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November 6, 2007
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The Kurdish Dilemma: Separating Facts from Fiction
Kurdishaspect.com - By Dr. Rashid Karadaghi
An acquaintance of mine asked me the other day, “Why are your people (the Kurds) invading Turkey? What have the Turks done to you to deserve this?” I was taken aback by this unusual question and I thought she was joking, for even the biased news media has generally been talking about a possible Turkish invasion of Kurdistan, not the other way around. I responded to my acquaintance by saying, “I think you got it all wrong. It is Turkey that is posing to invade Kurdistan. The Kurds have never in their entire history invaded anybody’s land but have been the victim of invasions by just about everybody.”
I asked my acquaintance where she got her information and she said from a Turkish friend of hers. I then told her, “Next time you see your Turkish friend, ask her two simple questions: Are Kurdish students in Turkey allowed to study their mother tongue and get educated in it? And do the approximately twenty million Kurds living in Turkey have the right to have any radio or TV broadcasts or print media in Kurdish?”
Of course, I could have told my acquaintance to ask her Turkish friend dozens of questions about the way Kurds have been treated by Turks at least since the establishment of modern Turkey in the twenties, not to mention anything about centuries of Ottoman rule before that, so she could get a better idea as to who is invading whom and who has been the bully and the aggressor all along, but I thought that any fair person who got the true answer to those two questions would be able to begin to understand the background of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict.
When it comes to the Kurds, unfortunately, the facts are almost always blurred by fiction and outright lies that are fabricated by those who, for some mysterious reasons that I believe go even beyond perceived self-interest and human greed, distort every fact about them in order to show them in a bad light to the outside world. The perpetrators of these fabrications and these lies are those among Turks, Arabs, and Persians (in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria) who begrudge the Kurds everything in life. To them, there is no place called “Kurdistan,” for they claim that what has been Kurdish homeland from time immemorial belongs to them and Kurds are no more than unwanted tenants who should keep quiet regardless of their miserable conditions. To these liars, the only good Kurd is a meek, submissive, and ignorant one --- or, better yet, a dead one.
What is equally unfortunate is that policymakers and opinion-makers in the Western democracies have bought into the lies fabricated by those who are persecuting the Kurds, thereby participating indirectly in the persecution. These policymakers and opinion-makers say, for instance, that establishing an independent Kurdistan is impossible --- even sacrilegious --- because, they claim, that would mean taking big chunks of territory from Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran and giving it to the Kurds.
But what these policy makers overlook is the undeniable fact that those “chunks of territory” have always belonged to the Kurds but have been taken from them by force and occupied by those countries; therefore, by creating an independent Kurdistan, you would not be “taking” territory from those countries but giving it back to its rightful owners. This simple truth is lost on those who decide the fate of nations.
It isn’t that these policymakers and opinion-makers are ignorant of history; it is that because they are blinded by the perceived self-interest of the West, they side with lies rather than the truth, with the oppressor rather than the oppressed, and with the victimizer rather than the victim, and the result is the immoral policies that are being implemented today. Very few people who are in a position of influence have had the moral courage to speak the simple truth and say publicly that the Kurds throughout occupied Kurdistan are not the aggressors but victims of aggression.
One simply wonders what exactly the Kurds have to do to make the world realize that there are serious crimes being perpetrated against them every day with the tacit approval of countries that stand for human rights. Without Western explicit or implicit support, the occupiers of Kurdistan --- Turks, Arabs, and Persians --- cannot maintain their deadly grip on Kurdistan and continue terrorizing the Kurdish people for long.
Throughout their struggle for freedom, the Kurdish people haven’t been able to convey to the world the facts about their plight because they were denied access to the means of communication --- at least before the age of the Internet. By contrast, due to the enormous powers and resources of the state, their oppressors have always had the means to convey to their own people and the outside world precisely the image they have wanted the world to have about the Kurds, which has always been a distorted one. Thus, so far the world has known about the Kurds and their cause not from the Kurds themselves but from their enemies.
No wonder, then, that Turkey has succeeded in convincing the world that the Kurds, whom it has been terrorizing for a hundred years, are terrorists. No wonder, then, that Turkish propaganda has succeeded in convincing the world that the many thousands of Kurds and Turks who were killed from the mid eighties to the end of the nineties were killed by Kurds, not by the Turkish state. And how about the three thousand Kurdish villages that were destroyed and the three million Kurds who were displaced? Was that done by the Kurds themselves, too, or by the Turkish state? In any fair court, Turkey would be found guilty of the most horrendous crimes against the twenty million Kurds within its borders, yet the Turkish propaganda machine has turned the tables by branding the Kurds with the crime it is guilty of.
The Kurds have never been represented at any national or international conference by anybody who would tell the truth about them and their plight or defend their interests. Even when they are the main topic of a meeting, they are barred from it while their enemies and their supporters are all there. The latest conference in Istanbul (2-3 Nov.) is just an example of this outrage.
The Kurdish people have given up on any hope for a change of heart by those who have been terrorizing them and destroying their homeland for as long as they can remember, but they haven’t given up on the decency of the average people in the Western democracies and their instinct for doing what is right, which is to look at the Kurdish dilemma not through the eyes of the oppressor and occupier but through the eyes of a people who have been kicked around for too long and being blamed for it, too, a people yearning to be left alone and free. The Kurdish people demand getting back what is rightfully theirs but taken from them by force. They are determined to carry on their forefathers’ struggle no matter what it takes. There is no turning back now. All the tanks, the bombers, and other weapons in the world will not weaken their resolve to achieve their goal and be free.
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