It’s occurred to me that I’ve met (and written about) one Kurd in my life, 23 years ago, and while the situation of his people, mountain livestock herders, was then dire, squeezed as he said they were by five powers, the United States being one, it could well be even more so now, now that Trump has hung them out to dry — the Kurds, as staunch an ally as one could hope for when it comes to fighting, who did a lot of heavy lifting when it came to defeating ISIS.
Living in parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, an area the size of California, the seminomadic Kurds were ethnically, linguistically, and culturally one, I was told, and had inhabited that area of the world since time immemorial, long before the carved-out Arab states of the former Ottoman Empire.
I found that interview in my files. “Kurdish is an Indo-European language that has nothing to do with the Arabic languages or with Turkish,” he told me. “There is more similarity between Russian and English than between Kurdish and Turkish.”
I was reminded in this respect of the Basques, the farmers and fishermen of northwestern Spain and southwestern France, where my father and stepmother used to live. Signs along the road used to read: “3+4=1,” referring to the unity of the three Basque provinces in France and the four in Spain.
If you’re an American, I’ll warrant you tend to root for people like the Kurds, the Basques, and the Catalans, who in asserting their identities and in resisting homogenization have run afoul of greater powers. It’s a story not all that dissimilar to our own, one which an American president, you’d think, would find particularly compelling.
Turkey had wanted to wipe out the Kurds for years, I was told, a campaign that he said was buttressed by the tanks, helicopters, and weapons supplied it by the United States, its NATO ally.
“What is happening now in Turkey [remember, this was 23 years ago] is a stepped-up version of a campaign of cultural genocide — a national brainwashing policy to try to convince us Kurds that we don’t exist. Turkey changed the names of our villages, rivers, cities. We were not allowed to speak our mother tongue, not allowed to listen to Kurdish music, not allowed to write Kurdish. It’s been in effect for about 75 years, since the Kurds helped Kemal Ataturk liberate Turkey. . . . We have been denied anything that reflects a Kurdish identity. . . . It’s been a degree of oppression and brutality beyond anyone’s imagination. . . . Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on the Kurds in 1988. Over 10,000 children and women were killed. The world government was aware of that, and no one — not even an individual — questioned Saddam. Everyone was silent — the U.S. government, the British government, everyone. That was when he was ‘a good guy,’ when the Western world was selling him weapons.”
And thank you for your service.