Kurds

Kurds, semi-nomadic peoples inhabiting the Kurdish cultural region in south-western Asia, the largest concentration being in eastern Turkey. The Kurds are mostly Sunni Muslims (some are Alevi Muslims), many of whom live in small villages and are engaged in agriculture and sheep raising. Their chief manufactured products are finely woven rugs. They were traditionally a nomadic people although today many are town dwellers. They are divided into many different clans. Attempts have been made to establish a homeland but the Kurds are still without a territory of their own.

Languages from the North-Western Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages are spoken by the Kurds. There are several different languages, some of which may be dialects of the same language, however. Kurmanji is the most widely spoken, used primarily in Turkey but also in Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Armenia among other countries. Kurdi, spoken in Iraq and Iran, is also widely used, as is Dimli or Zaza (Turkey). In Turkey, until 1991 it was against the law to speak Kurmanji in public and Kurds were expected to learn Turkish or Arabic. It is still officially forbidden to publish anything in the language of the Kurds in Turkey, or to use it in broadcasting, although there is more freedom on this policy today. Kurdish languages are prohibited in Syria and Iran in varying degrees (particularly publications), but not in Iraq. The Kurdish society is male-dominated. Women run the household and serve the men, who go out to work. Elders are greatly respected.

The Kurds resisted invasions by many warring peoples, but were subjugated by the Seljuks in the 11th century and brought into the Ottoman Empire in the 14th century. According to the Treaty of Sèvres, concluded by the Allies with Turkey in 1920, the Kurds were promised an independent state; this promise, however, was not kept. Of an estimated 20 million Kurds in the early 1990s, more than half lived in Turkey, the rest in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the former republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Since 1925 Kurdish revolts have occurred in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.

In 1970, after more than eight years of almost continuous war, the Iraqi government promised the Kurds autonomy over a region in north-eastern Iraq. The implementation of this pledge in 1974 fell far short of Kurdish demands, however, and the civil war resumed. The rebellion collapsed in 1975 after Iran withdrew its support, as part of a border agreement with Iraq. Thousands of Kurds were killed (some by the use of chemical weapons), and hundreds of Kurdish villages were destroyed by Iraqi troops in 1988, after Kurdish guerrillas sided with Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. In March and April 1991, immediately after the Gulf War, another Kurdish uprising was crushed by the Iraqi government. More than 1 million Kurds fled to Turkey, Iran, and the mountainous areas of northern Iraq; about 600,000 Kurds remained in refugee camps in northern Iraq under United Nations (UN) protection in 1992.

In February 1999 the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured in Kenya by Turkish authorities, who arrested him on charges of murder and terrorism, a move that led to Kurdish protests throughout Europe. Ocalan and his Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a Marxist group that has been involved in terrorist actions, had spent the previous 15 years fighting an armed struggle for the creation of an independent Kurdish state which would include parts of south-east Turkey, and he had been seeking political asylum outside of Turkey. The events brought home to the European Union and the international community at large the severity of the problems involved in the Kurdish demand for nationhood. Ocalan was sentenced to death by hanging which, in October 2002, was commuted to life imprisonment, following the Turkish government’s decision to abolish the death penalty. Ocalan had appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in February 1999, and in March 2003, the Court ruled that he had not been tried by an independent and impartial tribunal nor received a fair trial.

After Ocalan’s arrest in 1999, the PKK ceased hostilities and attempted to reconstitute as a political party, in order to pursue Kurdish autonomy in a peaceful manner.

On April 10, 2003, following the invasion of Iraq by the coalition forces of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, Kurdish fighters took control of the city of Kirkūk in the Kurdish Cultural Region in northern Iraq ahead of the arrival of US troops. The city, the fourth largest in Iraq, is in the centre of the country’s oil fields. The Turkish government, fearing that Kurdish control of the economically important city might act as a catalyst for the Kurds to declare an autonomous state which could, in turn, lead to unrest among Turkey’s Kurdish population, sent military observers to Kirkūk shortly after to ensure the speedy withdrawal of the Kurdish occupying forces.