Kurdistan Observer

Most of us Kurds as well as other nationalities from our part of the world know how the illiterate among us who have a grievance and want to petition the government about it go to a professional petition-writer and ask him to write up his grievance in order to submit it to the proper authorities to investigate and render a judgment on it. It so happened that one day one of these men went to a petition-writer and asked him to write a petition for him. After the petition-writer finished the petition and read it to him out loud, the man started to cry. The petition-writer couldn’t help asking him, “Why are you crying”? The man replied, “I knew they had done me wrong, but, by God, I had no idea they have done me so much wrong!”

I believe that we Kurds, just like the man in the real-life story above, don’t quite realize how much injustice has been done to us by the occupiers of our country, who have done their evil in the guise of “brothers.” I also believe that one explanation for not having more rage than we do against this injustice is that we have become so numb to our horrible condition that we have come to accept it more-or-less because we have been brainwashed into thinking that it is impossible to change. For if we had had enough rage in us, coupled with the right kind of vision, we certainly wouldn’t have been in the intolerable situation we are in today.

The only way for us to get out of the box we have been put in is to reverse the brainwashing that our people have been subjected to for decades and start believing in ourselves once again, for once we do that we realize that there is nothing between us and freedom but our mindset. We will find that despite their superior armies, their tanks, their bombers and other instruments of war and repression, those who have persecuted us for decades will be powerless in the face of our determination to regain our dignity and our sense of ourselves as human beings, which the criminals have robbed us of for so long to satisfy their sick ego. We must once and for all come to the realization that the emperor has no clothes on; he is really naked and much more vulnerable than we have thought all along. Once we believe in this simple fact and internalize it in our thinking and actions, we will be on the road to freedom.

Our reaction to the great injustice done to us must not be to despair or cry out of self-pity, like the man did in our story, but to rage and rage and rage against all those who have had a hand in the dehumanization and enslavement of our people generation after generation. This rage must not quiet down until the occupiers are thrown out of our country and our brave people become free. With determination, that day should not be too far off.

There should be enough rage to go around not only against the occupiers of Kurdistan but also against those who support them in their unforgivable crime. How does the US Deputy Secretary of Desfence Paul Wolfowitz, for instance, expect the Kurds to react to his recent callous remarks to his Turkish hosts when he “rules out the prospect of Washington’s support for the creation of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq” because “it would destabilize the region”! What kind of “stability” are you talking about, Mr. Secretary? Surely, you remember that Stalinist Russia was “stable,” too! Is that the kind of stability you wish for the Middle East? Besides, why are the Kurds being blamed for the lack of stability in the region when every fair and knowledgeable observer knows that it is the tyrannical regimes there that create instability, not the Kurds. In fact, and contrary to what you claim, a Kurdish state would not destabilize the region but would be an important stabilizing element, provided people like you don’t undermine it before it is even established just to please the looters of our country, and provided that the occupiers of Kurdistan recognize that the Kurds are entitled to the same rights that they are entitled to.

I believe that an independent Kurdish state is very much in the strategic interest of the United States and the West as a whole, and U.S. policy-makers would realize this fact if they take off their blinders and listen, without any prejudgment and prejudice, to the Kurdish point of view for a change, instead of the old, baseless arguments put forth by the occupiers of Kurdistan, who have had the ears of the Western powers for all of the last century. A Kurdish state would be a voice for reason, and an expression of decent and democratic values --- as evidenced by eleven years of Kurdish self-rule in the liberated parts of South Kurdistan despite all the occupiers’ plots to sabotage it. The Kurdish people and their independent state would be the best and most reliable ally to have for the U.S. and other democracies and any neighboring country that wants the friendship of the Kurdish people.

Do you have any idea, Mr. Secretary, about the intolerable life of the 30-40 million Kurds living under occupation? Surely, you must know something about the genocidal war that your host country and Iraq have been waging against them for decades. Surely, you couldn’t be ignorant of the Iraqi regime’s chemical attack that left thousands of innocent Kurdish men, women, and children dead in Halabja, not to mention its terrible aftermath on the surviving population of the area from increased cases of cancer to birth defects and other deformities. Surely, you have to have heard about the “disappearance” of nearly a quarter million innocent Kurds in the Iraqi regime’s murderous Anfal campaign of the late eighties. And, surely, you must be aware of the ethnic cleansing carried out today by the Iraqi regime against Kurds in the Kurdish areas still under its control. And you certainly must be aware of your host country’s horrible treatment of the Kurds within its borders and its declared war on all things Kurdish everywhere. How would you like to live in a country where you would be accused of separatism and be put in jail just for asking to study your mother tongue? How could you, as a representative of the United States government and as a citizen of a free country, endorse the policies of such a country instead of being outraged by them?

Mr. Secretary--- and through you I am addressing all the decision-makers in this country be they in your own Department or the State Department or the Whitehouse or the Congress or in the Think-tanks --- the country on whose behalf you speak, and of which I have been a citizen for half of my life, does not have to submit to Turkey’s blackmail, or anybody else’s, because Turkey is in no position to impose its conditions on the only superpower in the world. Turkey could not survive without U.S. political, economic, and military support and yet it is somehow able to dictate its terms to the U.S. as if it is the U.S. that needs Turkey and not the other way around! All this is happening, of course, thanks to the ingenuity of U.S. policy-makers! This is truly a case of the tail wagging the dog! How could you and your colleagues succumb to the hegemonic designs and totally unacceptable demands of a state that claims to be democratic while forbidding fifteen to twenty million Kurds from speaking or studying their own language, let alone exercising their most basic human and national rights, and let alone its desperate attempt to keep the Kurds in chains even beyond its borders as if its only mission in life was to fight all things Kurdish no matter where they may be in the world. By expressing your “firm opposition to a Kurdish state in northern Iraq,” you are putting America’s stamp of approval on Turkey’s eternal and pathological hatred of the Kurds and its non-stop war on them. You know very well that America’s place should be on the side of the victims, not the victimizers --- as indeed we saw in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and elsewhere --- but you chose to be completely on the side of the victimizers of the Kurdish people in defiance of all the noble principles that the country on whose behalf you speak was founded on. The Founding Fathers of the United States envisioned this country to be a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world, and America can and should always live up to that vision. Unfortunately, your statements not only do not live up to that vision but make a mockery of it.

And, undoubtedly, there will also be enough righteous rage by the Kurdish people against any Kurdish political party or leader who, for whatever reason, is incapable of expressing the true and unambiguous national demands of the Kurdish people, demands which are not negotiable and must not be bargained away by any person or group. It is the job of political parties and leaders to lead the people rather than follow the slowest among them and hold the entire people back. Those who speak on behalf of the Kurdish people must not be content with getting less than the minimum for their people. As individuals, we shape and reshape our lives continuously, and as nations we have to follow the same principle. For any political party or group to try to repackage outdated slogans, which may have been appropriate for their time but unacceptable today, is doing a great disservice to the people they represent.

Part of our problem as Kurds was perhaps best summed up by a great Armenian friend of our people when he said in a fiery speech at a Kurdish National Congress (KNC) conference a few years ago, “The problem with you people is that you are too nice, too mild, too polite, too accommodating, and too trusting for this merciless world. You need to learn to be like others. You must change you ways if you really want to get your freedom and your country back from those who have stolen it from you.” I believe that our Armenian friend had sized us up well. It is quite obvious to us all that the way we have been dealing with our dilemma has not gained us anything but ended us up as a dispossessed people, a people boxed in by vicious enemies who have claimed to be our “brothers” but repeatedly deceived us in the past and used us for their own end. All of us Kurds must say with one voice, “Enough is enough!” It is time we took care of our own instead of serving other peoples’ causes because no one has cared about us or our suffering. Our neighbor-occupiers have throughout history used religion and every “-ism” to serve their own national interest and have involved us with them in their religion and their “-isms” only to serve their national interest, which has always been against ours. We have always put their interest ahead of our own, always helped them win while making ourselves lose, always deferential, accommodating, and self-effacing. We have always been tricked into fighting for their causes in the expectation that some day they would return the favor, but the way they have repaid us has been to forbid us from speaking or studying our own language as if that would destroy the unity of the country, giving our children Kurdish names as if that were a call for separatism, studying our own history as if we had no history and no past, calling our country by its proper name “Kurdistan” – the land of the Kurds --- as if that were the ultimate treason, feeling safe and free in our homes as if that were too good for us.

And as if all that were not enough punishment for those who throughout history have served them selflessly and served them well, they burnt our villages and towns by the thousands, built military posts on every hilltop and watchtowers along the borders to monitor our every move, tortured our brave men and women to death in their prisons, killed our innocent men, women, and children with chemical weapons, dragged our able men and boys by the thousands from their homes, separated them from their wives, mothers, sisters and children, trucked them to the lonely desert and buried them alive never to be heard from again. O, God! Imagine the agony on all the faces of those snatched away from their loved ones! Imagine the pain for both the victims and their survivors! And for what “crime”? For wanting to live free from fear in their own homes! Can anyone really imagine the degree of our suffering and the size of our sacrifice? And can anyone really believe that all this took place while a silent and oblivious world was going about its business as if nothing was wrong and, indeed, while the seemingly respectable people in suit and tie were getting rich off of this suffering by providing the killers with their lethal weapons? It has been said, “If you trick me once, shame on you; but if you trick me twice, shame on me!” We certainly have been tricked more times than we can count. It is time that we served our own Kurdish national interest instead of other peoples’ interest. It is time for a Kurdish Kurdistan.

We must reserve the most rage for the occupiers of our country. No nation, no matter how strong militarily, has any right whatsoever to terrorize another nation and take what belongs to it by force. Why isn’t Arab Iraq or any other Arab country imposing its will on any of its twenty-two sister countries by forcing a union on them even though they all share a common language, culture, heritage, history, religion, and customs and traditions, but forcing a master-slave union on the Kurds even though they share nothing with them but their religion? This is imperialism in its most horrible form, and every Kurd must reject it without a moment’s thought. We should not be fooled any more by the big lie of “historical brotherhood” between us because we have never had such relations and never will; we have had an occupier-occupied, master-slave relationship in the guise of “brotherhood.” If this is not imperialism, then what is it? And why isn’t Turkey imposing its will on its neighboring Turkic nationalities, with whom the Turks certainly have a lot more in common than with the Kurds, by annexing their territories?

The answer to these questions is that none of the peoples that would be targeted, whether by Iraq or Turkey or anybody else, would ever allow such a thing to happen because they believe in themselves and cherish their freedom and would teach any aggressor a lesson he would never forget if he attempted to take away their freedom. So the question is: Are The Kurds different from all other God’s creatures? Is our country a free-for-all piece of abandoned property to be looted by one thief after another and for ever? Every honorable Kurd must rage against this condition and this rage must not quiet down until every looter and occupier of our country is thrown out. And I say “thrown out” because history has shown us that no occupier has ever left the land he has occupied of his own accord. Freedom is always taken and seldom, if ever, given.