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The Kurds won't sacrifice themselves to
the West
27.3.2012
By Sergei Balmasov - Russian Pravda |
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Iraqi Kurdistan president Massoud Barzani.
Kurds in Iraq's Kurdistan eager to have their own
independent state, but Kurdish leaders still
reluctant.
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March 27, 2012
The declaration of the Kurdish state, which had been
scheduled by the president of Iraq's Kurdistan
Autonomous Region Massoud Barzani for the 21st March
2012, did not take place. Ishkhan Miroev,
editor-in-chief of "The Free Kurdistan" shared his
thoughts in an interview with Pravda.Ru about the
failure.
In the course of history, the Kurds have fallen
victim to domestic and foreign enemies. As everyone
already knows, the Serves World Peace Treaty, signed
in 1920 in France between Antanta and defeated
Turkey, granted Kurdistan permission to be
independent. And, as we know, the Kurds were
deceived. All this led to their lands being
immediately divided up between a few countries, and
that subsequently led to tragedy. That was how
Saddam Hussein managed to destroy 5000 Kurds with
chemical weapons. Or there's the example of Syria,
where, with complete permissiveness, the government
carried out a bloody conflict in 2004, costing the
Kurdish people dozens of lives.
That is why they do not trust anybody and play a
careful game, for they are afraid of once again
becoming a gaming chip for other, more powerful,
countries. The Kurds have understood Reagan's words
well, when he said that Kurdistan is a matchbox,
that might at any moment act in its own aims and
interests.
Nevertheless, in view of
what you have already said, the Kurds would not
utterly reject the idea of creating their own state?
The question is would the other players let such a
state be created? Firstly, danger is emanating from
Turkey, which is prepared to send troops in to
strangle the new state as it germinates. The Turks
know all too well that the situation in the Middle
East is changing very quickly and after Assad's fall
from power, the final hour will come for the
Iranians and Turks of Kurdistan. These dangers are
not coincidental; they all follow one another like
links in a chain. And of course it is possible that
the "loudest" event might happen amongst the Turks
in Kurdistan itself,www.ekurd.net
where almost half of all Kurds live, around
20million people altogether. In spite of the fact
that the Turkish authorities are consciously trying
to reduce the number of Kurdish people, as by the
way many other countries are also doing, in reality
the Kurds number more than 40 million people.
And what about Iran?
Even though certain steps have been taken by the
government of Iran in terms of the Kurds, at the
heart of all this is the fact that they do not solve
problems, in as much as the question of cultural
autonomy has still not been decided, and they are
fighting for their constitutional rights. I have
noticed that there aren't any serious problems
between the Kurds and the Iranians themselves. They
have a lot in common; these are primordial but not
alien inhabitants of a region with a single
Indo-European language at its core.
Nevertheless, the Iranian authorities are, to put it
mildly, far from sorting out the Kurds' problems .
Generally, when we talk about the Kurdish situation
it's impossible to ignore the fact that in Russia
they have many more rights than in their homeland.
It is no coincidence that the brigade PJAK is active
in the Iranian part of Kurdistan, which is a
military wing of the Russian Party Committee. They
are not insurgents or criminals, as they are
depicted to be in Tehran, rather they are simply
people struggling for their human rights.
In what way does this
situation pose a threat to Armenia?
Armenia is no exception to the rule, since those
countries which Kurds live in also oppress them.
Here we can observe a simply enormous anti-Kurdish
campaign. In many respects it has created a desire
to return to "Western Armenia" and does not exclude
the fact that in case of leaving this Kurdish border
zone between the Armenian and Turkish territory of
Yerevan it will want to "get it back again" as it
used to be when in 1920 the Armenians attempted to
create "Great Armenia".
But nobody will give anyone anything that simply. A
large part of these lands which the Armenian
revenge-seekers dream of are sitting on the Turkish
border-zone and is territory inhabited by Kurds. Of
course, it is impossible to ignore the question of
the Kurds' historical claim, representatives of whom
took part in the events of 1915-18 fighting on the
Turkish side, a fact which in Yerevan has not been
forgotten.
It is appropriate at this point to mention an
Armenian saying, which states that "you can have a
conversation with the Devil, but just not with a
Kurd." This view has led to the almost total
expulsion of the Kurdish population from Armenia,
with the exception of a few Ezidi, a people from the
North of Iraq.
The question then arises as to the precise borders
of the future Kurdish state. Will it accept and
recognise the Iranian authorities? After all, from
the moment of the declaration of the autonomous
region of Iranian Southern Kurdistan, a number of
disputed points had not been resolved, but the most
important ones had...
Barzani declared Kirkuk to be "the heart of the
Kurdish state" which they resolutely disagreed with
in Baghdad. The thing is that Saddam Hussein evicted
Kurds from that strategically oil-rich region,
replacing them with Turks which signified the
arising of future conflict.
Sergei Balmasov, Russian Pravda, translated by
Emily Ferris
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author or news agency,
pravda.ru
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