Kurdistan: the beloved country cannot even cry November 23, 2007

I was not going to write about Kurdistan and the Kurds. That is because I am an Israeli and a Zionist. One way in which the cause of Kurdish self determination has been discredited in the Middle East is by claiming that it is all a plot by evil Zionists to dismember Arab states (since when are Turkey and Iran Arab states? -see here ), or a plot by America to “punish” Turkish independence. If the Americans do not bomb the PKK into oblivion, they are “meddling” in the affairs of the Middle East and not doing their proper duty it seems.

I wasn’t going to write, but I could not resist. The one-sided international lynch mob that has organized itself to deny rights to the Kurds of Turkey, and to help the Turkish government commit genocide, must be proested by someone.

Self determination of every people can be viewed as a “plot” to dismember some other country. The American revolution was a plot to dismember the British Empire, and the Indian struggle for freedom was another such plot. Self-determination for Syria and the Arabs was a British imperialist plot to dismember the Ottoman Turkish empire, wasn’t it?

The “terror” of the PKK has a cause: the suppression of Kurdish language and culture in Turkey. Nobody is pressuring the Turkish government to give the Kurds what they want and what they deserve - real ethnic autonomy within Turkey. Nobody is even ready to admit that this is a right.

35 million Kurds have lived “since time immemorial” in northern Iran and Iraq, and in Eastern Turkey and Syria. Following World War I, they were promised independence by US President Wilson, but the promise was never implemented.

In Iraq, Kurds have won a measure of autonomy and they say they are satisfied with the present arrangement. If they are satisfied, then of course there is no reason to change the arrangement. It is not about dismembering Iraq at all as some make believe.

But in Turkey, the Kurds are not even taught their own language in public schools. Very reluctantly, under European pressure, the Turks agreed to allow some private schools that teach Kurdish. We can imagine the outcry that would issue from all the politically correct people if Israel did not provide education in Arabic for its Arab citizens, and offered such private schools as a ‘concession.’ Yet as regards the Kurds, everyone agrees that they have no rights. Gangsters who blow up mosques in Iraq are termed “fighters,” but Kurds who fight Turkish soldiers are called “terrorists.” The United States, ostensibly the only real friend of the Kurds, is reportedly supplying intelligence information to the Turkish airforce to enable them to hit PKK “terrorist” (or “insurgent” or “freedom fighter”) targets in Iraq. An occupying power has an obligation to protect the population of an occupied area, not to invite others to bomb it.

The Kurds are the stray fringes of the dirty little secret of the Middle East and North Africa: Many of the independent states created by the withdrawal of Western colonialism, simply reinstated older Arab and Muslim colonialism, stifling the legitimate right to self determination of native peoples. Most of you never heard of the Amazigh and the other native peoples of North Africa, who probably constitute the majority of the North African population, and who are denied the right to develop their own culture and language and relegated to the pejorative status of “Berbers.” Of course you know what Berbers are, right? Everyone knows who Berbers are. But they don’t know that “Berber” is a word that is not much better than n*gger. In Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Saudia Arabia, Iran, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and elsewhere, there are national and religious minorities that have been brutally supressed. Not surprisingly, the word “self-determination” makes “politically correct” Middle East pundits very very nervous, except when it is applied to the Arabs of Palestine, or the Oozlebarts of Iraq.

According to the dogma of the politically correct, suppression of national rights must lead to violence and terror. The result of suppressing the national rights and aspirations of all these people must eventually produce bigger and better PKK terrorist movements, as well as nationalist and separatist movements throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Even if you don’t believe that, you must surely see the justice of allowing each people self determination. There is room in the community of nations for a Jewish state and a Palestinian state, a Czech state and an East Timor state, a Bangladesh and a Pakistan. There was room enough for everyone. Except that when the turn of the Kurds came, it turned out that there is no room at the inn, and they must be ignored and condemned.

Ami Isseroff