What’s That You Say? Kurds, like Iranians, celebrate the New Year on or about March 21. Kurds call it Newroz. Iranians say Nowruz. There the difference ends. The Iranians have their own country. The Kurds do not.
Kani Xulam, a Turkish Kurd, along with a number of other activists like himself, brought the image of statelessness home to Americans in Washington, D.C. on March 21, 2024. They hung a great banner from the Dumbarton Bridge carrying Q Street over Rock Creek Parkway, an arboreal commuter road through the center of Washington, D.C. Daily traffic volume is about 50,000 cars a day.
Why Did They Do That? Here’s a simple but complicated explanation.
As Mr. Xulam stated, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne did away with the rights of the Kurds, despite previous promises made by the victorious wartime powers. What happened? According to background given by state-run BBC,
In the early 20th Century, many Kurds began to consider the creation of a homeland - generally referred to as "Kurdistan". After World War One and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Western allies made provision for a Kurdish state in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres.
Such hopes were dashed three years later, however, when the Treaty of Lausanne, which set the boundaries of modern Turkey, made no provision for a Kurdish state and left Kurds with minority status in their respective countries. Over the next 80 years, any move by Kurds to set up an independent state was brutally quashed.
Consequently, as Kani Xulam commented, 50 million Kurds are, essentially, stateless. “In Turkey, they face legal prosecution. In Iran, they face beatings and hangings. In Iraq, they have been gassed like rats. And in Syria, they have been subjected to varied citizenship laws.”
But There’s A Problem That Needs A Solution. The United States has always used the Kurds as a political football, backing them when convenient, abandoning them to their fate when inconvenient. Here’s a brief rundown of American treatment of the Kurds.
As The Intercept remarked in 2019, “The U.S. has now betrayed the Kurds a minimum of eight times over the past 100 years. The reasons for this are straightforward…”
· “On the one hand, the Kurds are a perfect tool for U.S. foreign policy. We can arm the Kurds in whichever of these countries is currently our enemy, whether to make trouble for that country’s government or to accomplish various other objectives. On the other hand, we don’t want the Kurds we’re utilizing to ever get too powerful. If that happened, the other Kurds — i.e., the ones living just across the border in whichever of these countries are currently our allies — might get ideas about freedom and independence.”
· “We armed Iraqi Kurds during the rule of Abdel Karim Kassem, who governed Iraq from 1958 to 1963, because Kassem was failing to follow orders. We then supported a 1963 military coup — which included a small supporting role by a young Saddam Hussein — that removed Kassem from power. We immediately cut off our aid to the Kurds and, in fact, provided the new Iraqi government with napalm to use against them.”
· “During the 1970 negotiations for autonomy with Iraq, the U.S. covertly backed Kurdish rebels in Iraq in order to help the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran. In 1975, however, Iraq and Iran settled their disputes in Algiers, and the U.S., led by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, promptly abandoned the Kurds. “Their adversaries, knowing of the impending aid cut-off, launched an all-out search-and-destroy campaign the day after the agreement was signed.” (Foreign Policy Research Institute. 2019)
· “During the 1980s, the Iraqi government moved on to actual genocide against the Kurds, including the use of chemical weapons. [But] because [President Ronald Reagan] liked the damage Saddam [Hussein} was doing to Iran, it opposed congressional efforts to impose sanctions on Iraq. “
· “As the U.S. bombed Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991, George H.W. Bush famously called on “the Iraqi military and Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside. Both Iraqi Shias in southern Iraq and Iraqi Kurds in northern Iraq heard this and tried to do exactly that…. The U.S. military stood down as Iraq massacred the rebels across the country.”
· During the Clinton administration in the 1990s, these Kurds, the Iraqi Kurds, were the good Kurds. Because they were persecuted by Iraq, our enemy, they were worthy of U.S. sympathy. But the Kurds a few miles north in Turkey started getting uppity too, and since they were annoying our ally, they were the bad Kurds. The U.S. sent Turkey huge amounts of weaponry, which it used — with U.S. knowledge — to murder tens of thousands of Kurds and destroy thousands of villages.”
· …"The post-war independence of Iraqi Kurds made Turkey extremely nervous. In 2007, the U.S. allowed Turkey to carry out a heavy bombing campaign against Iraqi Kurds inside Iraq.” (Now, also, including Syria.)
COMMENT. American Kurdish Information Network (Kurdistan.org). Provides additional information for those interested.
J. Michael Springmann is an attorney, author, political commentator, and former diplomat, with postings to Germany, India, and Saudi Arabia. He previously authored, Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World: An Insider’s View, recounting how the U.S. created and used Islamic Terrorism. Additionally, he penned Goodbye, Europe? Hello, Chaos? Merkel’s Migrant Bomb, an analysis of the alien wave sweeping the Continent. He currently practices law in the Washington D.C. Area. Internationally-recognized as a knowledgeable pundit, he is a frequent commentator on Arab, Iranian, and Russian news programs.
Blacklisted by the US news media, he is also on the Ukraine’s “Enemies List”, having questioned, inter alia, that country’s refusal to honor the Minsk Accords and for stating that its government is Nazified.