What is Kurdistan?

The Kurds are a nation without a state, probably the largest stateless people in the world, comprising over 30 million people. Most historians concur that they belong to the Iranian branch of the great family of Indo-European peoples who live in a region which, in the days of Antiquity, was known as Media and Upper Mesopotamia. Kurdish nationalists consider the year 612 B.C., date of the conquest of the mighty Assyria by the Medians, to be the start of the Kurdish era. For them, we are now in the year 2613. After being known under a variety of names, the country has been called Kurdistan since the year 1150. It has a surface area of approximately 500,000 square kilometres and since 1923, has been divided across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. After fierce resistance for almost a century to Arab-Muslim invasions, the Kurds finally rallied to Islam, although they resisted Arab influences. Before they were islamized, the Kurds were mainly adepts Zarathustra, but also had large Christian and Jewish communities. After almost two centuries of unrest and clashes, in 1514 a Turkish- Kurdish pact was signed which recognized the Kurds' general independence in the running of their affairs in exchange for military alliance with the Turkish Sultan against the Shah of Persia in the event of war between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. During these years of peace, the Kurds, organised in seventeen semi-independent principalities, had plenty of time to develop a rich, original culture in their own language. In the early 19th century, the Ottoman Empire, having lost many territories, decided to annex Kurdistan. During the course of the 19th century, there was a whole series of uprising for Kurdish independence, which were all quelled by the Ottomans with the support of the Germans and the English. Finally, after WWI and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the international Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, an annex of the Treaty of Versailles, recognised the Kurds' right to set up the State of Kurdistan. However, this treaty, which was seen as unjust for the Turkish people, was never applied, and Turkish military resistance led to its being replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 which established Turkey's independence and the division of Kurdistan. Today, the majority of Kurds, some 15 to 20 million, live in Turkey which refuses to recognize their existence and cultural rights. As part of ultra-nationalist policy, the Kurds are submitted to intense assimilation, deportation, dispersion and systematic elimination of their dissident intellectual elites. Since June 1991, in a territory as big as Switzerland, 3.5 to 5 million Iraqi Kurds live independently, beyond the control of Saddam Hussein's regime. They have a parliament, three universities, schools, television stations, and over 120 publications in Kurdish. Furthermore, 10 million Kurds, the victims of ethnic and religious discrimination, live in Iran whose official ideology is Shiite. The majority of the Kurds are Sunni. Despite of the loss of their political and religious leaders, the Iranian Kurds are continuing their struggle, and the Kurdish question has yet to be resolved. The 1.5 million Kurds living in Syria have no collective linguistic or cultural rights. At the present time, over 300,000 Syrian Kurds are arbitrarily deprived of Syrian citizenship, prohibited from working in the public sector and considered as foreigners in their own country. To complete the picture, mention must also be made of the Kurds from the former Soviet Union who are said to number some 500,000.

(Rusen Verdi, Kurdish Institute Paris)