With a Grain of Salt: The Kurds' fight for Kurdistan (Good History)

Kurds are much in the news these days. Apparently, northern Iraq, where the Kurds live, is a haven of peace compared to the sullen environs of Basra, Tikrit and Baghdad with fearful Sunnis, confused and militant Shias, and a host of other groups such as Palestinians, Marsh Arabs, Muslim jehadis etc.

From what I gathered, the history of these Kurds is a particularly sad one and it is only now, after almost couple of thousand odd years, that they can see the glimmer of hope for a nation. So what is the story of these Kurds?

Kurds have a pre-history of great antiquity; they were essentially nomadic in nature, roaming the vast highland plains of eastern Anatolia, western Iran, Northern Iraq, Azerbaijan and parts of Syria. The Kurds are mentioned in the early Mesopotamian chronicles. Xenophon and his 10,000 faced the Kurds as noted in his seminal book, Anabasis. Then the next stage of evolution of the Kurds began when they converted to Islam in the 7th century and when their reputation of being very fierce fighters was born.

Kurds were at the vanguard of the conquering green crescent armies as they flared across North Africa, Spain and to the east to India. In fact, Salah-ad-din, known to the West as Saladin the Great, was a Kurd by birth.

A most amazing man, literate, polite, a gentleman of the old order, he unified a host of squabbling tribes, petty kingdoms and little sultanates into a mailed fist, which smashed into the Crusader Kingdoms and managed to free Jerusalem (without the blood drenched savagery that the Christian knights displayed when they took Jerusalem).

He stood off Richard the Lion heart for long years and ended the third crusade with victory for Islam. He was respected as the ruler of millions, Sultan of Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Palestine, indefatigable fighter for Islam, pious Muslim, a friend to be treasured and an enemy to be feared and respected. This man, whom even his enemies respected, ended his life without enough money to even pay for his grave. Perhaps his life is a strange echo of all Kurds till now.

It should be noted that their martial spirit, the mountain fastness of their homelands and their strong tribal social structure, all caused them to rebel against authority almost constantly. Mountains tend to make men out of anybody, like we have seen the Gurkhas, the Scots and the Swiss (Yes, the Swiss were very feared in the middle ages, and then they became all peaceful and made cuckoo clocks).

The near constant skirmishes between the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid Empire in Iran meant that the poor Kurds were almost always crushed between a rock (the Turks) on one side and a hard place (the Safavids) on the other side. In particular, the Safavids were very harsh on the Kurds, while not going as far as the Romans who sowed the Carthaginian fields with salt, practised the scorched earth policy in the Kurdish homelands.

The Safavids burnt entire villages and farms to the ground at the slightest threat of rebellion. Adding to this military blow was the economic blow coming from the shift away from land trade on the silk road to trading by sea. This shift lost them the earnings from trade in finance, caravansarais, the transport links, the animal husbandry etc. The treaty of Zohab signed between Sultan Murat IV and Shah Safi I on May 17, 1639 settled the frontier to some extent. After the fall of the Ayyubid Dynasty, the Kurds fell back into their traditional nomadic way of life till late into the Ottoman Empire when Kurdish Nationalism started to flower.

Three main factors lead to Kurdish Nationalism. First was the introduction of the concept of private property. For nomadic people, the fact that public rangeland was actually to be split up and "owned" would have been a deep shock, something akin to what the American-Indians felt after the arrival of the American settlers. Second was the rise in the concept of states. Late in the 1890s and early 1900s, states were being formed rapidly around that area, partially because of the dissolution and slow disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and additionally because of the British/French colonial process. Since everybody was clamouring for their own state, the Kurds got into the act as well. Finally, all those years of having no land, not belonging anywhere specific, not being integrated into any society, being scattered in so many different states, being shoved around all the time and abused by the different governments made them desire their own homeland with a vengeance.

Unfortunately, the Kurds were not strong enough in a political sense and they would find that despite their occupation of these pastoral lands, their lands were slowly being divided into states. Still, the nascent nationalism of the Kurds was strong enough. The Treaty of Sevres drawn up in 1920 provided for the existence of an independent/autonomous Kurdistan.

The Treaty of Sevres was a standard treaty of those days, imposed by the Allied Powers on the dregs of the Ottoman Empire. It abolished the Ottoman Empire, removed all Turkish rights over North Africa and vast swathes of the Middle East. Particularly, a roughly triangular shape on its side was carved out and noted as Kurdistan, bounded by Syria, Turkey, Armenia, Mesopotamia and Persia, in Part III, Section III, Article 62 to 64 of the treaty. The autonomous state would be converted to an independent state if the Kurdish populace will make representations to the League of Nations and if the League agrees. This is where I would snort at the idea of the League of Nations deciding on Kurdistan. The League was totally impotent. Was there any question that the Kurds didn't want Kurdistan? On what basis did the League ever think that the Turks will allow this to happen?

Then came Mustafa Kemal Attaturk, who pushed back almost all the Allies starting from the Italians, Russians, Greeks, British etc. All this culminated in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, with which the aspirations of the Kurds and the dreams of a Kurdistan got digested with the baklava, only three years after they seemed so close. With a resurgent Turkey and defeated Greeks and thoroughly tired allies (after the Great War), the poor Kurds were left out of the spoils of war.

Furthermore, the League of Nations gave away Mosul to Iraq in 1925 and the Kurds were cheated out of their nation and Kurdish nationalism seemingly imploded. There suddenly emerged many political parties, each with their respective armed wings. A less charitable person may as well as call them bandit gangs with a thin veneer of political representation. More like tribal warfare. Not only were they fighting amongst themselves, they were also fighting the various countries who ruled over "their" areas - Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. There was particularly vicious fighting between the Mesopotamian/Iraqi/British troops and the Kurds in 1931-32 as well as in 1944-45.

Since the end of the World War II, the history of Kurds has been a history of occupation, very heavy-handed repression, forced cultural assimilation and elements of genocide. The world knows more about the Turkish repression of the Kurds (specially due to Abdullah Ocalan and Turkey's application to join the EU), but Syria, Iraq and Iran were no kindly godfathers to these dispossessed and benighted people.

The Kurds are one of the largest single cultural groups in the world without their own nation-state and the reasons behind this are many, some of which have been explained above. In many ways, Kurdish nationalism is even more difficult to resolve than Palestinian nationalism. On one hand there are the pressures coming from the five countries of Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. On the other hand there are the internal fissures arising from rival power groups who face each country separately without one single overarching group.

Over the 50 years of the post war period, the Kurds have been used, abused and betrayed by everybody of consequence, by the British, the Americans, Russians, the Arabs and rest of the world. A short lived Kurdish Republic of Mahabad was established with the help of the USSR in Iran in 1946, but the Shah crushed that brutally and in short order. They were treated comparatively well in Iraq after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1956 by the various despots up to and including Saddam Hussein, but after the Iraqi's eyed the oil fields around Kirkuk, the Kurds were in trouble. After a major offensive by Iraq, a very large number moved into Iran, where at first they were welcomed but after the Iraqi détente with Iran the Kurds were betrayed again by Iran and the Kurdish rebellion was crushed. In 1988, more than 5000 Kurds were massacred in a poison gas attack.

Their position improved somewhat after the Gulf War I, when the Iraqi Kurds had a bit of a breather with their autonomous region under the northern no-fly zone established by the British and Americans, but Saddam had it in for the Kurds and massive repression took place all over again. An F-15 screaming overhead at 15000 feet cannot really do anything about Saddam's goons with guns popping off Kurds. Turkey had a big success when they captured Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of one of the biggest Turkish Kurd parties. Because of the pressures of an eventual EU accession, Turkey gave much more freedom to the Kurds and their cultural/political needs. Syria, that bastion of human rights and peace, forcibly removed Syrian citizenship from 120,000 Kurds in 1962 and made them effectively "stateless", giving rise to severe repression and hardship. I bet the Syrian Kurds are praying for Syria to consider EU membership so that their lot will be improved!

Fast forward to 2003. We all know the anxiety of the Turks with reference to the regime change in Iraq and the Kurdish question. They even parked some of their tanks deep inside Iraqi Kurdistan. With the removal of the detested regime of Saddam Hussein, they have finally managed to get a statelet of their own. It is not surprising that northern Iraq is the most peaceful region in Iraq now.

The Kurds know that their single chance of a statelet is to prove that they can have a peaceful state and manage it, too. Coalition force soldiers are getting ambushed and shot at in the other regions, but nary a peep in the northern region. The de-facto Kurdish state, which has been in existence for the past 12 odd years in northern Iraq, is getting well established. If things pan out, the Kurds will have a place to call home. It has been a long time coming, after betrayal by everybody, to let them to make a state of their own. The United Nations should look at the Kurds and their desire for a state very carefully and try to help them get one, which the UN's predecessor, the League of Nations promised and miserably failed to deliver.

Unfortunately, this pious hope won't get anywhere given the opposition of the other countries. So if the Kurds want their own state, they have to work on it themselves. If they manage to carve out an autonomous statelet in northern Iraq, that would be a brilliant first step. The chances of Iraq imploding are high, and I will not be surprised if these statelets (Kurdistan, Shiastan, Sunnistan and some other bits and bobs) are all what is left of Iraq once it is left alone. See Bosnia and Serbia, for example.

Anyway, good for the Iraqi Kurds, but what about the other 70 per cent of Kurds still living and being oppressed in other contiguous countries? What are their chances of having a nation-state of their own? What are the chances of further Kurdish rebellions breaking out in these countries? Now that there is an autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, still protected by the coalition troops, just what will Iran, Syria and Turkey do if their respective Kurd populations take up the sword for their rights and use Iraqi Kurdistan as a base? Hot pursuit, a la Israel? What will the world say to these people asking for their own state? Will it again forget these poor, benighted, oppressed people or make promises and not deliver or betray them again or finally allow them a land, even if only a crowded one, but one to call their own?

(Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta, currently working on a doctorate at Kings College in International Relations and Terrorism, also holds a Doctorate in Finance and Artificial Intelligence from Manchester Business School. He works in the City of London in various capacities in the Banking Sector. He also lectures at several British Universities.)

I used to think the Kurds could do no wrong (aside from their infighting), but my opinion was moderated when I read an account of how they preyed on the Armenian refugees of 1915:

From: Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, CHAPTER XXIV, THE MURDER OF A NATION

"When the victims had travelled a few hours from their starting place, the Kurds would sweep down from their mountain homes. Rushing up to the young girls, they would lift their veils and carry the pretty ones off to the hills. They would steal such children as pleased their fancy and mercilessly rob all the rest of the throng. If the exiles had started with any money or food, their assailants would appropriate it, thus leaving them a hopeless prey to starvation. They would steal their clothing, and sometimes even leave both men and women in a state of complete nudity. All the time that they were committing these depradations the Kurds would freely massacre, and the screams of women and old men would add to the general horror. Such as escaped these attacks in the open would find new terrors awaiting them in the Moslem villages. ..."

Not exactly good Samaritans. Granted, this was a long time ago.

Well a Muslim is a Muslim after all.

Apparently some Kurds are Christian and there have been large numbers of Christian Kurds in the past.

http://kurdish.com/kurdistan/religion/christianity.htm

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