Time for Kurdistan?

For Kurds, as for many other peoples in the Near East, the diplomacy of the big powers has been nothing but the story of a series of painful betrayals; but for the Muslims of the Mesopotamian Arc, it ought to by now have become a way of life. For much of the Muslim World, the […]

For Kurds, as for many other peoples in the Near East, the diplomacy of the big powers has been nothing but the story of a series of painful betrayals; but for the Muslims of the Mesopotamian Arc, it ought to by now have become a way of life. For much of the Muslim World, the immediate aftermath of the First World War was a period of Western duplicity and broken promises in which the latter played dominoes with the former.
The first betrayal was at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 when Britain reneged on the promise Lawrence of Arabia had made to Sheriff Hussain of Mecca. Having found the family in Najd intent of conquest and an Islam without ulama that would provide foot soldiers, the British abandoned Hussain; and together with France signed the Sykes-Picot agreement that divided up the Ottoman Empire between them. France took Syria and Britain took Palestine.
The 1920 Treaty of Sevres signed at the conference promised to create Kurdistan for the Kurds. After the Kurds had done their part of the bargain, like the promise that procured the Arab Revolt before it, the treaty was abandoned without s state for the Kurds. Three years later, the British, the French and, now, the Turkish signed the Treaty of Lausanne that put Sevres in a permanent cooler.
Today, there are about 30 million Kurds in the world. Almost half of them live in Turkey, where they constitute almost a fifth of the population. Iraqi Kurdistan is home to around 5 million Kurds; and they represent a sizeable minority of the population in Turkey, Syria, Iran and in diasporas in the republics of the former Soviet Union, Europe and America. Kurds have consistently occupied their Zagros Mountain enclave since 2,500 BC; and, at more than 30 million strong, they are the largest stateless racial group in the world.
As he led his struggle for an independent Turkish republic, Ataturk appealed was able to enlist the support of the Kurds, who made up the bulk of the forces in Turkey’s war of independence. But after getting what he wanted, Ataturk turned against the Kurds. He opposed the 1920 Treaty of Sevres signed at the conference promised to create Kurdistan for the Kurds. After the Kurds had done their part of the bargain, like the promise that procured the Arab Revolt before it, the treaty was abandoned without s state for the Kurds. Three years later, the British, the French and, now, the Turkish signed the Treaty of Lausanne that put Sevres in a permanent cooler.
And as the 1976 Pike Commission in the US confirmed, despite all the commitments given, the CIA was only interested in using the Kurds to wear down Iraq; it had no intention of helping Barzani create Kurdistan.
But what could be the real reasons why Kurdistan was not created? Obviously, in deciding the fate of Kurds, the oil question was obviously in evidence. It has been said that at the time of colonial conquest, if your land remains un-invaded, it is because it has no resources worth stealing; and so also if it remains free of intrigues and schemes. And that might have been the real reason why Kurdistan was not created. Britain wanted to retain control of Northern Iraq, where, unfortunately for them, the Kurds happen to live. The British had their eyes, and would soon have their hands, on the oil in Mosul. If they created Kurdistan, they had no guarantee that they could take it. For one, Kurds are fiercely independent people. Two, they might not be as stupid and simple-minded as the Arab rulers had proved. And, three, there would just be too many of them to manipulate if, in addition to the oil they had, they were left in a single country, they would be too powerful to handle.
But the non-creation of Kurdistan might have been the convenient European payback for Hattin in 1187, and a fitting recompense for Saladin, the great Iranian Kurdish General who inflicted a devastating defeat on corporate Europe during the Crusades. Now, Europeans had the chance to deprive his people of a homeland to call their own. If as late as 1917, General Edmund Allenby would see his conquest of Jerusalem as the completion of the Crusades, it would not be far-fetched to assume that, a mere six years later, Western powers would seek, with the help of the Treaty of Lausanne, to punish Saladin’s people with statelessness.
From the middle of the 1880’s, Kurds had been fighting wars of unification and independence from oppression by the four countries in the midst of which they are sandwiched; and, since then, in Turkey and elsewhere—Syria, Iraq and Iran—their lot has been one of deportations, migrations, resettlements and discrimination. But it was not just the desire for statehood that initially sparked Kurdish revolt in Turkey. There was this cynical introduction of nationalism, which is strange and foreign to Islam today or tomorrow; there was Ataturk’s active, almost psychotic, self-hating secularisation, which the Kurds, as the new post-Saladin champions of Islam, strongly opposed.
When their betrayal by the Western powers became all too obvious them, the Kurds decided to take matters into their own hands in spectacular revolts in the four countries in which they were scattered. The first revolt was that of Sheikh Barzanji, the famous Sufi of the Qadiriyyah order who led an uprising around Sulaimaniyyah against the British Mandate in 1923. The Kurdish Kingdom he established was suppressed the following year. Two years later, Sheikh Said led another revolt in Turkey in an attempt to revive the Caliphate.
And on the eve of the Second World War, the Dersim Rebellion took place in Turkey, and during the last two years of the war, Mustapha Barzani led revolts in Iraq that were suppressed by the combination of Turkey, Iraq with the help of the British Royal Air Force. A year after the war, the Kurds were able, with the help of the Soviets, to establish a republic—the Mahabad Republic—in Iran. But as the Soviets were later forced to withdraw from Iran, Stalin refused to give the Kurds the weapons they needed to protect the young republic; and it was promptly destroyed by Iran, the United States and the UK.
But creating Kurdistan was something overdue, though doing so now might not necessarily be a good thing. In the past, the interest of British imperialism was best served by the refusal to create Kurdistan; and today Western geostrategic interest will be best served by its creation, which will immediately destabilise all the countries of the sub-region.
Yet, whatever the West chooses to do, it will have foot soldiers ready to do its bidding. Wherever the interest of Islam and the Muslim World is being betrayed with the fervour of a believer, Wahhabi-Salafism like that espoused by ISIS will be found taking the pride of place. It is the West’s great facilitator. It provides imperialism with all the camouflage and pretexts it needs to breach all the defences of Islam and to penetrate into the inner sanctum of the Muslim World physically, socially and, now, ideologically. It is the Muslim World’s Trojan horse in reverse: it is not made to inadvertently bring its enemies in by way of deception; it consciously brings them in by way of deliberate miscalculation.
And I the process, it has reduced the foreign policy of the Muslim World to a dalliance between scheming hypocrites and gullible fools. The West, happy at such happenstance, goes on to achieve its own purpose using it, wreak havoc in its name, and use it to alienate the entire world from its message of uncompromising justice and peace, so much so that the world today takes Islam as the very opposite of its message and Muslims nothing more than a bunch of anti-civilisational, reactionary killers on the prowl.
But whether Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is Abu Khinzir al-Yahudi or Ibrahim Samarra’i or indeed Shimon Elliott is quite immaterial now: those who swore allegiance to him and his Caliphate, hearkened to his call; and are today fighting and dying for the ISIS cause are not all Shlomos, or are they? With the decision of Iraqi Peshmergas to enter the Syrian conflict this week, a turning point may have been reached and the world may know the truth.