The Kurds are a mostly Sunni Muslim, Iranian ethnic group native to the mountainous regions of West Asia, which includes the current territories of eastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, southern Armenia and northern Syria. The Kurdish population amounts to around 45 million people, of which 20 million live in Turkey, which has 85 million. Kurdistan has a distinct language and a very own national identity since the Middle Ages. Towards the end of WW1, Kurds lived under the Ottoman and Persian Empires, which had historically successfully integrated, but not assimilated the Kurds, through use of forced repression of Kurdish independence movements.
With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WW1, France and the UK divided the Middle East into zones of influence but were more interested in supporting Armenian christian nationalism than islamic nationalism. Moreover, the Kurds were considered complicit in the atrocities committed against the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire during the early stages of the war, which made the construction of a Kurdish state a low priority issue for western powers. Moreover, shortly after the war, a strong Turkish republic was created under the leadership of the secular, nationalist and pro-western leader Atatürk. As a consequence, the winners of WW1 did not want to lose the alliance of Atatürk and refused to support the creation of a Kurdish state that would diminish the influence of the new state of Turkey. After World War II, the Soviet Union backed the establishment of an independent country around the largely Kurdish city of Mahābād, in northwestern Iran. But the so-called Republic of Mahābād collapsed after Soviet withdrawal in 1946,
From the 1920s until the 1970s, sporadic nationalist revolts and Kurdish political movements erupted in Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey. Depending on the situation, the U.S sometimes supported Kurdish rebellions, other times it didn’t, which resulted in yielding no tangible results for the creation of a Kurdish state. Hoping to achieve greater autonomy under the rule of shiite Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Kurds were initially supportive of the January 1979 Islamic Revolution, but they rebelled against the new regime when their demands were unmet. Khomeini then declared a holy war against the Kurds and repression against them lasts until today.
During the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-1988, Saddam Hussein supported Iranian Kurds, while the Iranian Islamic republic of Ayatollah Khomeini supported Iraqi Kurds. These cross-border alliances weakened pan-Kurdish nationalism and the creation of Kurdistan as a multicultural state. Furthermore, in 1988 Saddam Hussein killed around 100,000 Kurds in what scholars have labelled a genocide. Then, 1991, the U.S defeated Iraq after Saddam invaded Kuwait. This allowed the Kurds to fill the vacuum of power in northern Iraq and form a semi-autonomous government.
In Turkey, Following the military coup of 1980, the Kurdish language was officially prohibited in public and private life. Many who spoke, published, or sang in Kurdish were arrested and imprisoned. At this time, expressions of Kurdish culture, including the use of the Kurdish language, dress, folklore and names, were banned in Turkey. and, in an attempt to deny their separate existence from the Turks, the Turkish government categorized Kurds as "Mountain Turks" until 1991.
One of the many Kurdish nationalist rebel groups that emerged in the 70s and 80s was the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). It was founded by a young student called Abullah Öcalan as a Marxist- Leninist organization with the aim of establishing an independent Kurdistan in Turkey’s southeast. In 1984, the organization began to use violence against the Turkish state and terrorist tactics, and many countries, including the United States, the European Union, Canada, Japan, Iran, Iraq and Turkey have designated it as a terrorist organization. On the other side, it received initial moderate support from Syria, Palestine and Russia.
In the 1990s, the PKK dropped its demand for independence after suffering several military defeats against the Turkish state, calling instead for greater autonomy inside Turkey’s borders. In February 1999, two years after the U.S labelled the PKK as a terrorist organisation, Öcalan was captured in Nairobi, Kenia, by Turkish special forces with the help of American intelligence and was flown to Turkey. There, he was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. But, following Turkey’s abolition of the death penalty in August 2002, however, his sentence was commuted to life in prison.
Amid a power vacuum caused by the Syrian Civil War of 2014-2015 and in defense against incursions from the Islamic State (ISIS), PKK-aligned groups began establishing self-governance over large portions of northeastern Syria. The growing strength of these groups along the Turkish border and the instability throughout northern Syria, and a failed coup attempt against president Erdogan in 2016 by members within Turkey’s armed forces provided a pretext for an intensified crackdown on the PKK. More than 80 successful and democratically elected mayors in the Kurdish region were arrested and replaced by Turkish state trustees. Furthermore, in 2016-2017 Turkey launched an invasion into northern Syria to chase PKK-aligned Kurds from extending their reach westward. But, the U.S with Trump reacted and imposed a military embargo on its ally Turkey in 2019 as many of these Kurds in Syria, not directly part of the PKK, were also allies of the U.S in fighting against ISIS.
PKK’s funding is based on a variety of sources. In a number of European countries there are ongoing investigations and court cases related to financing of PKK terrorism. PKK is also into organized crime, illegal human smuggling and drug trafficking. Currently, in Turkey anything which could be perceived as a support of the PKK is forbidden to be shown to the public, including political parties, and the Turkish state views the demand for education in Kurdish language as supporting terrorist activities by the PKK. In July 2020, Turkey's Council of Higher Education banned students studying the Kurdish language and literature at Turkish universities from writing their dissertations in Kurdish. Kurdish political opposition parties exist today in Turkey but many of their members are imprisoned when the Turkish state deems that they have slightest connection with the PKK or its affiliates.
Last week, Abdullah Öcalan, the founder and leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), issued a statement from prison calling upon the group to dissolve itself and lay down its arms and end its war against the Turkish state. The reason of this historical announcement is due to several factors:
• Öcalan got an offer by several pro-Erdogan political parties to call for the end of PKK’s rebellion in exchange for his release from prison.
• In a statement read on his behalf by politicians from the pro-Kurdish DEM Party, Ocalan said that the PKK had been formed in response to a Turkish state that restricted Kurdish rights, but that freedoms had increased since then, and that the PKK had “reached the end of its lifespan, making its dissolution necessary.
• Many Kurds do not support the PKK’s tactics and instead increasingly vote for pro-Erdogan parties, meaning that the rebellion is losing ground.
The war between the PKK and the Turkish military has caused more than 40 000 deaths, more than 2.5 million Kurds have been forced to flee and more than 3500 villages in the Kurdish dominated south-east Turkey have been destroyed, and there has been hundreds of extrajudicial killings of Kurds, including intellectuals, entrepreneurs, politicians, activists.
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