Washington Kurdish Institute
By: Philip Kowalski
November 27, 2018
If a casual observer were to walk around DuPont Circle today, they would notice a colorful array of banners celebrating the centenary of over a dozen nations. In the closing moments of the First World War, a number of new nation-states came into existence, ranging from Finland in northern Europe, going southward through the Baltic and Slavic nations, and jutting eastward as the crescent-shaped domino finishes at Azerbaijan. The birth of these nation states was in large part due to the efforts of the United States under President Woodrow Wilson and his principle of “Fourteen Points,” which laid out the groundwork for self-determination. The impact was immense for the members of these new nations; the idea of independence seemed beyond the realm of possibility after centuries of iron-gripped rule by various empires including Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. Yet, within a short period of time at the close of the war, independence quickly became the new reality as the so-called Great Powers agreed to the new borders. Though the Fourteen Points are remembered fondly by many nations in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, for the Kurds, the world’s largest stateless nation, they are often associated with bitter disappointment.
Indeed, it was in the former Ottoman Empire, and more precisely in the region known as Kurdistan (i.e., the ancestral homeland of the Kurdish people), that the limits of Wilsonian idealism came up short against the harsh demographic reality of the region. While Kurds represented a large portion of the population in the southeast Anatolia region (inclusive of northern Mesopotamia), they shared the land with other Muslim majority ethnicities and a Christian minority populations as well – Armenians, Arabs, Turks, Assyrians, and Azeris, among others. For these disparate ethnic and religious groups, each had a conflicting vision of what Wilson’s Fourteen Points entailed. Proposed borders, evolving concepts of identity and nationalism, visions of nationalization, and economic aspirations all overlapped, and with a lack of any serious epistemic capabilities in the West to deal with the free-for-all, conflict continued in the region for years past the supposed armistice of November 11, 1918.
Among Kurds, Wilson’s Twelfth Point was widely discussed, which stated that “The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development…” With the shakeup of the traditional power structure, Kurds wasted no time in beginning their negotiation of Wilson’s Twelfth Point. But with the British and French occupying much of Kurdistan and a nascent Turkish nationalist movement claiming control over all non-Arab Muslim majority lands of the former Ottoman Empire, it soon became apparent to Kurds that they would have to fight for the right to nationhood in the new world order.
Sheikh Mahmoud Barzinji of Sulaymaniyah was the first significant Kurdish figure to attempt to create an independent Kurdish nation in the Wilsonian era. In 1920, after witnessing a lack of any British intent to follow through with promises for Kurdish self-government in the newly created Mandatory Iraq (i.e., the newly established Kingdom of Iraq under British administration), Barzanji declared himself as King of Kurdistan and began an uprising against British rule. When the British managed to quell his uprising and capture him, they found that he had strapped a copy of Wilson’s Twelfth Point written in Kurdish next to the Koran on his arm. While Barzanji’s uprising was unsuccessful, it remains an important point in
history as it clearly defined the unwillingness of the Mandate powers to negotiate a future for the Kurds that included any notion of Wilsonian ideals. The British were more than happy to discard their promises of autonomy to the Kurds and to throw them to the mercy of an Arab-centric government in Baghdad.
The newly formed Republic of Turkey was more upfront about its lack of intent to see through Wilson’s Twelfth Point on its Kurdish population. Perhaps due to Wilson’s support for the creation of an Armenia that would have included a significant portion of what is today eastern Turkey, İsmet İnönü, one of the chief architects of the Lausanne Peace Treaty of 1923, was entirely unwilling to negotiate on the Wilsonian point of minority rights. The only exception made was for the rights of Armenians, Greeks, and Jews – all non-Muslim minorities – who had been reduced to such small numbers during the wartime period that they no longer constituted any sort of “threat” to the establishment of the envisaged ethnically Turkish nation-state. The Treaty of Lausanne resulted in international recognition of the new Republic of Turkey as the successor state of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkish representatives left Lausanne without any mention of the autonomy of a Kurdish region in accordance with Wilson’s Twelfth Point, and without any guarantee of the cultural rights of Kurds or other Muslim minorities living within the borders of today’s Turkey.
While Turkey’s official statement to the Interdepartmental Conference on Middle Eastern Affairs in 1925 stated that “All Kurds possess in Turkey, without any restriction, all the rights possessed by the Turks,” the reality on the ground was quite different. Kurds were systematically denied their basic rights as a people, forced to learn Turkish, and even removed from their homes and exiled to western Anatolia in the effort to spread the Kurdish population
so thin that their culture, which was harshly suppressed, would be effectively absorbed into Turkish culture. With the League of Nations proving itself to be ineffective in protecting the rights of minorities, Turkey was left to its own devices to socially engineer the Kurdish region as it wished.
The spectacular failure of the global community to ensure that the Kurds were properly granted their own place in Wilson’s Fourteen Points has had dire and far reaching consequences. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s Anfal Campaign saw the Kurds subjected to nothing less than genocide, and the 2014 ISIS-orchestrated genocide of the Yazidis perpetrated by the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group showed that little had changed decades after the establishment of a Kurdish autonomous region within Iraq. In Turkey, successive governments which pursued policies of denial and uncompromising brutality in addressing the existence of the indigenous Kurdish population within Turkey’s borders resulted in the rise of the PKK, and a brutal conflict that has dragged on for decades, relegating the beautiful and historic Kurdish region to economic backwardness. In Syria, Kurds have had to fight for their survival against successive waves of Arab nationalists and Islamic extremists with, at best, tepid international support. In Iran, Kurds have been subjected to arbitrary legal challenges to cultural expression, with bloody consequences for Iranian Kurds.
On the hundredth anniversary of the cessation of the First World War and the supposed implementation of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the Kurds still find themselves divided among states that have shown absolutely no desire to adequately represent them. Even following the 2017 independence referendum Iraqi Kurdistan, which resulted in a resounding vote for the establishment of an independent state including the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and other
predominantly Kurdish regions within Iraq, the international community remained uninterested in the aspirations of the Kurdish people, who are no closer to the same self-determination realized by so many other nations one century ago. Had Kurds been allowed to exercise the same rights as Poles, Finns, Georgians, and other nations born in 1918, perhaps DuPont Circle would now also feature a colorful banner celebrating the centenary of Kurdish independence.
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