THE KOREA HERALD
November 1, 2017 Wednesday
Like the Palestinians, the Kurds deserve a state
[Shlomo Avineri]
Nowadays, almost everyone agrees that the Palestinian people deserve a
state, and that they should not live under Israeli rule. Most Israelis
share this view, including even Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who
has reluctantly stated his own commitment to a two-state solution. And
in many Western democracies, a strong left-wing constituency regularly
organizes demonstrations in favor of Palestinian independence.The
argument for Palestinian statehood is anchored in a fundamentally
moral claim for national self-determination. Yet when it comes to
securing the same right for the Kurdish people, the West has been
shamefully and strangely silent.
Western democracies offered no support for the Kurdistan Regional
Government��s independence referendum in late September, and they
have not spoken out against the Iraqi and Turkish governments��
threats to crush the KRG��s bid for statehood by force.When
officials in the European Union or the United States give a reason for
opposing Kurdish independence, it always comes down to realpolitik.
Iraq��s territorial integrity must be preserved, we are told, and
independence for the KRG could destabilize Turkey and Iran, owing to
those countries�� sizeable Kurdish minorities.But these arguments
merely underscore a double standard. Moral claims for
self-determination are justly raised in the case of the Palestinians,
but they are entirely absent from the international discourse about
Kurdistan. Worse still, the brutal oppression of the Kurds over many
generations has been totally overlooked. In Iraq under Saddam Hussein,
the Kurds were subjected to genocidal chemical-weapons attacks. And in
Turkey, the military has razed hundreds of Kurdish villages.Among the
arguments used to deny the Kurds their right to self-determination,
the defense of Iraq��s territorial integrity is the most spurious
and hypocritical of all. When British statesmen established Iraq as a
distinct political entity after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in
World War I, they did so in accordance with their own imperialist
interests. Accordingly, they disregarded the territory��s history,
geography, demography, and ethnic and religious diversity.The
residents of this newly conjured state were never actually asked if
they wanted to live in a country with an overwhelming Shia majority
and large Kurdish and Christian minorities. And they certainly were
never asked if they wanted to be ruled by a Sunni dynasty that the
British had implanted from the Hejaz, now a part of Saudi
Arabia.Initially, under the Treaty of Sevres, which the defeated
Ottoman Empire signed in August 1920, the Kurds, like the Armenians,
were promised an independent state. But the victorious Allied powers
later abandoned this promise, and the Kurdish people have lived under
constant oppression ever since.In what became northern Iraq, the
Kurds, like the country��s Assyrian Christians, were for decades
denied recognition of their distinct language and culture by hegemonic
Arab rulers in Baghdad. In this context, ��territorial
integrity�� is nothing more than an alibi for ethnic or religious
oppression.Similarly, the tens of millions of Kurds living in Turkey
and Iran have also long been denied basic human and cultural rights.
It is thus understandable that the Turkish and Iranian governments
would object to the KRG��s independence bid: they fear the
emergence, if it succeeds, of similar movements among their own
oppressed Kurdish populations.But the prospect of an independent
Palestine destabilizing Jordan is never offered as an argument against
Palestinian statehood, and nor should such an argument be used against
Iraq��s Kurds. Moreover, the KRG has already established a
relatively open and pluralistic society. As a semi-autonomous region,
Iraqi Kurdistan operates under a multi-party system the likes of which
one will not find in neighboring Arab countries, let alone in Iran or
Turkey, which is increasingly turning toward authoritarianism.National
self-determination is a universal right that should not be denied to
populations suffering under oppressive non-democratic regimes. The
same arguments that rightly apply to the Palestinians should apply
equally to the Kurds. Human-rights activists who demonstrate for
Palestinian statehood should be no less vocal on behalf of Kurdish
statehood. And human-rights claims - unless they are applied
selectively as part of a hypocritical sham - should always trump
realpolitik.Throughout their long, tragic history, the Kurds have
repeatedly been abandoned by the West, to its great shame. This must
not happen again. Kurdish Peshmerga have been Western
democracies�� staunchest allies in the fight against the Islamic
State. It would be a bitter travesty to abandon the Kurds to the mercy
of the Iraqi or Turkish governments in their time of need.By Shlomo
Avineri Shlomo Avineri, Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, is a former director-general of Israel��s
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. -- Ed.(Project Syndicate)