Rewarding The Palestinians While Ignoring The Kurds

By Joseph Puder,
June 11, 2010 5:21pm

The Quartet consisting of the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union is committed to a Palestinian state, or as it is commonly phrased: “A Two State Solution.” Historic justice compels one to ask, “Why isn’t the Quartet similarly committed to a Kurdish state?

Unlike the Palestinians who are indistinguishable from the other 22 sovereign Arab states in the region — by virtue of their ethnicity, culture, religion and language — the Kurds have a distinct history, culture, and language (the two Kurdish dialects are Karmangi and Sirani). And, whereas the totality of the people claiming to be “Palestinians” number around six million — including those in the Palestinian “diaspora” — there are over 30 million Kurds spread throughout Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria — excluding those Kurds who live abroad. And while the Quartet seeks to add yet another Arab state — Palestine to the list, there is not a single sovereign Kurdish state, nor for that matter a region or a state (except in recent years in Northern Iraq) where Kurds enjoy full cultural autonomy, not to speak of full political rights the way the Palestinians do.

Why then has the international community ignored the self-determination of the Kurdish people? Before delving into the history of the last 95 years, suffice it to say that the power and influence of Arab oil was a major factor. Western nations craved the oil of Arabia and the Persian Gulf, while Kurdistan was too remote. The Kurds have lived as a minority among the rival and expansionist Turks (Ottoman Empire), the Iranians (Persian Empire) and the Arabs, but unlike the Arabs, the Kurds did not resort to suicide bombing and airplane hijacking, albeit they resisted bitterly and fought their Arab, Iranian and Turkish oppressors.

In 1914, as World War I began, the Western Allies sought out the Kurds as allies to fight the common enemy — the Turks. Britain and France promised the Kurdish tribes independence, and most of the Kurdish tribes were keen on aiding the Western Allies’ war efforts against the Turks.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson called for the independence of all the non-Turkish peoples (minorities) in the defeated Ottoman Empire. The Kurds sent a delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference as did the Arabs in the person of Prince Feisal, the son of the Sharif (guardian) of Mecca. And while the Arabs as a whole did little to aid the allies’ war efforts, the Kurds had contributed significantly. While the British rewarded the Arabs with the states of Iraq and Transjordan, and the French eventually created the Arab states of Syria and Lebanon, the Kurds received nothing; they were robbed of their freedom and independence.

To be fair, the allies did incorporate a provision for an independent Kurdistan in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres — a treaty that the father of modern Turkey Kamal Ataturk refused to sign. The Treaty of Lausanne, signed by Turkey and the allies in 1923, omitted references to Kurdish independence. Kurdistan vanished as Iran and Turkey incorporated the Kurdish areas, while Britain and France incorporated the rest of the Kurdish areas into the Arab states of Iraq and Syria (which had not existed previously).

The British similarly betrayed the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised a Jewish homeland in all of historic Palestine. In 1922, to accommodate Abdullah, the other son of the Sharif of Mecca, they severed off 72 percent of Mandatory Palestine to create the Emirate of Transjordan.

The Kurds, until the latter part of the 19th century, enjoyed relative autonomy under the Ottomans — as they guarded the Ottoman’s eastern frontier with the rival Persian Empire. The weakened Ottomans at the dawn of the 20th century centralized their administration, and in the process terminated the Badarkhan Kurdish dynasty that had ruled the Kurdistan region within the larger Ottoman Empire for over 300 years.

In the aftermath of World War I, as the victorious colonial powers apportioned pieces of the Ottoman Empire, they separated the contiguous Kurdish tribes across national borders (between the Turkish-Syrian, Turkish-Iraqi and Turkish-Iranian borders in particular) making unity among the Kurds impossible. Still, sporadic Kurdish revolts occurred in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Kurds endured ethnic cleansing in Iraq (under Saddam Hussein) and in Syria (under the Ba’athist regime of Hafez al-Assad and, today under his son, Bashar al-Assad) and, during the Nasserite period of the United Arab Republic, 1958-1961. More than 5,000 Kurds in Halabja were gassed by the Iraqi Army and, in 1991 when the first Bush administration encouraged them to rebel against Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime tens of thousands of Kurds were murdered and left defenseless against Iraqi air attacks. Today, in Iran, the Kurds are chafing under the cruel regime of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who have habitually persecuted the Kurds.

While the Obama administration has sent high level goodwill ambassadors to Damascus, Washington ignores the al-Assad regime’s persecution of the Kurds in Syria. The discovery of oil in the region fueled the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds and more than 160,000 Kurds have been stripped of their citizenship. The lives of those who have remained in the Kurdish region of northeast Syria have been subjected to the process of Arabization.

President Barack Obama’s quest to find a new understanding with the Muslim world seems to have focused only on the terrorist entities in the Middle East — the Palestinians and their Iranian and Syrian supporters. Interestingly, the human rights and the right of self-determination of the Kurdish people has not been a consideration for this administration that underscores the need to protect the human rights of captured al-Qaida terrorists.

At Sharm el-Sheikh, earlier this month, Egypt, international donors, and a large cadre of largely western donors pledged $4.5 billion to bolster the Palestinian economy and help them rebuild Gaza. The U.S. pledged $900 million of the taxpayer’s dollars; money that will, undoubtedly, end up being used to purchase weapons and pay the salaries of the gangsters and terrorists that make up the Mahmoud Abbas regime. Invariably, some of the money will reach Hamas as it has in the past. Yet, no such effort has been made to aid the Kurds in Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

Where is the European Union and America’s moral obligation towards the Kurds? And, why don’t the Kurds deserve the same consideration and commitment to statehood and financial welfare as the Palestinians do? It is high time that the American people begin to ask their representatives these questions.

Joseph Puder can be reached at jpuder2001@yahoo.com.