Many enormous impediments stand in the way of Kurdish independence. None of their nations would let them go without a fierce struggle— ironic, considering the way Kurds are mistreated and looked down upon by their respective compatriots. After eighty years of separation by international borders, the Kurds have also become considerably estranged from one another; each group has taken on some of the characteristics of their nation. And the divide between the Iranian Kurds and those in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey dates back far earlier—to the days of the Ottoman-Safavids and, before that, the Ardalans. A large number of Kurds, especially in Turkey, are well integrated into mainstream society and no longer live in predominantly Kurdish areas or speak Kurdish. The Kurds also lack a strong military, adequate financial and economic resources, organization, education, and, perhaps most important, a unified, Pan-Kurdish leadership. The Kurds remain a fractured people on many levels—torn between countries, regions, political parties, tribes, families, dialects, outlooks, the old and the new.
And yet, and yet . . . Modern technology, coupled with oppression, has changed everything. Through satellite communications and the Internet, the Kurds have their own television shows, radio broadcasts, publications, and websites, all of which are theoretically available to every Kurd anywhere in the world. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds, forced out of their homelands by politics, now live in Europe or the United States, where they are steadily gaining advanced degrees, power, and influence. The Kurds may not have their own physical nation, but they do have an international cyberspace state, along with a quickening sense of national identity that, decades from now, may yet give rise to Pan-Kurdish unification—perhaps in the form of a federated Kurdish nation-state. I do believe that the time of armed Kurdish conflict is over, at least for the foreseeable future—the Iraqi peshmerga are not what they once were, while the Kurds of Iran and Turkey are ineffably weary. The Kurds are also a smart, pragmatic, industrious, and increasingly modernized people. They know that there is more than one way to win a war.
I THOUGHT BACK to my last stop in Kurdistan—Dogubayazit, Turkey, situated at the northern edge of Kurdish territory. Celil and I had traveled there from Hakkari, backtracking through Van to continue farther north along the eastern shore of Lake Van, over a dry, brown plateau enclosed by a powder blue dome of sky. Along the way, we passed Çaldiran, the site of the 1514 battle that established the boundary between the Ottoman and Safavid empires and divided the Kurds. Built largely of cement block homes with corrugated iron roofs, Çaldiran looked neglected and flimsy. I wondered how many of its citizens even knew of the momentous battle that once took place there.
Nearing Dogubayazit, the landscape changed. Ridge after ridge of mountain hills, each a different brown, appeared, along with giant cow-dung patties of hardened black lava. On the reddish earth between the patties sprouted green grasses upon which sheep grazed. In the distance rose the smooth, cone-shaped peaks of the Greater and Lesser Mount Ararats, shrouded in mist from afar, but bathed in shafts of sunlight closer up, with stocking caps of snow.
With Iran less than twenty miles away, Dogubayazit was a frontier town, containing a handful of muddy streets lined with small storefronts, an Internet center or two, and many poorly kept businessmen’s hotels. The gendarmes said to have dominated the place even a year before had been replaced by villagers with pushcarts and animals, and a surprising number of tourists. Israeli, European, and Japanese, they were in town to see Mount Ararat and the Ishak Pasha palace, spectacularly perched on a red outcropping, outlined against the sky like a dream.
An amalgam of Ottoman, Georgian, Persian, and Armenian styles, the palace was a hundred years in the making, begun in 1685 and completed in 1784 by the Kurdish chieftain for whom it is named. Dominating its silhouette was a pointy striped minaret and a round dome that reminded me of the caps that many Kurdish men in Turkey wore.
The drive to Ishak Pasha took us past a huge military outpost filled with rows of tanks and trucks, and up a steep red road that quickly burrowed into the hills. Arriving at the palace, we passed through a towering arched gate to enter a serene courtyard in which a young British artist sketched. We wandered through empty room after empty room, past window after window, each with heart-stopping views of the mist-filled plain below, the silver snows of Mount Ararat gleaming in the distance. From a loudspeaker overhead came a lonesome Kurdish melody, sung by a woman dengbej. “Mother, mother, today is Saturday, come and wash my hair and braid it,” Celil translated. “Lawike Metini, my beloved, come and ask my father for my hand, and if he refuses, kidnap me.”
Beyond the castle was a mosque, and the tomb of Ahmad-i Khani (circa 1650 to 1706), the most famous of all Kurdish poets. Probably originally from Hakkari, Khani is best known for his long literary poem Mem u Zin, which he versified from a famous Kurdish folktale. Revered by the Kurds as their national epic, Mem u Zin tells the story of handsome Mem of the Alan tribe and Zin of the Botan tribe, who fall in love. But Zin is already betrothed to another, and her father, the Botan emir, has a villainous minister named Beko, who tries to keep the two would-be lovers apart. Beko suggests that the emir and Mem play chess; if Mem wins, he may have Zin, and if he loses, he will be imprisoned. Mem agrees and is winning the match until Beko distracts him. He is thrown into jail. When he is released, he dies suddenly. Zin visits his grave and dies of heartbreak, to be buried beside him. Mem’s good friend Qeretajdin, who has been out hunting, returns to the city and goes to the cemetery with the emir and Beko. The graves are opened, and Mem and Zin are found embracing. Beko sticks out his head to leer and Qeretajdin beheads him. A drop of blood falls between the lovers and a thornbush grows between them, separating Mem and Zin even in death. Whenever the bush is cut down, it grows back again.
But Khani’s Mem u Zin is about much more than doomed love. Living at a time of great tribal conflict, with the Kurds divided between the Ottomans and Safavids, Khani was the first to give written voice to the Kurds’ longing for self-determination—one century before the French Revolution conceived of the idea of a nation-state. Scholars posit Mem and Zin as the two parts of Kurdistan, divided between Ottomans and Safavids. Beko personifies the disunity between the Kurds that keeps them apart; for all the Kurds’ powerful external enemies, their most dangerous enemy comes from within.
Nation building even before the term was invented, Khani begins his poem with a long introduction in which he praises God and discusses the place of the Kurds among nations. He writes of his people’s subjugation, dispossession, divisiveness, independence, and courage. His words resonate as much today as they did three hundred years ago:
Look! Our misfortune has reached its zenith,
Has it started to come down do you think?
Or will it remain so,
Until comes upon us the end of time?
Is it possible, I wonder, that for us too,
A star will emerge out of the firmament?
Let luck be on our side for once.
Afterword
Two years after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, three years after my travels through the region, much in Kurdistan—the poverty, the dispossession, the repression—remains the same. Yet a number of important changes of enormous potential have occurred, and I remain cautiously optimistic regarding the future of the Kurds.
For the past year, Iraq has consistently dominated the front-page headlines, often with reports of horrific violence: suicide bombings, kidnappings, mob lynchings, beheadings. But with only few exceptions—most notably the February 2004 bombings of Kurdish party headquarters, which left 109 dead—almost all of this violence has occurred outside the Kurdish region. While the rest of Iraq has roiled and burned, Kurdistan has remained remarkably calm and has in fact flourished, due in large part to the effective Kurdish regional government and peshmerga. Foreign investment has been funneling in, exiled Iraqi Kurds have returned home, Kurdish culture has blossomed, and new schools, roads, water treatment plants, shopping centers, hotels, restaurants, caf�
�s, and small businesses have opened up.
During the national elections of January 30, 2005—Iraq’s first democratic elections in over fifty years—the Iraqi Kurds turned out by the hundreds of thousands. Virtually all voted for the Kurdistan Alliance List, a combined ticket of KDP and PUK candidates; the two parties had set aside their differences in order to win the largest possible bloc of seats in the 275-seat National Assembly (75, in the end, putting them in second place behind the Shiites’ United Iraqi Alliance, which won 140). The Kurds’ large showing guaranteed them major positions in the new government and an influential role in the forging of the new constitution.
In a jubilant post-election mood, many Kurds saw themselves at a historic turning point. “Indeed it was a great day in the history of Iraq . . .” one Kurdish friend wrote me in an e-mail. “For the Kurdish people it was their first chance in their life to vote for their future, for freedom, peace, and democracy.” “Oh my God, for people in my age group and older this is unbelievable . . .” wrote another. “The new experience of free voting today for Iraqis was huge, just huge.”
Other Iraqi Kurds were not as sanguine. The elections were problematic on the regional level. The joint KDP-PUK slate for the 111-seat regional Kurdish parliament—which also included candidates from Arab, Turcoman, and Christian parties—meant that the powers-that-be had already decided on the distribution of seats pre-election. As one Kurd put it, “Democracy is supposed to be about choice, but where was the choice here? It was like having George Bush and John Kerry on the same ticket.” That complaint echoed other ongoing complaints about the parties’ continuing nepotism, the near impossibility of obtaining jobs without party membership, and the parliament representatives receiving fat salaries for doing little. Far from diminishing post-Saddam, as many Iraqi Kurds had hoped, the parties’ abuse of power appeared to be as fully entrenched in early 2005 as it was during my 2002 visit.
The question of an independent Iraqi Kurdistan remains a volatile issue. The vast majority of Iraqi Kurds want nothing to do with their Arab compatriots. In a February 2004 petition delivered to the United Nations, 1.7 million Kurds—about half the Iraqi Kurdish population—voted for independence. An informal referendum held on Iraqi election day resulted in a similar statistic, with 1.9 million, or 95 percent of those polled, voting for independence. Nonetheless, most Kurdish politicians—no matter what they might hope for in their hearts—remain publicly committed to building a unified, federated Iraq. Given the many impediments to independence, theirs is the more realistic position, but it is creating a widening rift between the party leaders and their constituents.
Oil-rich Kirkuk remains at the heart of the debate about Iraqi Kurdish independence. Kurds, Arabs, and Turcomans all continue to claim the city as their own. Disturbingly little progress has been made regarding the property claims of Kurds ousted during Saddam’s “Arabization” campaign, and animosity between the three ethnic groups is riding high. Some say civil war is right around the corner. After the January 2005 elections, Kurds claimed victory as well as a majority presence in Kirkuk, but those results were not conclusive. The election committee had allowed about 70,000 Kurdish refugees in the city to vote, leading the major Arab parties, fearing the “busing in” of ineligible Kurdish voters, to boycott the elections.
The Iraqi Kurds face other worrisome issues as well: The majority Shiites might try to establish an Islamic state, Iran might try to unduly influence the Shiite politicians, Turkey might threaten the Iraqi Kurds’ autonomy and ambitions. But the Kurds’ strong showing in the Iraqi national election promises to help mitigate these and other potential problems. With the second-largest bloc in the National Assembly, and a two-thirds vote needed to pass the new constitution, the Kurds are in an excellent position to both limit the Shiites’ power and to push through various demands of their own, including the continuation of their semi-autonomous zone. As long as Iraq holds together—a big “if,” granted—the Kurds should be able to stand fast against their Arab compatriots and other threats.
This past year has brought change to Turkey. In December 2004, the European Union finally voted to allow Turkey to begin membership negotiations in October 2005. That vote was deemed an enormous victory for the republic, even though full-fledged membership is still at least a decade away, due to the multitude of conditions—including an improvement in minority rights—that the EU has placed upon the country.
Over the past year, Turkey’s human rights record has continued to improve, but only slowly and fitfully, with two steps forward, one step back. Hopefully, the setting of an EU negotiations date will lead the republic to work harder to implement the many bold reforms it passed over the last two years, but only time will tell.
On the plus side of Turkey’s 2004 human rights record: In June, Turkish state radio and television started broadcasting limited weekly shows in Kurdish, and the new law abolishing the state security courts—often used to prosecute people for non-violent, antigovernment opinions—went into effect. Also in June, Leyla Zana, the Kurdish parliamentarian jailed in 1994 after speaking Kurdish during her swearing-in ceremony, was released from prison, along with her three colleagues jailed for the same offense. In October, Istanbul’s first and Turkey’s sixth private Kurdish language education center opened its doors. And throughout the year, there were fewer reported cases of torture and ill-treatment in Turkish prisons.
On the minus side: Although Zana and her colleagues were released, they were forced to stand retrial, starting in late February 2005; even if they are convicted, they are unlikely to go back to prison. Despite the abolition of the state security courts, several writers received prison sentences for non-violent expressions of opinion; one, Hakan Albayrak, was sentenced for fifteen months under the “Law on Crimes Against Atatürk” for writing that prayers were not said at Atatürk’s funeral. Despite the fewer number of reported cases of torture and ill-treatment in prisons, incidents of beating, sexual assault, and the use of electric shock and hosing with cold water continued. The Turkish government did nothing to help the hundreds of thousands of Kurds displaced during the civil war to return to their villages, and abuses by the village guards continued.
Complicating matters was the fact that KONGRA-GEL, as the PKK renamed itself, declared an end to its five-year unilateral ceasefire on June 1, 2004. The group resumed attacks in the southeast and was also blamed by the Turkish security forces for the bombing of two hotels in Istanbul in August, which left two dead and eleven injured. Predictably, the Turkish state responded to the rebels’ attacks with a heavy hand, igniting Kurdish fears of renewed antiterror operations. The resumed armed conflict resulted in about 220 dead and 125 wounded in 2004, according to the Diyarkabir Human Rights Association.
Many of Turkey’s Kurds are quietly questioning why KONGRA-GEL/ PKK is again resorting to violence at a time when human rights conditions are finally improving; the guerrillas’ actions are putting the Kurds’ recent gains at risk. A deeply ingrained distrust of Turkey’s sincerity in reform is a large part of the answer. “We’ve come a long way,” Sezgin Tanrikulu, the human rights lawyer I met in Diyarbakir, told The New York Times in October. “But no matter how harshly we condemn, the idea of violence continues to have a hold on the minds of young people. To expel it, there have to be much more courageous steps toward cultural rights and democratization.”
About 5,000 KONGRA-GEL/PKK guerrillas continue to hide out in the mountains of northern Iraq. Turkey has repeatedly asked the Iraqis and the United States to take action against the rebels, but has thus far failed in its request, as the troops already have their hands full battling the Iraqi insurgents. Turkey has managed to convince Iran to cooperate, however. In July, Iran launched attacks on the far fewer number of KONGRA-GEL/PKK guerrillas hiding in its mountains—resulting in twelve deaths—and declared the group to be a terrorist organization.
Meanwhile, the situation for Iranian Kurds remains largely unchanged. Over the past year, several Kurdish publi
cations daring to address political issues have been shut down, and Kurdish dissidents continue to languish in prisons.
Syria erupted into interethnic Kurdish-Arab violence in March during a football match between a Syrian Kurdish team and one supported by the country’s Baathists. Some members of the audience began shouting “Death to the Kurds, long live Saddam, long live Fallujah,” and shot at least three Kurds dead. Those deaths led to Kurdish rioting and a huge demonstration in Qamishli, during which another 25 to 40 people were killed. The Syrian authorities then arrested more than 2,000 Kurds. Among them were at least 20 children age 14 to 17, who were tortured and held incommunicado for over three months.
Where exactly does all this leave the Kurds? That question remains as difficult to answer today as it was a year ago. The regional tides could still flow in many different directions. Iraq could collapse into civil war, the Iraqi Kurds could insist on full independence, Turkey could backslide into deeper repression, KONGRA-GEL/PKK could reignite a civil war, and Iran and Syria could crack down harder than ever on their Kurdish populations.
Nonetheless, it does seem to me that progress is slowly being made overall. The Kurds of Iraq and Turkey are in a significantly better position now than they were ten years ago and in a somewhat better position now than they were one year ago. The Kurds of Syria and Iran continue to suffer under considerable repression but are holding their own. All Kurdish eyes are trained on Iraq and Turkey; whatever happens there could affect the Kurds of all nations.
New York City
February 15, 2005
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 46