Denying a Nation The Right to Speak Through Its Members: The Case of the Kurdish Students at Loughborough University

By: Dr. Sabah Salih

29 April 2005

This may sound like a small thing, a student group at a fifth-rate university—Loughborough—preventing a group of Kurdish students from participating in one of those faddish, feel-good cultural diversity events that have come of late to define much of the intellectual landscape in the American and British academy.  But it isn’t, for the issue here has less to do with different styles of living—which is what culture is about—than with the politics of identity, a much heftier issue.

Cultural celebrations at public institutions like a university, though their organizers are at pains to deny it, almost always involve a fair amount of politicking—but in this case it involved a lot more: the twin machinations of power and politics was at work here.

These Kurdish students have been ruled over in a manner reminiscent of colonial times, denying at will a people’s space of their own, delegating them to the margins, or robbing them of the right to speak for themselves, both as individuals and representatives of a nation.  These students’ exclusion, therefore, is not a simple matter of just preventing a few individuals from doing something personal: it’s rather a matter of not allowing a nation to speak through its members.  Silencing a few individuals from a nation already wounded and dispossessed, like the Kurdish nation, is the same thing as silencing that nation as a whole.  Indeed, the action taken by the organizers of this event cannot be separated from the colonial mindset that legitimized the dismembering and the occupation of Kurdistan in the first place.

The organizers of the April 28, 2005, celebration tout the annual gala as an “International Day” aimed at recognizing the cultural diversity of the school’s student body.  But this is not what they did: By endorsing their government’s view that there’s no such thing as Kurdistan, these student organizers have in effect allowed themselves to become active participants in the ongoing imperial plunder of Kurdistan.  If these organizers have forgotten about history, as Frederic Jameson reminds us in another context, history—in this case Kurdish history—will not forget about them.

I’m told that the organizers, in justifying their decision, also raised the matter of the Kurdish students not having Kurdish passports.  Now, that’s something!  This was supposed to be a cultural not a political event.  You don’t organize a cultural event according to who has or who hasn’t a passport.  The vulgarity of it aside, passports do not make a culture; people do.  Passports represent countries, which are political systems, not cultures.  Passports, unlike culture, are political documents, rigidly artificial and of recent vintage, with no bearing whatsoever on a nation’s heartbeat—which is what culture is about.  The exclusion of the Kurdish students, therefore, is a smack at the very notion of cultural diversity; in this case, one might as well call the event a celebration of passports or nation-states!

But I’m afraid there’s another sub-text to the issue, a much deeper one.  The corridors of the American and British academy these days are rife with fundamentalist voices who in the name of Marxism have adopted a very un-Marxist style of thinking.  Take Usama Bin Laden’s rhetoric, throw out the references to Islam, pepper it with references to Marx and Gramsci and Said, and you’ll get a good taste of this superficial rhetoric of desperation, which the brilliant contemporary Marxist Slavoj Zizek has rightly called “a prohibition against thinking.”  There’s only one evil in this world, the thinking goes, and that’s the Bush administration; the Kurds, because of their recent involvement with Uncle Sam, are not much better either.  This might very well be the political framework within which the student organizers, working in tandem with Arab and Muslim fascists in support of Iraq’s Ba’thist tyranny, made their decision.

A recent addition to such monumental disregard for the complexities of the Kurdish and Iraqi situations is a piece by Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Mathews, and Michael Watts in the April 21 London Review of Books; the writers begin ominously with a title (“Blood for Oil?”) that easily shows they have the flimsiest grasp of the situation.  Of course oil is a factor, but to think that the whole situation in Iraq begins and ends with oil is to operate with an incredibly closed mind, is to subject millions of people to ideological distortion, and is to violate the native’s role in shaping his/her own history.  From their lengthy piece you cannot tell that Iraq is place of a complex mix of cultures and ethnicities; the Iraq of their imagination is a vast network of radical and progressive opposition against the intervention, growing by the day! If this is their take on what’s happening in Southern Kurdistan and Arab Iraq, then, sadly, these people operate in a world of make-believe.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to find out that these student organizers at Loughborough take their cues from such and other like-minded circles; we would then understand perfectly well that their decision to bar the Kurdish students from participating in the college’s annual cultural event was in fact a form of political axe grinding against the Kurdish people for playing such a pivotal role in ending fascist tyranny in Iraq—tyranny they campaigned so hard to protect.

Dr. Sabah Salih is Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA. <Ssalih@bloomu.edu>