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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)
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