by AMIR TAHERI THE KURDS
In a region where there are no good choices, they’re an ally worth having
“I am puzzled by God’s wisdom That, among all nations, has denied Kurds a state of their own!”
THIS is how Kurdish poet Ahmadi Khani expressed his people’s feelings in “Love and Life,” the epic he composed in 1690.
Three centuries later, the Kurds still don’t have a state but represent a spider’s-web set of ethnic and sectarian fractures that threaten the integrity of at least five nations.
At the time Khani wrote, a majority of mankind lived in a dozen empires or a jigsaw of isolated tribal entities with the concept of nationstate unknown outside Europe.
Now, in a world dotted with 198 nation-states, the Kurds represent the largest “nation” without a “state.”
Stuck in the center of every Middle East conflict, the Kurds are a rarity: a sympathetic ally. Supporting them is not without risk, as it could cause even more upheaval in the region, but if the US acts strongly and prudently, the Kurds could help keep Iran, ISIS and others in check.
IN TURKEY
While there is no Kurdish state, there certainly is a Kurdish “space” designated by the Persian-Kurdish word “Kurdivary,” which means “Kurdishness.”
That space spans a large chunk of the Middle East plus a large Kurdish diaspora.
The many communities included in “Kurdivary” number between 30 and 40 million people, according to who is counting. Almost half live in Turkey, representing a quarter of the population. The second-largest community, more than 5 million, is in Iraq, and a further 4 million in Iran. Syria is home to 2.2 million Kurds. Armenia and Azerbaijan, both former Soviet republics, are home to around 1 million Kurds.
In Turkey, ethnic Kurdish voters helped sweep the conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power more than a decade ago and saw it through three successful general elections. In exchange the AKP, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now president of Turkey, took a series of measures to lift decades old anti-Kurdish measures, including a ban on even mentioning the word “Kurd” in the media.
In 1991, an elected member of the Turkish parliament, Leyla Zana, nicknamed “Kurdish la Pasionaria,” took the oath of office in Kurdish, provoking a national scandal. Ten years later, no one noticed what language newly elected parliamentarians used. Erdogan also negotiated a cease-fire with the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) a leftist guerrilla movement initially seeking to create a Sovietstyle republic. Now, however, with Erdogan developing neo-Ottoman fantasies, a growing number of Turkey’s Kurds have abandoned AKP in favor of a new outfit, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), that has emerged as the country’s major opposition force.
Relations between AKP and the Kurds have also suffered from Erdogan’s decision to revive the military campaign against the PKK in the hope of appealing to the Turkish nationalist groups. Kurds were especially shaken when Erdo g an turned a blind eye to the ISIS campaign to seize Kurdish territory and conduct massive ethnic cleansing in favor of Arab Sunni Muslims.
Last weekend, 99 people were killed at a rally that was calling for an end to fighting between the Turkish government and PKK. It’s unclear who was behind the bombing, though officials were pointing fingers at ISIS.
In next month’s general election, Kurdish voters may spell the end of Erdogan’s domination of Turkish politics. More importantly, perhaps, Turkey’s Kurds seem to have undergone a major ideological shift away from both Stalinism and romantic 19th century-style nationalism in favor of pluralist and democratic positions.
The idea of a truly democratic Turkey in which Kurds enjoy a large measure of autonomy within semi-federal structures is gaining ground with a young generation of politicians symbolized by the HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas.
Such a scenario could provide Turkey with a new basis for longterm stability.
IN SYRIA
In neighboring Syria the picture is different.
There, Kurds are divided into three camps.
One camp, consisting of half a dozen groups and parties, has sought an arrangement with the Bashar al-Assad government in Damascus in exchange for promised concessions such as the restoration of Syrian nationality to over 1.2 million ethnic Kurds who were declared “non-Syrians” in the 1970s.
Another camp consists of several associations and tribes working with Iraqi Kurds, who are led by Massoud Barzani, president of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan. The goal is to create an extended Kurdish autonomous region in both Iraq and Syria. That camp is backed by Barzani’s Peshmerga fighters in his 50,000-strong national guard.
A third camp is represented by the PKK, which has had a presence in Syria for almost four decades. Its Syrian branch, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) has concluded that Syria will never again emerge as a unitary state and that time has come for Kurds to carve out a mini-state of their own in at least three Syrian provinces bordering Turkey and Iraq.
Turkey is not alone in opposing such a scheme.
Iran also is concerned because a mini-Kurdish state dominated by PKK would block the channel that Iran needs to send men and arms to the rest of Syria and beyond it to Lebanon. The PKK has retaliated by reactivating is Iranian branch, known as Kurdish Party of Life (PJAK), which has carried out a series of attacks in western Iran since 2013. That, in turn, has soured relations between Tehran and the PKK further, with the Iranians no longer
allowing Kurdish fighters attacking targets in Turkey to use safe havens in Iranian territory.
Russia is equally hostile to the PKK scheme because Kurdish secession could speed up the end of Assad’s regime in Damascus while threatening the Syrian coastal enclave that President Vladimir Putin hopes to transform into a permanent base in the Mediterranean.
IN IRAN
Making things more complicated are the rifts between the Kurdish movements.
Iraqi Kurdistan has flourished, after the US invasion of Iraq gave them more anonymity. It sees a Kurdish mini-state in Syria as a potential rival for the leadership of all Kurds. This is why Barzani has drawn closer to Turkey, a move that has sharpened differences with PKK.
Barzani’s pro-Ankara tilt, in turn, has angered Tehran which, as the principal backer of President Assad, finds itself on the opposite side of Turkey in the Syrian war. Thus, Tehran is now pulling no punches to dislodge Barzani from his presidential position in Erbil. Iran is encouraging a complex power struggle among Iraqi Kurds that could split the area into two units.
Iraq President Fuad Masum, himself an ethnic Kurd, is working hard to keep the two halves of Iraqi “Kurdistan” together.
One important result of the internecine feuds of the Kurds is Barzani’s decision to kick the plan for declaring independence from Iraq into long grass while he fights to prolong his presidential term which ended last August.
On Iran’s homefront, meanwhile, the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), one of the country’s oldest political parties, has for the first time committed it- self to working for regime change in Tehran. A smaller, left-wing outfit Kurdish Toilers’ Party (Komala) long has pursued a strategy of armed resistance against the Islamic Republic.
KURDISTAN RISING?
Partly thanks to the spread of social media, the concept of “Kurdivary” is more alive than ever, appealing to the imagination of far larger numbers of ethnic Kurds across the globe.
For instance, when Tehranborn Omid Kordestani, an ethnic Kurd but now a US citizen, was named CEO of Twitter last week, a tsunami of pride hit “Kurdivary” across the globe.
What would a united Kurdish state look like?
It would consist of chunks of territory from Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan and Armenia. Its largest city, in terms of number of inhabitants, would be Kerman- shah, in Iran, while perhaps a majority of Kurds want Amid (Diar-Bekyr) in Turkey as the capital of their dream state. Thousands of ethnic Kurds from the US, Germany, France and even Australia might rush to the dream state to help build it as did Italians from all over the world when an Italian state was created in 1870.
However, the mirror image of that dream could be a nightmare of epic proportions with at least four Middle Eastern states determined to crush the secessionist aspirations of their Kurdish citizens while rival Kurdish parties would fight among themselves over who should be in the driver seat.
Those internal differences are significant. The Kurds speak four different, though closely associated, languages, written in four different alphabets- Arabic, modified Persian, Turkish-Latin, and Cyrillic. Though a majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, they are divided into numerous “schools,” not to mention Sufi fraternities. Even Shiite Kurds are divided into many sects, including the People of the Truth (Ahle-Haq) and Alevites.
Zoroastrian Kurds, better known as Yazidis, form an important community of their own, as do Kurdish Christians.
Inside the Kurdish majority areas and on their peripheries are a number of other ethnic groups, including the Faylieh in Iraq and the Elamites in Iran that, though closely linked with Kurdivary, could play “identity” games of their own.
The Kurdivary space is also dotted by other religious and ethnic groups notably Turcomans, Azeri and Armenians.
In other words, the mosaic that is the Middle East could be broken again and again.
ON OUR SIDE
Kurdish particularism is, in part, a natural reaction to the emergence of pan-Arab, panTurkish and pan-Iranist nationalisms as developed in the past 100 years under European influence, with the dream of imposing a single national-cultural narrative on a region steeped in diversity from the dawn of history.
In more recent decades, pan-Islamism, in both its Sunni and Shiite versions, has fostered a similar ambition with tragic results.
By rejecting uniformity in the name of narrow nationalism or Islam, the Kurds have rendered a great service to the people of the Middle East as a whole. The Kurdish quest for diversity was often backed by the Western democracies. including the United States. Under President Obama, however, the US was put in retreat mode in the Middle East, removing the sole power capable of influencing virtually all segments of Kurdivary.
Kurds of all denominations are now at the forefront of the struggle to contain and ultimately destroy ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
Despite more than a year of airstrikes by the US and other NATO allies, the only major defeats suffered by ISIS were the work of Kurdish fighters. The battle of Kobani, a Kurdish city in Syria close to the Turkish border, will enter history as the first to end with ISIS being thrown out of a major part of its conquests.
If played right, the Kurdish card represents a counterbalance to dictatos like Assad, Islamic radicals like ISIS and the dreams of an Iranian empire. They could help negotiate the entire Middle East out of the current dangerous bend in its history with the promise of a new regional order that reflects its immense ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity.
But that requires leadership on a scale that only the United States could provide — and hasn’t.