The Kurd struggle
Rashed Rahman
The Kurds are a people divided between four countries: Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. This reflects the fact that state boundaries were drawn in many parts of the world depending on factors other than ethnic homogeneity, reflecting the relative reach and control of territory by states that included peoples of the same ethnic origin, in the process dividing them. Closer to home, we can refer to the similar case of divided ethnic groups and nationalities: the Baloch (Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan) and the Pashtuns (Pakistan and Afghanistan). In the case of the Kurds, despite the division, sentiments of solidarity and expressed desire for self-determination in the shape of a unified Kurd state have been part of their history. However, the divisions into different states have proved stronger than this aspiration, leading to struggles by the Kurds within the confines of the respective states they find themselves in.
The Iraqi Kurds fought a long guerrilla war against their state for independence, led by Mulla Mustafa Barzani and his Peshmerga fighters from 1961 to 1975, but were eventually defeated, leading to the exile of Barzani in the Soviet Union and Iran, where he eventually died in 1979. After the overthrow of Saddam by the US in 2003, the Iraqi Kurds, now led by Mustafa’s son Masoud Barzani, gained autonomous control of their oil-rich territory in northern Iraq in a tenuous alliance with the new regime imposed on Baghdad through US arms. The Iranian Kurds took advantage of the Soviet Union’s control of northern Iran after WWII to declare an independent Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, but it was crushed after the Soviets withdrew. An attempt to resurrect the Mahabad Republic after the Iranian revolution of 1979 was also brutally crushed. Iraq, Iran and Turkey have long followed forced assimilationist policies against their respective Kurd populations.
In Turkey, recovering after WWI from the loss of the Ottoman empire, this forced assimilationist policy denied the Kurds’ very existence, dubbing them ‘Mountain Turks’ in the 1930s and 1940s. The words “Kurds”, “Kurdistan”, “Kurdish” were officially banned. After the military coup in 1980, the Kurdish language was officially prohibited in public and private life till 1991. Many who spoke, published, sang in Kurdish were arrested and imprisoned. It was initially against this assimilationist loss of identity and to gain cultural and political rights that the Kurdish Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane (PKK) was formed in 1978 under the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan with a programmatic demand for autonomy. However, it was the Turkish state’s continuing fierce repression, including systematic executions, imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, destruction of villages, the murder of Kurdish journalists, activists, politicians, the prosecution and sentencing of teachers providing, and students demanding education in Kurdish, and the entire panoply of the modern state’s oppressive capabilities that incrementally persuaded the PKK to pick up the gun and wage an armed guerrilla struggle for independence in 1984.
The trajectory of the PKK’s guerrilla war has constantly fluctuated between conflict and unilateral ceasefires by the PKK in an attempt to restore peace through negotiations. But successive Turkish regimes, including the present Erdogan government, have never abandoned the mailed fist even while paying lip service to a peaceful solution through negotiations. The Turkish military pressure over the years on the PKK resulted in retreats into Syria, Lebanon, and eventually northern Iraq, the Iraqi Kurd area, where the leadership of the PKK is currently based. Unfortunately, the prime leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, who was snatched in an operation in Nairobi allegedly with the help of the CIA and Israel, has been in solitary confinement in a prison in the Sea of Marmara since 1999. Even from that isolation, Ocalan has attempted again and again to negotiate a peaceful solution with successive Turkish governments but to no avail.
This time though, through the intermediary role of the pro-Kurdish DEM party, whose delegation met Ocalan in prison, his message announcing the “end of the armed struggle” of the PKK has been made public, adding the PKK should now dissolve itself. The message and its import have been accepted by the PKK leadership in Iraq. What remains to be seen is whether the Erdogan government will accede to the PKK’s demand for the release of Ocalan from his long and lonely incarceration, and whether that will be accompanied by negotiations that frame a new future for the Kurds in Turkey and, indeed, for Turkey as a whole.
The Kurd example, whether in Turkey, Iraq, Iran or Syria, points to the futility and risks involved in denying a minority nationality its cultural and political rights in an attempt to wipe out its very existence through forced assimilation. Let us hope wisdom prevails and Ankara finds a fresh path to apply salve on the deep wounds of its Kurd people and adopts a democratic attitude to the vexed Kurd problem.
We in Pakistan too should learn the lessons embedded in the Kurdish problem in the four states between whom the Kurdish people are divided. The flowering of diverse cultures is the best means of achieving genuine unity between the federating units of any state. Pakistan can only be enriched and strengthened by its open hearted embrace of its minority nationalities, allowing an organic coming together of our diverse peoples to forge a voluntary, respectful unity, not one maintained by the knout.
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