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Television
With No Borders /
GIVE
P
We
Preserve The Moment /
KASLC
•
112 - World:
Baffled about how we get our news? TVI
Magazine utilizes its almost half a
century of experience in gathering its
International Television and current
affairs news. TVI Magazine news sources
includes, High Tech authorities,
educators, economist, world famous
investment advisors, a few intelligence
agents and many political figures. Our
Current Affairs newsroom is continuously
being updated on our tvinews.net
front page by major news sources, such as
the White House, BBC and Clear Channels
Network media.
Today's
Puzzle:
Who said
that . . . "The news is old news again, it
repeats itself like a bad
habit"..
_____________
Who
Are the Kurds?
April, 2003 - TVIYesNews. A largely
Sunni Muslim people with their own
language and culture, most Kurds live in
the generally contiguous areas of Turkey,
Iraq, Iran, Armenia and Syria -- a
mountainous region of southwest Asia
generally known as Kurdistan ("Land of the
Kurds").
Before World War I, traditional Kurdish
life was nomadic, revolving around sheep
and goat herding throughout the
Mesopotamian plains and highlands of
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.
During the early 20th century, Kurds
began to consider the concept of
nationalism, a notion introduced by the
British amid the division of traditional
Kurdistan among neighboring countries. The
1920 Treaty of Sevres, which created the
modern states of Iraq, Syria and Kuwait,
was to have included the possibility of a
Kurdish state in the region. However, it
was never implemented. After the overthrow
of the Turkish monarchy by Kemal Ataturk,
Turkey, Iran and Iraq each agreed not to
recognize an independent Kurdish
state.
The Kurds received especially harsh
treatment at the hands of the Turkish
government, which tried to deprive them of
Kurdish identity by designating them
"Mountain Turks," outlawing their language
and forbidding them to wear traditional
Kurdish costumes in the cities. The
government also encouraged the migration
of Kurds to the cities to dilute the
population in the uplands. Turkey
continues its policy of not recognizing
the Kurds as a minority group.
In Iraq, Kurds have faced similar
repression. After the Kurds supported Iran
in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, Saddam
Hussein retaliated, razing villages and
attacking peasants with chemical weapons.
The Kurds rebelled again after the Persian
Gulf War only to be crushed again by Iraqi
troops. About 2 million fled to Iran; 5
million currently live in Iraq. The United
States has tried to create a safe haven
for the Kurds within Iraq by imposing a
"no-fly" zone north of the 36th
parallel.
Despite a common goal of independent
statehood, the 20 million or so Kurds in
the various countries are hardly unified.
From 1994-98, two Iraqi Kurd factions --
the Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by
Massoud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan, led by Jalal Talabani --
fought a bloody war for power over
northern Iraq. In September 1998, the two
sides agreed to a power-sharing
arrangement.
Meanwhile, the Kurdistan Workers'
Party, the PKK, currently waging a
guerrilla insurgency in southeastern
Turkey, has rejected the Iraqi Kurds'
decision to seek local self-government
within a federal Iraq. The PKK believes
any independent Kurdish state should be a
homeland for all Kurds.
Over the years, tensions have flared
between the PKK, led by Abdullah Ocalan,
and Barzani's KDP faction, which controls
the Turkey-Iraq border. Barzani has
criticized the PKK for establishing
military bases inside Iraqi-Kurd territory
to launch attacks into Turkey.
Ocalan's recent capture by Turkish
agents touched off heated and sometimes
violent protests by thousands of Kurds
living in Western Europe. It's impact on
the Kurdish people and their quest for
independence is yet to be seen.
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April, 2003 -
COMMENTARY
Turkey,
U.S. Iran and Iraui Kurds Laying Claims
How the two nations handle this
discontented minority will play a large
part in the region's future.
-----Unresolved
tensions between Turkey and the Iraqi
Kurds are forcing Washington to choose
sides between our vital strategic ally in
Ankara and our long-standing moral
obligation to protect Iraq's Kurds.
Beneath this dispute lies a much more
fateful question: What kind of rights
should ethnic minorities enjoy in the
modern world?
On the one hand, the Iraqi Kurds were
corralled by the British into the new
state of Iraq after World War I, separated
from their Kurdish brethren in Turkey,
Syria and Iran. They are fed up with
brutal rule from Baghdad and would like to
be independent, although they recognize
that's probably not realistic at this
juncture.
On the other hand, there's Turkey, which,
despite its extraordinary odyssey toward
becoming a modern, Westernized and
democratic state, still reverts to old
anxieties and fears as it looks south at
this part of Iraq, once part of its
empire.
Turkey has its own Kurds, who make up 20%
of the Turkish population and who yearn
for recognition of their existence and
cultural rights and for some degree of
autonomy over their local affairs. Yet
many Turks -- including parts of the
security establishment and members of
nationalist groups -- believe that any
such concessions would lead down a
slippery slope to the division of
Turkey.
In dealing with its own Kurds, Turkey has
operated from the start on the 19th
century notion that "nation-states" must
ensure national homogeneity by imposing
nationwide assimilation. The state ignored
and even denied the existence of the
Turkish Kurds and banned them from public
use of their native language or
traditional clothes in an effort to create
a "purely Turkish" state.
The Turks even fought a bloody
counterinsurgency war against Kurdish
separatist rebels that started in 1984;
they largely defeated the rebels, but the
Kurdish region was left smoldering.
Today, as Ankara looks across the border
into Iraq, it sees another group of Kurds
making a bid to entrench Kurdish autonomy
in a new Iraqi constitution and poised to
take over Kirkuk's oil wealth to fund
Kurdish nationalist ambitions. This echoes
ominously across Turkey.
Turks have historical memories of
Europeans inciting ethnic rebellions
within the multiethnic Ottoman Empire.
Some fear Washington is now "punishing"
Turkey for denying military bases to the
U.S. during the war by letting the Iraqi
Kurds have their way.
Rather than let this happen, Turkey has
massed thousands of troops on the Iraqi
border, threatening to march in if its
interests are jeopardized.
But the Turks' fear about their Kurdish
population is largely misplaced and
betrays a deep lack of self-confidence. In
reality, Turkey's Kurds seek only
recognition of their existence as a people
and some cultural, linguistic and local
administrative rights. To give Turkey
credit, in the last decade it has made
some modest progress toward recognizing
some of these aspirations as it works
toward European Union membership.
The Ankara government now faces a moment
of truth.
Ironically, if it were to choose this
moment to expand the rights of its own
Kurds, that would actually leave it
largely impervious to what happens in
Iraq. It is only the Turks' failure to
meet the cultural needs of their own Kurds
that renders them vulnerable to events in
northern Iraq and constantly open to
manipulation by Turkey's regional
opponents.
The emergence of Kurdish authority in
Iraq, and even control of Kirkuk, however
politically sensitive, is a fait accompli.
As much as Turkey would love to roll back
the clock to 1991 in northern Iraq,
Turkey's strength will lie in working with
the realities of the new Iraq and not
against it.
The U.S. and Turkey are now actually
dealing with more of the unfinished
business of the colonial legacy of the
Middle East. Will Iraqi Kurds accept the
British-imposed forced marriage with the
Arab region to the south? Can Iraq ever
function comfortably as a modern,
multiethnic and multi-religious state
without another Saddam Hussein to enforce
it?
These are the grand questions that
Washington has inherited.
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Background:
The Kurds
The Kurds have been subjugated by
neighboring peoples for most of their
history. In modern times, Kurds have tried
to set up independent states in Iran, Iraq
and Turkey, but their efforts have been
crushed every time.
The Kurdish People
* 15 million to 20 million Kurds live
in a mountainous area straddling the
borders of Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and
Turkey. About 8 million live in
southeastern Turkey.
* The Kurds are a non-Arabic people who
speak a language related to Persian. Most
adhere to the Sunni Muslim faith.
Turkey
* 1920: After World War I, when the
Ottoman Empire is carved up, the Kurds are
promised independence by the Treaty of
Sevres.
* 1923: Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk rejects the treaty, and Turkish
forces put down Kurdish uprisings in the
1920s and 1930s. The Kurdish struggle lies
dormant for decades.
* 1978: Abdullah Ocalan, one of seven
children of a poor farming family,
establishes the Kurdish Workers' Party, or
PKK, which advocates independence.
* 1979: Ocalan flees Turkey for
Syria.
* 1984: Ocalan's PKK begins armed
struggle, recruiting thousands of young
Kurds, who are driven by Turkish
repression of their culture and language
and by poverty. Turkish forces fight the
PKK guerrillas, who also establish bases
across the border in Iraq, for years.
Conflict costs about 30,000 lives.
* 1998: Ocalan, who has directed his
guerrillas from Syria, is expelled by
Damascus under pressure from Ankara. He
begins his multi-nation odyssey until he
is captured in Nairobi on Jan. 15, 1999
and taken to Turkey, where he may face the
death penalty.
Iran
* 1946: Kurds succeed in establishing
the republic of Mahabad, with Soviet
backing. But a year later, the Iranian
monarch crushes the embryonic state.
* 1979: Turmoil of Iran's revolution
allows Kurds to establish unofficial
border area free of Iranian government
control; Kurds do not hold it for
long.
Iraq
* Kurds in northern Iraq -- under a
British mandate -- revolt in 1919, 1923
and 1932, but are crushed.
* Under Mustafa Barzani, they wage an
intermittent struggle against Baghdad.
* 1970: Baghdad grants Kurds language
rights and self rule, but deal breaks down
partly over oil revenues.
* 1974: New clashes erupt; Iraqis force
130,000 Kurds into Iran. But Iran
withdraws support for Kurds the following
year.
* 1988: Iraqis launch poison-gas
attack, killing 5,000 Kurds in town of
Halabja.
* 1991: After Persian Gulf War,
northern Iraq's Kurdish area comes under
international protection.
* 1999: Two rival Iraqi Kurdish
factions, one led by Mustafa Barzani's son
Massoud, the other by Jalal Talabani,
broker a peace deal; goal is for Kurdish
area to become part of a democratic
Iraq.
SOURCES: Reuters, World Almanac,
staff reports
|
Respectfully
Submitted
Josie
Cory
Publisher/Editor
TVI Magazine
TVI
Magazine, tviNews.net, Associated Press, Washington
Post, Reuters, BBC, LA Times, NY Times, VRA's
D-Diaries, Press Releases and SmartSearch were used
in compiling and ascertaining this news
report.
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