After 2,000 years, Kurds still seek a home | | Kurd Net does not take credit for and is not responsible for the content of news information on this page |
After 2,000 years, Kurds still seek a home 21.4.2006
Book review: By Alissa J. Rubin | |
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The Kurds :
A People in Search of Their Homeland. By Kevin McKiernan
OVER the last two decades, about 20 new countries have been
recognized by the United Nations and no doubt others are on the way.
Of course, some of these — such as Bosnia or the Baltic states —
were not entirely "new," having experienced some form of national
recognition in an earlier era. By contrast, in the last 2,000 years,
the Kurds have never had their own country.
They are the largest ethnic group to have lived in permanent
diaspora. Will the more than 30 million Kurds now living in a region
larger than Texas, one that spreads from eastern Turkey, across
northern Iraq and into Iran, succeed in obtaining their own nation?
Kevin McKiernan avoids a direct answer to that question in his new
book, "The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland." Indeed,
notwithstanding its title, this book isn't a treatise on
self-determination. Rather, it is a kind of personal travelogue,
with both the strengths and weaknesses that genre entails. Its
strength is McKiernan's knowledge of his subject — he's spent years
as a journalist among the Kurds, writes perceptively of their
culture and heritage, and offers captivating portraits of Kurds he
has come to know.
But the book lacks an analytic framework. It's frustrating to be
given so much information about the Kurds' aspirations without
analysis of how they might draw on their situation to make a
different future. And that story is complicated because the issues
differ for Kurds in the three countries where they have large
populations. |
The Kurds : A
People in Search of Their Homeland. By Kevin McKiernan
BUY The from Amazon- click here
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Still, anyone who has an interest in this ancient corner of the
world will find McKiernan's book engaging and informative. Readers
will come away with this overriding message: Whether or not the
Kurds succeed in forming a country, the drive toward nationhood
dominates their life and culture today.
McKiernan recounts the day in April 2002 when Barham Salih, then the
prime minister of what was the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan in
northern Iraq, and now a key political player in Baghdad, noted
gleefully that Newsweek used the word 'Kurdistan' in a headline.
"The K word is finally out there in the U.S.," Salih said. "We are
making progress.'"
The Kurds have long been recognized as a distinct people with their
own language and a culture different from that of the Arabs to the
south, the peoples of the Caucasus to the north and the Persians to
the east. Centuries of persecution and a hard mountain life have
isolated them.
Their struggles, especially in the last century, are movingly traced
by McKiernan, a documentary filmmaker and photographer who has spent
more than 15 years traveling through what he calls "the lands of the
Kurds." Unlike many journalists who write after a brief foreign
posting or covering a war, his fascination with his subject goes
back 15 years, to when he joined a relief group bringing aid to
Iraqi Kurds who fled Saddam Hussein and took refuge in squalid camps
in Iran. It was the first of many trips in which he pushed, finagled
and pleaded his way into areas off limits to most foreigners.
His reporting suggests that if any part of the Kurdish world could
become fully independent, it is Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds in Iran
are too poor and lack the central, political organization. The Kurds
in Turkey, after decades of struggle, are beginning to be accepted
as a minority with rights. This is due in no small part to Turkey's
effort to join the European Union and thus its need to demonstrate
tolerance to non-Turkic ethnic groups.
The book's virtue is its evenhandedness: Relentless interviewing
leads him to portray the Kurds in measured terms, at once
sympathetic but clear-eyed. They are persistent but also fighters,
willing to kill for what they want. He describes the Iraqi Kurds'
transformation from open and accommodating underdogs, willing to
reveal themselves to journalists, into wary managers of the media,
even attempting to cloister journalists in guesthouses far from the
action and give them minders — tactics also used by Hussein, the
Kurds' enemy.
In several final chapters, McKiernan offers a lucid narrative of how
the fundamentalist Muslim group Ansar al-Islam, which the United
States believed had ties to Al Qaeda, insinuated itself into Iraq's
Kurdish population, endeavored to Islamize it, terrorized local
Kurds and ultimately used the villages and towns they dominated to
launch brazen attacks against the Kurdish government. It's a
textbook example of the tactics used in fundamentalist takeovers of
other remote outposts from Afghanistan to Chechnya.
The reporting on Ansar is made more compelling because it
encompasses the story of a Kurd in whose life McKiernan became
deeply involved. Karzan Mahmoud, a driver for then-Prime Minister
Salih, was crippled when three Ansar-linked gunmen tried to
assassinate Salih in 2002. Karzan took 23 bullets, and when doctors
in Turkey were unable to relieve his pain or help him to walk
normally, he sought McKiernan's help. The author underplays what
must have been enormous effort to persuade Brigham and Women's
Hospital in Boston to treat Karzan free.
Usually when a reporter gets involved with his subject, we question
his objectivity. But McKiernan never lets his passion get in the way
of his reportage. But he understands the pathos of what he is
writing about and makes us understand it too.
THE KURDS: A PEOPLE IN SEARCH OF THEIR HOMELAND
• Author: Kevin McKiernan
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Price: $18.45 used 10 $
BUY The from Amazon- click here
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