PARIS, 18 October 2007 — Above and beyond the current tensions between Ankara and Baghdad, the Kurdish question represents a perennial risk in an explosive area at the crossroads of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. “The mountains are our only friend,” goes a Kurdish saying, which encapsulates perfectly the history of a people on one of the most unstable fault lines in the world.
With no access to the sea and no state to represent them, the 25 to 35 million Kurds have maintained their language, traditions and clan-based form of social organization. “Up to the end of the 19th century, the Kurds were used as tools by the Persian and Ottoman empires, which gave them great latitude and hired them as auxiliaries” to keep the peace on their borders or control other minorities, said Oliver Roy, a specialist in the region.
“It was when the Persian and Turkish worlds went secular — with Ataturk in Ankara and the Pahlavis in Tehran — that the Kurds developed in reaction their own ethno-national claims,” he said.
But the countries of the region have regularly acted together to quell aspirations for Kurdish independence. In 1947, Baghdad, Tehran and Ankara signed the Pact of Saadabad, aimed at coordinating efforts against the “armed gangs.”
And today the three countries — secular Turkey, Islamic Iran and Iraq under US tutelage — still waver between fear of separatism and the temptation to use the Kurdish question to further their own designs against neighbors. The games of the great powers created uncertain times for the Kurds themselves. World War I saw the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, but left no lasting solution for Kurdistan, which continued to be claimed by Turkey.
The League of Nations for a time considered the idea of an independent Kurdish state, but in 1926 it opted instead to attach the region around the Kurdish city of Mosul to the British protectorate of Iraq. Not until the first Gulf War of 1991 did the Western powers intervene to protect Kurds against the exactions of Saddam Hussein.
Allied to the US, the Kurds were major beneficiaries of the American intervention, which confirmed their substantial autonomy and the relative stability of their region. The downfall of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad then profoundly changed the balance of powers in the region.
“What we are now seeing is a meeting between the Kurds of northern Iraq and the Kurds of Turkey on the cultural, linguistic and economic levels in a way never seen before,” said Roy. Iran is also involved, with a “very clear increase in state repression in Iranian Kurdistan,” Roy said.
