Weighing in on the Kurds

This week a Kurdish politician, Ahmet Turk, caused an uproar in the Turkish Parliament by addressing the chamber in his outlawed native kurdish language.

"In order to show that there is nothing to fear in using other languages and to emphasize brotherhood of languages during the International Day of Mother Tongues, let me continue my speech in Kurdish," Turk said, pointing at the UNESCO world languages week.

The state owned television immediately stopped broadcasting the speech. It was a very dangerous move. The last time it had been attempted 18 years ago, Leyla Zana, a parliamentarian from the now-banned Democracy Party, tried to take the parliamentary oath in Kurdish and was sentenced to 10 years in prison as punishment. Kurdish singer Sivan Perwer was forced to flee the country, resulting in a twenty year exile in 1976. Other's who have run afoul of this archaic repression have also served very lengthy prison sentences.

The history of the 40 million Kurds is a sad one and in my mind eclipses the tragedy of the Palestinians. The Kurdish empire stretches back to at least 149 b.c.. Before World War I, Kurdish life was nomadic, revolving principally around herding throughout the Mesopotamian plains and highlands of Anatolia, Armenia, Syria, Turkey and Iran. The breakup of the Ottoman Empire after the war created a number of new nation-states, but not a separate Kurdistan. Kurds, no longer free to roam, were forced to abandon their seasonal migrations and traditional ways.

The Treaty of Sevres in 1920 which created Iraq, Syria and Kuwait codified the borders of an independent Kurdistan that was never ratified. The region has seen several major Kurdish rebellions including; the Koçkiri Rebellion of 1920, the Sheikh Said Rebellion in 1924, the Republic of Ararat in 1927, and the Dersim Rebellion in 1937. These were forcefully put down by the Turkish authorities and the region was declared a closed military area from which foreigners were banned between 1925 and 1965. Iraq used poison gas and killed at least 5000 kurds in Halabja in 1988.

These poor non arabic, mostly sunni muslim people have been murdered, exterminated, repressed and pretty much kicked around by the Iraqis, Iranians and Turks for the last hundred years. The United States has not been a good friend, geopolitical realities trumping morality once again.

I think that to steal a language of a people is to mortally wound a culture. Serbia outlawed the speaking of Albanian, causing deep rifts that resulted in the breakup of Yugoslavia. It is a classical means of repression. How many Native Americans lost their mother tongue through pressure from the United States government? How many Kumeyaay or Cahuilla speakers still remain in California? I assure you that the loss of their language was clinically planned and executed. Can you imagine the outcry if the Israelis forbade the speaking of arabic in Israel? The brutal tactic of language suppression is an attempt to kill a people's soul.

I hope that the Turks will ease up on their heavy handed approach to the Kurds. I was shocked when George Bush allowed Turkey to conduct bombing raids in Iraq on Kurdish separatists, right under our noses. I worry that in the end, the Kurds will be odd man out against the greater numbers of the Shia and Sunni in Iraq, in their quest to gain control of the underlying oil wealth in the north. And we will once again turn our heads, and allow another tragedy to occur to these poor people.