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What is Mine is Mine, What is Yours is
Negotiable
2.11.2009
By Dr Rashid Karadaghi
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November 2, 2009
The late Howard K. Smith, the ABC Television News
anchor and commentator, used to remind us often of
one of his favorite quotations, which he attributed
to the communists: “What is mine is mine; what is
yours is negotiable.” What he forgot to do was to
also attribute the saying to the occupiers of
Kurdistan – Arabs, Turks, and Persians. While no one
can deny that other occupiers throughout history
have been guilty of horrible crimes against the
occupied nations, what concerns us as Kurds most,
naturally, is how the occupiers have viewed and
dealt with our homeland and our people.
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Dr. Rashid Karadaghi |
The Arabs have managed to carve
out twenty-two states for themselves (we don’t want
to get into how and with what brutalities and
trickeries they did it), but when a Kurd talks about
the right of his people to establish an independent
state on their own ancestral land, they are quick to
accuse him of “separatism,” which, to them, is high
treason. They keep emphasizing the “Arab identity”
of each of their twenty-two states on every occasion
and deny all ethnic groups within those states their
human and national rights. They think that it is
their right to be ultra-nationalistic and be proud
of their Arab identity and enjoy all the privileges
of nationhood, but deny others a fraction of those
same rights.
The Kurds have had the misfortune of being ruled
over for too long by the twisted mentality which the
late Howard K. Smith was talking about. One of the
most flagrant and serious practical applications of
this mentality was carried out by Saddam Hussein in
Iraqi-occupied Kurdistan. To change the demography
of Kurdistan, Saddam expelled hundreds of thousands
of Kurds from their ancestral homes in the
majority-Kurdish Kirkuk province and other Kurdish
areas while bringing in an equal or larger number of
Ba’thists and other Arabs from southern and central
Iraq and settling them in their place in order to
Arabize these areas. To the tyrant, Kurdish land
was, of course, “negotiable.” To his succeeding
little tyrants, Kurdish land is still “negotiable”
today and will remain so forever.
The consequences of this evil act by Saddam have
become one of the thorniest issues that Iraq and the
Kurdistan Region are contending with today. Since
the liberation of Iraq in 2003 and the fall of the
tyrant, the Kurds have been trying peacefully, but
without any success, to get the Arab settlers
brought in by Saddam to go back to their original
homes with compensations, but the “new” Iraqi
government has, at best, only paid lip service to
the Kurdish demand despite the fact that Article 140
of the Iraqi constitution stipulates reversing the
Arabization of the Kurdish areas by allowing the
Kurds who were expelled from their ancestral homes
to return to their homes and properties and the Arab
settlers to go back to where they came from.
Under Saddam’s Arabization, the Kurds lost
everything, including their homes and their dignity
as human beings, while the Arab settlers gained a
lot. Now that the Arab settlers are being asked to
leave with dignity and with compensations (for
giving back what they had taken from the Kurds by
force), the settlers and their Arab chauvinists
backers call this “reverse discrimination.” For
racist and expansionistic reasons,www.ekurd.neteven
non-Iraqis from Saudi Arabia to Turkey oppose
righting the wrong done to the Kurds and demand that
the Arabization policy which Saddam implemented
stay, which would mean that the Kurds remain
homeless while the Arab settlers remain on the land
and in the homes they took from the Kurds by force.
Arab Iraq calls the historically Kurdish areas where
Kurds were expelled from and replaced by Arab
settlers “disputed territories,” which it is not
willing to give up and give back to its rightful
owners. “What is mine is mine; what is yours is
negotiable.”
Every Arab summit meeting and every Arab gathering
on any level usually concludes with a communique
stressing “Iraq’s Arab and Islamic identity” and its
“unity and territorial integrity,” which are all
code words for denying the right of the Kurdish
people to their own land and their right to be free
from Arab domination and oppression. So, as far as
Arab leaders and the majority of the Arab masses are
concerned, the only identity the seven million Kurds
in the Kurdistan region, which is still part of
Iraq, can have is an “Arab” identity. Imagine what
kind of hell would break loose if anyone or any
power told Arabs in any one of their twenty-two
states that they can no longer call themselves Arabs
but some other name! Again, “My identity is mine;
yours is negotiable.”
Like the Arabs, the Turks are also masters of this
chauvinistic, jingoistic attitude. They have been
occupying part of the Kurdish homeland for five
centuries and in the past hundred years of their
dark history they have also been trying to erase
Kurdish identity altogether in the part of Kurdistan
under their occupation by calling the Kurds
“mountain Turks who have forgotten their language,”
while denying them human rights as basic as
identifying themselves as Kurds, studying the
Kurdish language in schools, educating their
children in their mother tongue and giving them
Kurdish names, etc., and every other human and
cultural right that other people take for granted.
The Turks give themselves every right under the sun,
but they don’t consider a Kurd even a second class
citizen, unless he considered himself a Turk. To add
insult to injury, they constantly remind the Kurds
of their ultra racist graffiti: “Happy is he who is
born a Turk,” written in big letters in prominent
places in Kurdistan so that a Kurd cannot escape
being humiliated every day of his/her life. What the
Turks have been denying the Kurds in their own
occupied homeland shouldn’t even be called “rights”
to be granted or denied by the state but natural
birth rights that shouldn’t be taken away from
anybody by any state or power, yet the Turks have
been doing just that to twenty million Kurds under
their control
The Persians are not far behind the Arabs and the
Turks in clinging to their mistreatment and
oppression of the Kurds. While they consider the
part of Kurdistan under their occupation even beyond
“negotiable,” they, too, are denying every
legitimate right to the Kurds, including studying
Kurdish in schools, or using it as a medium of
instruction, etc. Such is the justice and democracy
that the Iranian regime claims to be practising
today. The Shah’s regime did not treat the Kurds any
better, of course.
No matter which way the Kurdish people turn, they
are faced with states and neighbors that consider
the Kurdish homeland and Kurdish identity
“negotiable.” The insistence by these greedy and
racist neighbors not only on keeping what they have
taken away from the Kurds by force and grabbing for
more, but on erasing Kurdish identity, remains as
serious a threat to Kurdish survival as it ever has
been. Therefore,www.ekurd.netthe
Kurds must remain vigilant and stand their ground
against continuous attempts to take away their land,
their freedom, and their identity. If we remain true
to our ancestors, who resisted and, in the end,
defeated every invader of Kurdistan who dreamt of
breaking the will of our people, we will foil any
and all attempts by today’s invaders, too, for, as
it is in any struggle, it is often a strong defence
that carries the day.
Search KurdNet for more articles by Dr.
Rashid Karadaghi
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