Where to now for the Kurds?
A friend of mine is currently in the Kurdish north of Iraq on one of his regular visits. The area is peaceful and I would love to visit it myself one day.
Meanwhile the situation of the Kurds in various Middle Eastern countries is being impacted considerably by developments in the region, as summarised in this piece in today’s “Guardian” newspaper:
Iraq’s 5 million Kurds have experienced relative stability since the end of the 1991 Gulf war, when they were liberated from Saddam Hussein and lived under a no-fly zone protected by US and British air power.
A persecuted people who famously had “no friends but the mountains”, they were allied with the post-cold war world’s only superpower. Iraq’s 2005 federal constitution gave the Kurdistan regional government (KRG) an unprecedented degree of self-government.
But the last few months have also held out the prospect of change for the 14-17 million Kurds in Turkey, where the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is in negotiations with the jailed Abdallah Öcalan, leader of the PKK and its 30-year insurrection.
Syria’s 1.6 million Kurds have made big gains since the uprising against Bashar al-Assad and now control the north-east of the country – though their status has bedevilled relations with the Arab opposition.
Kurds in Iran (7 million) enjoy minority rights but experience persecution. The Tehran government is concerned that PKK fighters leaving Turkey may now launch attacks inside Iran. Öcalan has talked of creating a “stateless union” between Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, which would increase integration while maintaining national borders.
Kurdish leaders everywhere are painfully conscious of a history of oppression and betrayal by supposed friends. Hopes for statehood after the first world war came to nothing and the British put down a Kurdish revolt in Iraq in the 1920s. In 1946 the short-lived Mahabad republic in Iran >was abandoned by the Soviet Union. In 1975 the US withdrew its support for an Iraqi Kurdish rebellion mounted from Iran and secretly aided by Israel, as part of a rapprochement between Baghdad and the Shah of Iran. “Covert action,” Henry Kissinger told Mullah Mustafa Barzani, father of the current KRG president, “is not missionary work.”
June 13th, 2013 at 4:06 pm
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