World Politics since 1945 by Peter Calvocoressi

Author:Peter Calvocoressi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

Notes

A. The Kurds

The Kurdish peoples trace their tribal names further back in time than any other people in the world and their presence in western Asia for 4,000 years. Their fortunes reached a peak in the days of the twelfth-century sultan known to Europeans as Saladin. In more recent centuries they have been divided between the Ottoman empire and the Safavid and Qajar empires in Iran and further divided since the First World War among the Turkish and other successors of the former. They were promised statehood by the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 but denied it by the substituted Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. In religion most Kurds are Sunni Muslims but in Iran many are Shi’ites and in Turkey about a third are Alawis. By the mid-twentieth century they numbered about 25 million – half of them in Turkey, 7 million in Iran, 4 million in Iraq and smaller numbers in Syria, the Armenian SSR and Soviet central Asia. The last tried without success to get recognition as an autonomous republic in Gorbachev’s Russia.

In modern Turkey the Kurds number about a fifth of the population. They were concentrated in south-east Turkey, an area of agricultural decrepitude with its capital at Diyarbakir, and, like the Turks, were divided between a secularist view of the state and a Sunni clericalism. An increasing number of them spread to Istanbul and other essentially Turkish cities, where some of them prospered, intermarried with Turks and became more assimilationist than nationalist. Between the wars there were serious risings in 1925, 1930 and 1937 as Ataturk’s centralized and secularist regime played down a distinct Kurdish identity and discriminated and maltreated Kurds. After the Second World War – and particularly during 1950–60, when the Democratic Party was in power – relations eased but discontent and repression smouldered and in 1984 the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a partly nationalist and partly communist party founded a few years earlier by Abdullah Oçalan, started a guerrilla war which stoked hatred and brutality on both sides, wrecked thousands of villages and drove refugees offtheir lands into Diyarbakir (its population trebled) and other cities further west. Some 750,000 migrated to western Europe, where they added their voices against Turkey’s admission to the EU. Oçalan, who directed operations from Syria for many years, fled in 1999 to Europe and then Africa, where he was captured in Kenya, extradited to Turkey, tried and sentenced to death.

In Iran the Kurds were harried by Reza Shah between the wars and then led up the garden path by the Russians, who paid diligent attention to Kurdish notables during the war, fostered Kurdish nationalism and supplied a separatist movement with arms. In January 1946 the Kurds proclaimed the independent republic of Mahabad, but for the Russians the Kurdish movement was no more than a useful appanage of the separatist Azerbaijani republic which they had contrived in Tabriz at the end of 1945. The Mahabad republic was an expression of genuine non-communist local feelings, whereas the Azerbaijani republic was a communist artefact.

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