A rchive Date
[ 27-04-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mansur_london.html
Autonomy likely the Kurds' best hope
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the London Free Press
April 16, 2003
The fall of Saddam Hussein is a bittersweet victory for the Kurds.
Their modern history since the First World War has been a series of promises made and betrayed by the great powers, mainly Britain and then the United States, and their national rights contained and crushed by successor states of the Ottoman empire established between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.
The land through which the Euphrates and Tigris flow was known in antiquity as Mesopotamia and later as the Fertile Crescent. It is the crossroads of cultures and civilizations, ethnicities and religions, where the burden of history often suffocates people and where tyrants have been as common as prophets.
Kurds are one among many ethnicities in the Fertile Crescent. They are an ancient people belonging to the Indo-European family of languages related to Persian and Sanskrit. They were mentioned by Xenophon, a Greek historian of the 5th century B.C., writing about Greeks, including himself, who, retreating from Persia through hostile territory, encountered a mountain people, "very war-like and not subject to the [Persian] king."
The spread of Islam, beginning in the seventh century of the common era, penetrated the Taurus and Zagros mountains that form the natural boundaries of the Fertile Crescent. The Kurds, as did the Persians and the Arabs, accepted Islam and then helped the faith founded by Mohammed be carried beyond their lands north and east.
Kurds distinguished themselves as warriors, diplomats and occasional rulers. The most famous of Kurds was Salah al-Din Yusuf -- Saladin of legendary fame who fought the Crusaders and regained Jerusalem for Muslims in 1187. Saladin was born in 1138 in Tikrit, a little known Mesopotamian town north of Baghdad. Here, 800 years later Saddam Hussein was born and there are no two people in history connected by place of birth whose characters and destinies stand in such polar opposition.
The heart of Kurdish territory is in the mountains providing them sanctuary from their adversaries, Arabs, Persians and Turks. Movement of tribes and inter-marriages led to complex racial mix, yet divisions exist that neither religion nor politics have entirely erased.
The estimate for the Kurdish population vary from a low of 20 million to a high of 25 million. As a people distinct in identity, hence a nation, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the region deprived of a state of their own.
Kurds are spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Armenia. In Turkey, they constitute about 20 per cent of the population, or about 14 million, and in Iraq they are 22 per cent or five million.
Following The First World War, Britain and France carved out of the Ottoman lands of the Fertile Crescent the states of Iraq and Syria that included within their boundaries Kurdish areas. Both were unwilling to grant any autonomy to Kurds in the new states that eventually would come to be dominated by Arabs.
The idea of Kurdish autonomy was briefly entertained in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920 by the victorious allies, but then abandoned in the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 that recognized the boundaries of the new state of Turkey, including Kurdish areas, consolidated by Mustafa Kemal and his army.
The Kurds were abandoned. A Kurdish state, were it to exist, would be larger in population than any of the Arab states in the region except Egypt. In contrast, Palestine was partitioned in 1947 into two states, one Jewish and one Arab.
Thus the Kurds were left to face alone the pitiless wrath of their historic adversaries controlling undemocratic and authoritarian states occasionally tending to genocidal racism. as in Saddam's Iraq.
In 1991, Iraqi Kurds were encouraged to rise against Saddam's regime and then betrayed one more time by the Americans.
Now, finally, a fraction of Kurds may get freedom in some form of autonomy, yet to be negotiated with a future regime in Baghdad, by disowning their hopes of ever acquiring a state for themselves.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays. Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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