by A. Kasim S. Islam

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A. Kasim
S. Islam

GUWAHATI, INDIA - Ranting against neo-neo-colonialism and the American Enterprise war machine has now become standard fare. The day the "coalition of the willing" launched their strikes on Baghdad, Muslims in the UK said a special community prayer. This, they said, was a war against Islam and against Muslims and it was their duty to assist them with their prayers. Three weeks down the line, their prayers were in vain. But nobody seemed to make much of the fact that there were other Iraqi Muslims out there who were all too willing to assist the "coalition of the willing". And when anti-Saddam demonstrations broke out all over Iraq, and citizens began narrating their tales of horror, there must have been quite a few embarrassed blushes amongst those who had gone to prayer. This is not to deny the tangential motives of the United States, nor to deny the immense suffering that the war and sanctions had caused. One quite rightly argues that sidestepping international consensus sets a dangerous precedent. But what the war has brought out is that large sections of the Iraqi populace, though not too fond of the United States, are yet happy to see Saddam go.

Some of the most memorable video clippings from the war that I have seen were scenes of Kurdish Pashmergas, marching against the Iraqi army with minimal support from US firepower. Their participation in the war must have come as a deep embarrassment to Arab regimes who had insisted that this was a war against an Arab nation, a war against their own people. That the suppression of the nationalist expression of a large minority had gone hand-in-hand with the forging of the Socialist Arab-nationalist Iraq under Saddam was something they refused to even comment upon. That an entire people have been reduced to a minority in their own land, through the carving up of their land by fiat, was something best left out of public debate.

There were no prayers when Halabja was gassed, not in the public domain at least. Somehow, Arab lives were more important than Kurdish lives just as Israeli lives continue to be more important than Arab lives in occupied Palestine. But Palestine has many mourners; Kurdistan, a few.

Spread throughout six Middle-eastern countries, the Kurds probably represent the largest stateless nation in the world today. For a whole century, their fate has been decided by others, by powers that had offered them up as sacrifice in the nationalist upsurge of the Arabs and the Turks. Time and time again, they have been promised their due rights and time and time again, have they been betrayed.

The following fact-sheet should serve as a reminder to those who prefer to see the war in black and white. We mourn and condemn the US-led aggression. But there are fortuitous consequences to the war that are not all gloomy.

Turkey:

1. By the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 the Kurds were recognized as a nation and their right to independence shown due deference. The Treaty included a bizarre clause on the need of the Kurds to demonstrate, through representation at the League of Nations, the majority will of the Kurdish people for independence. Naturally, the Kurds had no idea how to go about doing this.
2. By the Treaty of Lusanne in 1923, concluded with a resurgent Turkey, the Kurds faded into oblivion in international diplomatic discourse. The Turks promised a Turkey that was for Kurds and Turks, a modern, secular Turkey bound by a common nationhood and irreverent of race.
3. Turkey soon became the State of the Turks. Ataturk reneged on his promises to a quiet and receptive people. Turkish became the language of the State and Turkish became its culture. The Kurds cried foul and they had reason to.
4. In 1924, legislation made the use of the Kurdish language illegal. Publications in Kurdish were banned.
5. The Kurdish nationalist movement, originally using religious imagery, was severely suppressed. Its politics, albeit more nationalist than religious, was dubbed as reactionary-Islamic by the Turkish government. Armed battles were fought with the Kurds with seventeen battles fought between 1924 and 1938.
6. By the Anglo-British Treaty of 1926, the oil rich Kurdish city of Mosul was handed over to Iraq which was then a British mandate. An independent Kurdistan did not suit the British for whom the Kurds were essential political weapons in the colonization of Iraq.
7. A Kurdish rebellion in 1929 was actively supported by Iran who allowed the Kurds to operate from within Iranian areas of Kurdistan to fight the Turkish forces. Iran encouraged the Turkish Kurds in the light of territorial disputes with Turkey. Consequent to an agreement reached between Iran and Turkey, the Turkish army was allowed to move into Iranian Kurdistan and crush the Kurdish rebellion.
8. Democratic elections in 1950 saw the Kurdish elite gaining some political power in Turkey and being able to dispense favors to the Kurdish electorate.
9. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, expressions of Kurdish nationalism remained strictly prohibited under various Turkish laws. Radio broadcasts in Kurdish were never allowed. Right until 1991 the use of the Kurdish language was illegal in Turkey. Some bilingual Turkish-Kurdish journals appeared in the '60s but were quickly banned.
10. The 1970s saw the dissemination of communist ideology in Turkey and the Kurds promptly picked it up as a foil to the ruling pro-West orientation. The new movement was firmly suppressed. Entire Kurdish villages were massacred and a genocide was unleashed on Turkey's Kurds.
11. In 1978, Abdullah Ocalan formed the Kurdish Worker's Party (PKK) , a leftist organization that advocated armed revolution, was expelled from Turkey and granted refuge in Syria which saw this as an opportunity to hassle Turkey on the water-sharing dispute .
12. Since 1984, the PKK has been conducting guerilla warfare in Kurdish Turkey, often operating from across the border with Iraq. The PKK, an avowedly terrorist organization, has conducted massive attacks on civilian Turkish populations matched only by the Turkish army's brutalities on the Kurdish civilians.
13. Since 1991, the Turkish government has allowed the use of the Kurdish language. Forming of Kurdish parties is however still banned.
14. In 1998, Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the PKK was arrested in Nairobi and brought back to Kenya. Violent protests broke out all over Europe and in Canada with resident Kurds occupying Greek embassies at a number of European capitals. The Greek Interior and Foreign ministers resign over their inability to protect Ocalan. A queer irony for while the Kurds had very genuine grievances, Ocalan's methods were all but acceptable and the Greeks seem to have had no objections to using this violent methodology in their disputes with Turkey.
15. In October 2002, Ocalan's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment as Turkey lifted the capital punishment in its movement towards EU integration.

Iraq:

1. Unlike Syria and Turkey, Iraqi Kurds have always been recognized as a different nationality within the Iraqi nation. They were allowed to express themselves culturally and the Kurdish language was allowed to flourish.
2. Kurdish resistance in Iraq starts in the early 1930s with the movement led by Ahmad Barzani and after him, by his son, Mustafa Barzani.
3. In 1970, the Kurds reached an agreement with Saddam, then Iraqi Vice President and Kurdish ministers find a place in the Iraqi cabinet.
4. The relationship turned sour with an attempted assassination of Mustafa Barzani.
5. In the 1970s, the Ba'athists made a conciliatory gesture by granting the Kurds limited autonomy. This offer was rejected by the Kurds as it did not include Kurdish control over oil-rich Kirkuk.
6. In the early 1970s, the US used its proteg&eacue; in Iran, the Shah , to encourage Kurdish rebellion in Iraq.
7. After an agreement between the Iranians and the Iraqi regime, the Kurdish resistance was weakened, US assistance stopped and the Kurds found themselves at the mercy of Iraqi forces once again.
8. Resistance culminated in the gassing of Halabja in 1988, which for the very first time brought the Kurds into the concern space of international human rights and the Western press.
9. US encouraged Kurdish resistance once again in 1990 with the Gulf War. The sudden termination of the war saw a massive aerial strike against Kurds by Iraqi warplanes. Pictures of fleeing Kurds and pursuing Iraqi warplanes puts pressure on the coalition to declare safe-havens and No-Fly-Zones over Northern Iraq.
10. From 1991 until the recent war, the Kurds have enjoyed a fair degree of autonomy. They have held their own elections and strengthened their Pashmerga forces.
11. In 1994 internecine conflict broke out amongst the Kurds with the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) getting engaged in an armed conflict that lead to deaths on both sides. The KDP called in Saddam's forces while the PUK sought help from Iran. The war continued till 1997. The US disengaged itself from the conflict and the PUK and Iraqi National Congress rebels were arrested by Saddam's forces. An uneasy US brokered truce now reigns and observers point out that hostilities are dormant and not dead.
12. During the latest war, Kurdish Pashmergas were mainly responsible for liberating Kirkuk from Iraqi forces. Under pressure from Turkey, however, the US asked the Kurds to hand over the administration of Kirkuk to the coalition forces. The city for which the Kurds have fought for eight decades is again denied to them.

Syria:

1. Like the United States and Iran, Syria has been using Kurdish ambitions as ammunition in its international disputes.
2. Syria allowed Abdullah Ocalan to operate from bases in its territory till 1999 when he was disallowed entry.
3. Syrian assistance to Ocalan's PKK was to pressurize Turkey with which Syria had a long standing water dispute.
4. By a 1962 census, thousands of Kurds in the northeastern Syrian province of Hasakeh were stripped of their Syrian citizenship and this "stateless" status has been passed on to subsequent generations.
5. Publications in Kurdish are generally prohibited in Syria.
6. Active discrimination is practised in the recruitment of Kurds into the Syrian armed forces.
7. International travel by Kurdish citizens is actively monitored and Kurds are often denied passport clearance for foreign travel.
8. Last October, two Kurdish members of the People's Council, Hasan Saleh and Marwa Uthman were arrested following a pro-democracy demonstration.

The Kurds make up more than 20 percent of the population in Turkey and Iraq and around 10 percent of the Syrian population. All these countries have pursued a nationalist agenda that is tilted in favor of the majority community, that is Turks in the case of Turkey and Arabs in the case of Syria and Iraq. The Kurds have been generally under-represented in the political structures of these countries and as a consequence have endured economic policies that have largely ignored resource-rich Kurdish regions. Little of the wealth generated from the exploitation of natural resources in Kurdish regions have flown back to these regions.

Naturally, Kurdish nationalist sentiments are high and opposed to the mainstream nationalist agenda. In the absence of any sincere recognition of the Kurdish cause, however, problems are likely to remain unsolved in the foreseeable future.

Betrayed time and again by the West, the Kurds may well see no other alternative to armed resistance, a policy that has already claimed thousands of lives, most of them Kurdish. In post-Saddam Iraq, the Kurdish question becomes all the more important given a history of bloody rivalry between the Kurds and the Iraqi National Congress and amongst the Kurds themselves.

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A. KASIM S. ISLAM is a freelance data analyst and Internet researcher based in Assam, India. He hails from beautiful north-east Indian town of Guwahati where he grew up and currently resides. After completing an MA in Economics from Delhi University, Kasim has worked in various positions-- as a journalist and as a researcher. His international exposure includes 2 years in Singapore as reserach assistant and MSc student at the National University of Singapore and he is still working on his thesis. Kasim's primary areas of interest are South and East Asian politics and culture, Human Rights in Asia, and Asian religions . He can be contacted from http://in.geocities.com/newslens. This is his second article for The World's Magazine.