nigeria/Biafra, Spain/Basque independence movement represented by ETA and Canada/Quebec independence movement represented by the FLQ. In later chapters we discuss issues of self-determination and terrorism in reference to internal secessionist movements but in this chapter we examine the narrower issues of lawfulness of resort to armed force by the independence movement and the use of force to be used against the independence movement. Finally, we introduce ideas of aggravated state responsibility to argue that regardless of the lawfulness of the use of force, such sustained and severe violence triggers the
international responsibility of all states within the international community to respond to situations of non-international armed conflict, which involve violations of peremptory norms of public international law known as norms of jus cogens.
