Kurdistan: A History of Betrayal
U.S. President Donald Trump’s impulsive and often incoherent policies have caused national and international uproar once again. As the Turkish government prepares a new offensive on Syrian soil, Trump’s decision to redeploy U.S. American forces in northeastern Syria has thus paved the way for Recep Tayyip Erdogan to freely attack the Kurdish militias settled in that area with the alleged goal of restoring peace to bring back Syrian refugees. Trump has thus disavowed the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), with which the U.S. had until now maintained a close alliance in security matters.
Kurdistan is a historical region encompassing southeastern Turkey, northern Syria (Rojava), northern Iraq and northwestern Iran. Despite its people’s continuous claims for independence, Kurdistan’s legal and political status is still a question mark. The Iraqi Kurdistan gained an autonomous status in the Iraqi constitution and the Iranian Kurdistan became a province in Iran, but the situation in Turkey and Syria is quite different. In Syria, after Bashar al-Assad’s forces left the northern region to fight elsewhere, the Kurds gained control of this territory, establishing a de facto autonomous region known as Rojava which has developed significant foreign relations although it has not yet been formally recognized as a State neither by the Syrian government nor by the international community. In Turkey, Kurds have suffered constant human rights violations perpetrated by the central government: during most of the 20th century and still today, Kurds—referred to as “Mountain Turks” by Turkey—have been subject to systematic executions, massacres, torture, forced displacements, arbitrary arrests, and to different forms of discrimination by prohibiting and persecuting the Kurdish language and traditions as well as political parties representing the interests of this people.
The Kurdish question dates back to the fall of the Otoman Empire after World War I when the Allies supported the idea of an independent state: the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) between the Allied forces and the Central powers included a provision for the Kurdistan region in which its people were scheduled to decide on their own fate. However, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne redrew and expanded the borders of Turkey and thus the small territory given to the Kurds three years earlier ceased to exist.
The relations between the U.S. and Kurdistan have developed throughout the 20th century and became a rather odd alliance. In the 1970s, the U.S. supported the Kurds in their fight against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but when the latter became a pseudo-ally of the U.S. when the war between Iraq and Iran broke off in the 1980s. The U.S. now preferred to look the other way while Hussein’s forces perpetuated a genocide against the Kurds. However, Hussein was again seen as an enemy of the U.S. when he decided to invade Kuwait in the 1990s, which led the Bush administration to support Kurds in their fight against Hussein’s regime. The U.S. imposed a no-fly zone over Iraqi Kurdistan to prevent Saddam Hussein from continuing his brutal repression against the Kurds, which allowed for the creation of an autonomous Kurdish republic that ultimately failed as they got no U.S. support.
The situation of the Kurds in Turkey has always been a complex one. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was established in the 1980s to fight for this people’s right to self-determination, and in doing so it has led a form of guerrilla war against the Turkish state, to the point that it is considered a terrorist group not only by the Ankara Government but also by other international actors such as the UK and the U.S.—Turkey’s allies under the NATO. Despite this military alliance, the U.S. found a reliable ‘partner’ in the Kurdish militias fighting ISIS in northern Syria, thus supporting them with air strikes, weapons and financial instruments.
Now that the Trump administration has decided that the job in northeastern Syria has been done, the Kurds have been abandoned, their lives in incertitude. Greenlighting Erdogan’s determination to enter Kurdish-held territory in Syrian soil means increasing the threat of an ethnic cleansing that will likely generate thousands of deaths and displacements.
Across the southern border of Turkey, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) as well as an associated militia of female fighters have been fighting against ISIS since 2004 with the hopes of creating an autonomous state based on democratic values such as secularism, gender equality, socialism and environmental protection, all of which were clearly set down in the 2014 Constitution.
The creation of such a State and the increasing power of the Kurds has obviously become a serious threat for Erdogan, who has now seen the perfect opportunity to resume a war with a people that has never experienced peace. The legal status of Rojava and the Kurdish State as a whole is thus unclear, as the right to self-determination under international law does not specifically apply to this particular case (while it might be applicable for the Iraqi Kurds).
For the international community in general and for the United States in particular, the Kurdish people has always been used as a pawn. The Trump administration has demonstrated its lack of empathy and humanity by betraying those who fought restlessly for their liberation. “No friends but the mountains”, the old Kurdish proverb goes. The Kurds, despite their resistance, still have no statehood, and thus no power. And now, for the millionth time in history, they might also have no place to call home.
