[quote]Mufasa wrote:
Okay, Doc…
At least give us the “abridged” version of your thoughts on the Kurds.
Mufasa[/quote]
Ok. Broad strokes here, and I apply the trick, “If you don’t know the answer to the question, anser a different question.”
When someone cliches, “We are still living with the results of the fall of the Ottoman Empire,” I respond, “No, we are still unravelling the results of the fall of the Byzantine.”
1453 and all that.
(http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Byzantium-Julius-Norwich/dp/0679772693/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1407602534&sr=1-1&keywords=john+julius+norwich
This is the abridged version, right? I could not bear to read the 3 volume set.)
Who were all these tribes and cultures, sliced and diced across thousands of miles, by invading Mongols, Turks, Cipchaks, Huns, Bulgars, Rus, Persians…?
And which had advocacy of the European nation states of the 17th to 20th centuries?
In Anatolia alone, Turks may have been a majority centrally, but at their periphery, there were Bulgars, Romos (true Greeks of Anatolia), Armenians, Kurds. The Kurds themselves, linguistically a part of Persian culture, had history separate from Persia. They were swept along in nomadism through the Persian empire, from Afghanistan to eastern Anatolia, where the vast majority now reside (12 or more million).
The Kurds are not arabic speakers and are nor Arabs, and despite a remarkable history through the Crusades, are multireligious. There are Sunni, Shia, Christians (some of personal acquaintance, who often speak a second language like late Aramaiac) and Jews (the 200,000 Jewish Kurds were evacuated to Israel in 1950-52.)
Next, consider the chessboard in 1919. Woodrow Wilson could care less about the Ottomans. His concerns were the Balkans and the Slavs. France and Britain? They imagined a necessity in Western Asia for their suzerainty, even before oil production. Persia? A weakened empire which was a non-combatant of strategic importance; its borders were could not be addressed.
There was no European power in Versailles with an interest in the fate of Kurds, Armenians, Romos. Turkey might have been dismembered, but British French and American interests saw it, correctly, as base against the new Soviet regime; they favored an intact state over principles of national self-determination.
Kurds had had emirs under the early Ottoman empire, but their satraps were taken back to Istanbul in the 18th Century. Kurdish independence movements had started in 1880, only to be crushed repeated by Turks, who attempted to extinguish its culture entirely until very recently.
The resulting PKK, a marxist organization defined as terrorist by NATO and others, only ensured isolation and further repressions. (How much of it was funded by the Soviets as a threat to NATO and Turkey, I do not know.)
Kurds had no advocate, their centers of population and culture were repressed by Turkey, their regions of Iraq and Iran had oil and resources, and their people were a suspect minority to everyone. (The non-terrorist non-marxist nationalists have only recently been heard.) There was never going to be a Kurdish nation, and the Kurdish people, a minority everywhere, were repressed and exploited by “host” multicultural “nation states.”
The abridged version. Corrections welcome.
