• 112 - Who Are The Kurds? 01
• 112 - Turkey, U.S. Iran and Iraui Kurds Laying Claims
• 112 - Kurds' Background
• 112i- TODAY'S PUZZLE? • 112i The World
• 112i- TODAY'S PUZZLE? • 112i The World

• 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"..
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• 112 - 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.

Who Are The Kurds? 01
Turkey, U.S. Iran and Iraui Kurds Laying Claims
Kurds' Background
112 - Turkey, U.S. Iran and Iraui Kurds Laying Claims
April - 2003 / 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.

Who Are The Kurds? 01
Turkey, U.S. Iran and Iraui Kurds Laying Claims
Kurds' Background
112 - Background: 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 - TimeLine
• 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

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Who Are The Kurds? 01
Turkey, U.S. Iran and Iraui Kurds Laying Claims Kurds' Background
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