Washington Kurdish Institute
By: Arianna Cerea June 25, 2022
“The Kurds: My Friends in the North” is a new publication exploring the Kurdish quest for self-determination, and historical and present events throughout Kurdistan, including Western interventions and massacres facing the Kurds.
John Cookson is an award-winning journalist who began his career in Fleet Street and then spent 30 years as a senior correspondent at Sky News, Fox News, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, Euronews and African start-up Arise News. He is also a qualified lawyer.
Interview excerpts
How did your interest in the Kurdish nation begin? Where did you get inspired?
It all began back in the 1980s when I was a budding, cover reporter back for a radio station and in newspapers. All of a sudden Iraq was in the news. Like most British people, I knew where Iraq was. Then Kurdish activists in London start talking about Kurdistan. To be frank, I’d not heard of the region before. I couldn’t pinpoint it on a map, but I met with a Kurd who is called Dara Rashid. He was a freedom fighter back then, but he subsequently became a minister in the Iraqi government. He’s known as Dara Yara Rashid, he sort of came to the newsroom almost on a daily basis, trying to get journalists interested in the plight of the Kurds who were being persecuted by Saddam at the time. He was just an engaging character. Over the early years, I got to know him and we started to do interviews, and suddenly the Kurds were more in the news as the persecution intensified. That’s how it all began really.
When was the first time you visited Kurdistan?
The first time was very memorable. It would be in the early 1990s, I think it was 1993. I was working for Sky news at the time. A Brit had been kidnapped by the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] and his Australian traveling companion, somewhere in the mountains of Eastern Turkey. I was dispatched by the news desk to go to Diyarbakir. I made contact with the PKK and organized a meeting. To get a long story short, they agreed to take me up into the mountains. The purpose of doing that was to try to get an interview with the two people who were kidnapped. So there was myself and the Cameraman. We met outside the town of Batman in the end, and to our astonishment they rolled carpets out by the side of the road and invited me on the cameraman to get into the carpet each.
We hesitated, of course, we didn’t know who these guys were, but in pursuit of the story, this is the kind of mad thing that you do. I was rolled up in one carpet and the cameraman was rolled up in another carpet. And then we were put into the back of a truck and off, we went up into the mountains. We came across a Turkish army road block. We were in the back of the truck and we could hear this argument going on and suddenly the driver, one of the PKK men disguised as a farmer, shoved his foot down hard on the accelerator, and we shot off. The Turks started to open fire on the truck, but we were moving so fast. We got away and went up the mountain.
The Turks didn’t really follow us too hard, maybe they just gave up, I suppose, in the end. Again, to cover a long story short, a few hours later, we were up at the PKK stronghold, high up in the mountains. We’d come to one of their camps. We asked to interview the two, the Britain and the Australian girl, and they made all sorts of excuses and it never really happened. But we subsequently heard that the pair was sick and were being treated at another camp and not far away, but we got the opportunity to interview PKK members and get some flavor of the kind of life that they were living, being bonded by the Turks on a regular basis. In fact we spent about 48 hours altogether talking to PKK members, which was extremely interesting.
Have you been to Iraqi Kurdistan recently?
I actually traveled with the Pope last year on his historic visit to Iraq, including to Kurdistan. You may recall the ecstatic welcome that you got in the Christian areas. For example, in Erbil. So that was the last time I was there. That was an amazing trip because you’ve got to see things that even though I’ve been going to Iraq and Kurdistan for a long time now, traveling with the Pope, you went to churches. What was very interesting for me was to go down to Ur in the south of Iraq and see the Ziggurat there and the alleged home of Abraham. It was just quite extraordinary. The Christian tribes that people thought would’ve been a bit almost extinct attended meetings with the Pope on that historic visit. It was just an amazing, amazing experience.
Did you see any changes to previous visits?
No. I mean, Iraq is Iraq. Nothing changes there too quickly. What I would say was that there was tension , I was there in March of last year, and there was tension in the air. This of course is to do with the political instability in the country at the moment. Still seeking a functioning government even though the elections were some months ago now. But for me as a westerner, what was exciting for the last trip was to be able to walk around cities like Baghdad and not be worried too much about the security situation, whereas in previous years, I’m going back decades now, sometimes people like me need security to go out onto the streets of Iraqi cities as well. That’s all changed now. I felt quite happy, quite confident, walking around, going to cafes and restaurants by myself.
Regarding your book, when did you first think about writing it and what was your goal in writing it?
I love Kurdistan the Kurdish people, and I always wanted, because they were so welcoming and so accommodating for me when I’d been traveling there as a journalist, I wanted to write a book about the Kurds and it was Donald Trump’s what you might call a betrayal in 2019 of the Kurds, withdrawing support, totally having used them to fight against ISIS, which prompted me to write the book. Really, in the book is there is a serious bits about the quest for independence, but a lot of vignettes and all sorts of life in Kurdistan, which I wanted to get across to the general public, because the average Brit or the average American, when people talk about Iraq and, and the Kurds, they think of conflict, bloodshed and struggle. But there’s much more to Iraq and Kurdistan.
What do you think of the US and European politics toward the Kurds?
Well, as the Kurds well-known, the Americans relationship with Kurdistan has a checkered history. Indeed with the west as a whole. We can go back all the way to the first world war, the aftermath of the Paris peace conference in 1919, and the Treaty of Sèvres in 1921, which in theory gave the Kurds the right to independence. But they were betrayed through the efforts of those at the Cairo conference later. If you look back through the decades about America’s relationship and the West, countries like Britain’s relationship with the Kurds, my opinion is that America and Britain, they use the Kurds for their own ends, but when it suits them, then the Kurds get let down at the last minute.
For example, the Treaty of Lausanne completely negatived the proposals in the treaty of Sevres, which would’ve given the Kurds independence in theory. Then you look at recent history when the Americans in the 1970s supported the Kurds, but then withdrew, because they suddenly started supporting Saddam at the time of Halabja [massacre.] For example, the Americans were still supporting Saddam, even though the terrible atrocity had happened. The next big betrayal would be in 1991when George H W Bush encouraged the Kurds and the Shias to rise up against Saddam. I was there in Iraq at the time and the Kurds and the Shias always expected that the American support that the cavalry would come over the hill and rescue them because of course, when they started their rebellion, then Saddam was brutal in crushing it. But the Americans never came and the Kurds were slaughtered in the thousands. So the Shias, so that was another example of the Americans deserting the Kurds, and that continued really through the Clinton era, and even at the time of the US-led invasion in 2003, when Americans needed the support of the Turks, Washington turned the blind eye to the persecution bombing of the Kurds by Turkey for international politic reasons that they needed support of Turkey.