Thursday 04 / July / 2024
Nowadays, almost everyone agrees that the Palestinian people deserve a state, and that they should not live under Israeli rule. Most Israelis share this view, including even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has reluctantly stated his own commitment to a two-state solution. And in many Western democracies, a strong left-wing constituency regularly organises demonstrations in favour of Palestinian independence.
Yet when it comes to securing the same right for the Kurdish people, the West has been silent.
Western democracies offered no support for the Kurdistan Regional Government’s independence referendum in late September.
When officials in the European Union or the United States give a reason for opposing Kurdish independence, it always comes down to realpolitik. Iraq’s territorial integrity must be preserved, we are told, and independence for the KRG could destabilize Turkey and Iran, owing to those countries’ sizeable Kurdish minorities.
The brutal oppression of the Kurds over many generations has been totally overlooked. In Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the Kurds were subjected to chemical-weapons attacks. And in Turkey, the military has razed hundreds of Kurdish villages.
Among the arguments used to deny the Kurds their right to self-determination, the defence of Iraq’s territorial integrity is the most spurious and hypocritical of all.
When British statesmen established Iraq as a distinct political entity after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, they did so in accordance with their own imperialist interests. Accordingly, they disregarded the territory’s history, geography, demography, and ethnic and religious diversity.
The residents of this newly conjured state were never actually asked with whom they wanted to live.
Initially, under the Treaty of Sèvres, which the defeated Ottoman Empire signed in August 1920, the Kurds were promised an independent state. But the victorious Allied powers later abandoned this promise, and the Kurdish people have lived under constant oppression ever since.
In what became northern Iraq, the Kurds, like the country’s Assyrian Christians, were for decades denied recognition of their distinct language and culture by Arab rulers in Baghdad. In this context, “territorial integrity” is nothing more than an alibi for ethnic or religious oppression.
Similarly, the tens of millions of Kurds living in Turkey and Iran have also long been denied basic human and cultural rights. It is thus understandable that the Turkish and Iranian governments would object to the KRG’s independence bid: they fear the emergence, if it succeeds, of similar movements among their own Kurdish populations.
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Moreover, the KRG has already established a relatively open and pluralistic society. As a semi-autonomous region, Iraqi Kurdistan operates under a multi-party system the likes of which one will not find in neighbouring Arab countries, let alone in Iran or Turkey, which is increasingly turning toward authoritarianism.
National self-determination is a universal right that should not be denied to populations suffering under oppressive non-democratic regimes. The same arguments that rightly apply to the Palestinians should apply equally to the Kurds.
Human-rights activists who demonstrate for Palestinian statehood should be no less vocal on behalf of Kurdish statehood. And human-rights claims – unless they are applied selectively as part of a hypocritical sham – should always trump realpolitik.
Throughout their long, tragic history, the Kurds have repeatedly been abandoned by the West. This must not happen again. Kurdish Peshmerga have been Western democracies’ staunchest allies in the fight against the IS. It would be a bitter travesty to abandon the Kurds to the mercy of the Iraqi or Turkish governments in their time of need. - Project Syndicate
