|
On My Mind: The Kurds and Our Dilemma
30.12.2007
By
Mark Hopkins
|
|
|
|
December
30, 2007
The political campaigns are in full swing and
candidates are being judged on a very limited list
of issues. Chief among those is the war in Iraq. Who
voted for it, against it, who wants our troops home
now and who wants our troops home later.
Arguments on both sides of the “now or later” issue
are persuasive. Many “single-issue” voters will
decide their votes based on that one position of the
candidates.
Do you remember 1968 and 1972? Vietnam was the
“single” issue in those election years. Anti-war
demonstrators rioted in the streets of Chicago in
’68, and by ’72 demonstrators were following the
candidates around the country by the thousands.
Few people who lived in that time will forget the
aftermath of our pull out from Vietnam. The picture
of our Vietnamese supporters on top of the United
States Embassy trying to escape their fate on an
American helicopter is still burned into the
American psyche and, even 35 years later, it affects
the “Iraqi” debate today.www.ekurd.net
President Bush, in a
recent speech, talked about that aftermath, the
“re-education camps” and the “killing fields.” For
the over-age-50 group, there are enough of those
memories to last us a lifetime and we don’t need
more.
There is little doubt that our troops in Iraq are
coming home. Exactly when, and under what
circumstances, is the key question on everyone’s
mind. A resounding victory is probably not in our
future. No responsible authority in Washington or in
the military is predicting a positive resolution for
the conflict in Iraq.
We are in our fourth year of fighting a war that has
turned into a quagmire.
The Shiite and Sunni religious groups both seem
committed to fighting a guerilla war against us —
when they aren’t attacking each other. It is a very
confusing war.
What is obvious, and has been ever since we arrived
in Baghdad, is that the majority of the Iraqi people
do not want us there. There is an exception,
however, to the “Yankee Go Home” sentiment that
kindles the constant turmoil in the streets.
One group welcomed us there, wants us there and will
again become an oppressed minority when we leave.
They are the Kurds.
Anthropologists call the Kurds an “Indo-European”
people, a mixture of many different tribes and
groups who migrated to the region over the past
4,000 years.
One particular group came from southern France about
3,000 years ago. They were a peace-loving group who
chose to leave their lands when nearby aggressive
tribes continued to attack and harass them. They
moved across the Alps, through what is today
southeastern Europe and settled for a time in
nrthern Macedonia.
Still uncomfortable in their hostile surroundings,
they were offered a “deal” by the King of Bithynia,
a country located in the most northern province of
present-day Turkey. (Those familiar with the
journeys of Paul the Apostle in the Bible will
remember Bithynia as a destination he was not able
to reach.)
The deal offered those early Kurds was a
“land-for-protection” arrangement. It called for the
tribe to move to the mountainous eastern section of
Bithynia to help the king protect his kingdom from
the Persians, who threatened him from their home
base in what is present-day Iraq. (Again, Bible
readers will remember that in the first century
A.D., the apostle Paul wrote letters to churches he
had founded earlier in the Roman province of
Galatia. Some of those churches were in the region
occupied by the Kurds.) Thus, early in history their
heritage was French. They moved east and in Biblical
times, we called them Galatians. Today they are
called Kurds.
In history the Kurds played a significant part in
the 500-year battle for the city of Jerusalem. The
Crusaders from Europe conquered Jerusalem in 1099.
In one of the more embarrassing “happenings” in
history, our “Christian” leaders put to death every
Muslim who was captured in the siege. Ninety years
later Muslim armies,www.ekurd.net
led by Saladin, king of the
Kurds, took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders.
The most notable aspect of that siege was the pledge
of Saladin not to follow the example of the
Crusaders 90 years earlier, to put all of the
defenders of Jerusalem to death.
Instead, he offered them safe passage out of Arab
lands. True to his word, more than 35,000 survivors
were spared. Saladin escorted them from the Holy
Land across present-day Turkey and allowed them to
return to their homes in Europe. (For more
information on that period in history, you can read
a book titled “Saladin: Sultan and Uniter of
Islam.”)
Today, Saladin is a hero in Arab lands as the great
king who succeeded in bringing all Arabs together
into a unified fighting force. It should not be lost
on us that the only time in history when the
mideastern Muslim countries ever united on anything,
it was to fight the European “outsiders,” the
Infidels, those who do not believe in Mohammed and
Allah.
Saladin was the most powerful man of his time. He
held life and death in his hands but knew how to
show mercy, as well. He was a Kurd.
History has not been good to the Kurds. Originally,
they were a western people lost in an eastern world
where they neither fit nor wanted to be. Today the
Kurds make up 28 percent of Iraq’s population. They
live mostly in the northern mountainous region, and
have different customs and language from the rest of
Iraq. Because of those differences they have been
constantly harassed, discriminated against and even
murdered by their own Iraqi government.
It is not hard to predict the eventual outcome of
our war in Iraq. More difficult to predict, however,
are the overall effects of our withdrawal on our
supporters, the Kurds.
We should have serious concerns about their future.
They deserve our support in the development of their
own nationalism, what Americans of another century
called “Manifest Destiny.”
There was a time when they had their own
independence. But when national borders were redrawn
in the Mideast at the end of World War I, their
region, called Kurdistan, was divided between
Turkey, Iran and Iraq. They have been an oppressed
minority every since.
As we contemplate withdrawal and still have
significant control in Iraq, we should let them
again have their own land and their own government
in their mountain homeland. To do otherwise is to
allow the Kurds to be drawn back into the abyss of
second-class citizenship and persecution in one or
another Mideastern country where they neither belong
nor want to be.
Historians often tell us that “those who do not
study history are doomed to repeat it.”
The next several months will tell us if we have
learned the lessons of the past. We should remember
the effects of the
Vietnam pull-out on our friends and supporters
30-plus years ago, and we should not forget the
Kurds in Iraq today.
Mark Hopkins, 68, has been president at three
institutions of higher learning, including what was
then Anderson college.
Today the Anderson resident is a consultant in
international higher education working primarily in
Asia.
independentmail com
Top |
Kurd Net
does not take credit for and is not responsible for the content of news
information on this page
|
® 