Specialist "Kevin McKiernan" to lecture on
Kurds 10.5.2006
By Aria Miran | |
|
|
Kevin
McKiernan To Discuss Group’s Influence in Middle East
The lecture, entitled “The Kurds - A People in Search of Their
Homeland,” is based on a book of the same name that McKiernan
recently published. Tickets are available through Arts & Lectures
and are $8 for students and $10 for the general public. McKiernan
said the lecture would be a dynamic representation of the subject
matter.
“I plan to keep people awake,” McKiernan said. “Everyone knows the
name Kurd, but now they are America’s best friend in a war that
appears to be lost otherwise. I will show over 100 slides from my 15
years in these Kurdish areas. The drumbeat is beginning that would
pull all these diverse Kurds together.”
The Kurds are the world’s largest stateless ethnic group and have
garnered recent attention for their role as a U.S. ally in the
invasion of Iraq, McKiernan said. Middle Eastern governments have
historically repressed their identity, he said, and Saddam Hussein
poisoned about 7,000 Kurds using chemical weapons.
The Kurds, who number between 25 and 30 million, will be important
to the stability of the Middle East in the next decade, McKiernan
said.
“Ten years ago, a Syrian Kurd told me that [they were a key to the
stability of the Middle East],” McKiernan said. “I thought he was
boasting, and I politely nodded my head and didn’t put much stock in
that analysis. But the Kurds have a bloc located in all of these
[Middle Eastern] countries, and in some senses they have common
interests. They are an outline for stability or great instability in
those areas.” |
The Kurds : A
People in Search of Their Homeland. By Kevin McKiernan
BUY The book from Amazon- click here
|
McKiernan began work as a journalist covering armed confrontations
between Native Americans and authorities in the 1970s, and said it
was this experience that spawned his present outlook on the
repression of Kurds.
“I saw a lot of similarities between the Kurds in the ’90s and the
Native Americans,” McKiernan said. “They were the prism through
which I saw Kurdish experience.”
In 1999, McKiernan was first introduced to the Kurds while a group
of them was taking refuge in tent camps in Iran, and has since been
astonished by the huge changes they have seen.
“They were a people dying of disease and running away from Saddam’s
gunships,” McKiernan said. “They were living in tents with not much
clean water. They were fearing for their lives and dying in those
camps. [But] today, a Kurd is the president of Iraq - it’s been
quite an arc.”
Books by Kevin McKiernan will be available for purchase and signing
at the lecture, courtesy of event co-sponsor Borders.
THE KURDS: A PEOPLE IN SEARCH OF THEIR HOMELAND
• Author: Kevin McKiernan
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Price: $18.45 used 10 $
BUY The book from Amazon- click here
ucsbdailynexus com Top |
Kurd Net does not take credit for and is not responsible for the content of news information on this page |
® 