Kurdistan Observer

The volume of defeatist statements by spokesmen and high officials of both major Kurdish political parties of Southern Kurdistan is getting louder by the day. In their wisdom, some have gone even as far as saying that we Kurds are “destined” to remain part of Iraq (no doubt after consulting some astrological signs concocted by the occupiers of our homeland) as if to negate all that generations of Kurdish patriots have taught us and struggled for, and thousands of whom have died for, namely, that the borders within which our people have been imprisoned for almost a century were designed by our enemies and imposed on our people against their will. Like millions of Kurds, I believe that the advocates of full independence and total freedom from foreign occupation are one hundred percent right while the advocates of defeatism and surrender, no matter what their party affiliation and position, are dead wrong.

Who has ever heard any spokesman for any oppressed people, past or present, say that his people were destined to remain enslaved forever? I certainly have not. Quite the contrary, I have heard every leader and spokesman for every oppressed people say that their people’s right to complete freedom was not negotiable. Something strange has, indeed, been happening to the thinking of those who speak on our behalf. Something has gone seriously wrong with our national consciousness and our sense of ourselves as a nation deserving no less than any other in the world. It has been said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. If we as a nation and as individuals ever forget all the crimes that successive Iraqi regimes have committed against our people ---from the house-by-house destruction of our villages and towns to ethnic cleansing that continues even today to chemical attacks to genocide --- which is what we would be doing by advocating or accepting to remain part of Iraq in any way shape or form, including federalism, we should not be surprised if there is a repeat of those crimes in the future, and we will surely bear part of the responsibility for them if for no other reason than our short and faulty memory and our complacency.

It is, indeed, ironic that just as the prize seems to be within our reach, we hesitate to reach for it and grab it as if waiting for our very few friends and many enemies not only to bless our getting the prize but to hand it to us also, forgetting that such things have never happened in history and never will because human beings are what they are and nations and governments are what they are, and wishful thinking does not make them behave differently. It seems that, again, we Kurds miss no opportunity to miss an opportunity. Never before have we come so close to be free from foreign occupation and domination – a goal that generations of Kurds have fought for and thousands upon thousands have died for – yet never before have there been so much defeatist and Kurd-denigrating pronouncements by non other than the Kurds themselves and, surprisingly enough, by those whose record of patriotism and struggle for Kurdish national rights no one can question.

Following is a sample of statements made by various Kurdish spokesmen recently : “Kurds do not want an independent state, but a federation. … If Iraq loses its unity, then we will not have a future. …No one wants a Kurdish state. …We are all Iraqis. Iraqi Kurds want to be seen as Iraqis, not defined and limited by their Kurdishness. … We reject the establishment of an independent Kurdish state…. We have never asked for separation from Iraq…. We are Iraqis first and Kurds second., etc. .”

Every one of these statements is a big betrayal of the memory of the thousands and thousands of Kurdish patriots who have sacrificed their lives so their people would be free. Every one of these statements is a slap in the face of a people in whose name they are made, a people who have endured more than most other oppressed nationalities at the hands of their “brotherly” occupiers, a people who expect their shepherds to protect them from the wolves rather than be lulled by them into believing that the wolves can be rehabilitated and be made gentle and even loving through wishful thinking and a flimsy legislation called “federalism.” These statements truly reflect the case of a victim not being able to live apart from his victimizer despite his sure knowledge, based on tons of evidence over a long period of time, that he would be victimized again and again.

Can anyone deny that these statements smack of defeatism and surrender? Who can argue that these and similar statements do not express the will of the Kurdish people but only the views of those who make them? Unfortunately, the official Kurdish national thinking has taken an astonishing turn backward in an age when other previously oppressed nations are reaping the fruits of their struggle because of their assertiveness and determination not to be distracted by specious, phony, timid, unreliable, unsatisfactory and so-called “realistic” solutions from their goal of becoming completely free. One cannot solve a problem by the same kind of thinking that created the problem in the first place. We need a new kind of Kurdish national thinking, a kind of thinking that is not stuck in the outdated 1961 slogan of “ Democracy for Iraq and Real Autonomy for Kurdistan,” which may or may not have been all right for that time, but, for God’s sake, forty years have passed and the Kurdish political parties have to wake up to the fact that we live in a very different world now and have to be bolder than to simply recycle that dead slogan in the new slogan of “federalism” and try to push it down the Kurdish people’s throat and to appear to the enemies that they are reasonable because they don’t want to upset the status quo too much. The new slogan is no better than the old one of forty years ago, and the Kurdish people deserve better after decades of suffering under a brutal rule. We must tell our enemies, as well as our friends, if we have any true ones, that indeed not only do we want to upset the status quo but we want to turn it upside down and then throw it in the dustbin of history because it was not of our own making but designed for us against our will by both local and distant imperialists who wanted to keep us in bondage forever. We should throw the status quo at the doors of the British Foreign Office and let them do what they want with it because they constructed it for the benefit of the local imperialists, not us. The status quo, or anything resembling it, is imprisonment for us, which is why we must reject it, not in part but in total.

And to end the status quo, we must be assertive, confident, self-reliant, defiant, united and bold, and, above all, we must break out of the vicious cycle we have been in for the last half a century and stop tying our people’s future with that of Arab Iraq. If Arab Iraq doesn’t leave us alone, for its own obvious hegemonic reasons, why on earth don’t we leave it alone? Why did we ever become part of the Iraqi opposition, and are still part of it, instead of having our own independent personality embodied in a Kurdish opposition? Are we really that helpless without becoming somebody else’s tail? I believe we are shortchanging our people too much. Why are we trying to walk back into the horrible Iraqi jail of our own accord, after being free and on our own and doing well for a decade? And who said that it is the Kurdish people’s responsibility to establish democracy in Iraq? Hasn’t forty years of trial and failure taught us a lesson? Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitation on clinging to failure? The Kurds should try to put their house in order and the Iraqis should try to do the same with theirs, and each side must respect what the other side chooses for itself without trying to impose its will on the other. (It should be noted here that the Kurds have never been in a position, nor are they now, to impose their will on anybody, but everybody else in the region and beyond has tried to impose their will on them.) Now, this is the civilized way of working out the Kurdish-Iraqi relationship, and if the Arab people of Iraq want to have any claim to bragging about being the heirs to one of the earliest human civilizations on earth, then they must behave in a civilized manner and stop their hegemony in the guise of “brotherhood.”

The Arabs under the Ottoman Empire’s rule declared their rebellion against the hated Turkish rule around the time of the fall of that empire at the end of the First World War and achieved their independence as a result. The Kurds, too, rebelled because they wanted their independence from foreign rule, but, unfortunately, they came away empty-handed largely because of the deviousness of their “brothers” and their own trusting nature. As a consequence, they were assigned a new master to do with them whatever he wished. Now, almost a century later and after the untold sacrifices that the Kurdish people have made in their quest for freedom, all that Kurdish political representatives have been able to come up with is to ask for some cosmetic changes to the century-old horrible life we have led under Baghdad’s hated rule, under the fancy name of “federalism,” which is inherently flawed because it will leave the fox in charge of the chicken coop. There is no limit to brainwashing. The enemy has succeeded in making us believe whatever it wants us to believe.

We must stop begging our tormentors for this or that. We must no longer “ask for” our rights; we must take them. What exactly happened to what we learnt even as children from our Kurdish revolutionary poetry and traditions that “ Sarbaxoyee ta nasandre nadire,” that is, “Freedom is taken, not given”? Since when have oppressors let go of the oppressed willingly? And why should we “ask for” our freedom from anybody? Freedom is nobody’s to give but ours to take. And why are we empowering others to “grant” us what is not theirs to give but ours to claim and should have claimed long ago? The emperor really and truly has no clothes on if only we open our eyes and see him for what he is and look upon him with contempt rather than in awe. We must strip our tormentors of the power we have given them over us, for that is the only road to freedom --- and no one can do that for us but ourselves. The minute the slave says “NO,” he wins his freedom, but he must mean it with every ounce of energy in his body and mind and not go back on it. No one but the Kurdish people themselves must have the right to determine their future, and they must take that right, not ask for it.

I firmly believe that everything stems from the self whether we are talking about an individual or a nation. No one can insult us if we don’t allow it; no one can intimidate us if we don’t bow to their intimidation; and no one can subjugate us if we refuse to be subjugated. As individuals and as nations, we are in large part responsible for what happens to us. We have to stop blaming others always for what happens or doesn’t happen to us and stop absolving ourselves from the responsibility for the conditions we are in. After all, isn’t that what makes us human, to have the will to choose this over that and do this and not that? I believe that if we Kurds get united, instead of fighting each other, and rally around our goal, no one can defeat us. No one, including our so-called friends in the West, will ever say, “ You people have suffered for too long. It is time we fought on your behalf and made sure you got your freedom! ”We have to realize that this is our cause and nobody else’s. Others can and will give us moral support but we have to bear the burden ourselves. No one will “grant” us our freedom and independence; it is up to us to reach for it and grab it. I marvel at those among us who still ask, “ What is the West’s agenda for us”? when they should be asking, “What is the Kurdish people’s agenda for themselves”? It is about time that we heeded the Kurdish proverb that says, “Those who count on their neighbors for dinner will go to bed hungry.”

By any account, the Kurdish government(s) have conducted themselves in the last eleven years as democratically as possible, given the circumstances, which is a source of pride for all of us Kurds. They have served the Kurdish and non-Kurdish population in liberated Kurdistan well and made a huge difference in the ordinary people’s everyday life and made headways towards building a civil society and lasting democratic institutions --- all of which is good. What is needed now is to be as creative, bold, dynamic, democratic, and assertive in their formulation of our people’s vision of a future completely free from Arab Iraqi domination as they have been in their administration of liberated Kurdistan. All the positive changes in the lives of the Kurds and non-Kurds in liberated Kurdistan in the last eleven years should give us the self-confidence to put to rest once and for all the lies that our enemies have been spreading about us that we couldn’t manage our affairs by ourselves. Of course, we Kurds never believed those lies anyway, but if the world wants to see any evidence to disprove the unfair distortions about our people, it has plenty of it now.

Of course, the advocates of limited freedoms for the Kurds, the “minimalists,” have been brainwashed by the scare tactics of the enemy to think that if the Kurds demanded their full rights, embodied in independence, hell would break loose: Iraq would retaliate, Turkey would invade Southern Kurdistan, and Iran would intervene, etc., and the Kurds would lose everything! We must not allow this kind of scare tactic to distract us from our mission and our goal. It is about time that we realized that this is not the Dark Ages when marauding Turkish armies could march on other people’s land and take it by force and get away with it. Let the Turks come in so our people will teach them a lesson they will never forget. Turkey cannot, must not, and will not be allowed to dictate the future of the Kurdish people because we are not their chattels. No one can ever bully us into submission unless we are willing to submit. The Kurdish people will rise up in arms and foil any such stupid and aggressive move by Turkey, and they will do that not to protect the myth of Iraqi territorial integrity but to defend Kurdistan and its true integrity --- and we will not be lacking in outside support. We have always overestimated the enemy’s strength and underestimated our own. It is time we believed in our own people and empowered them instead of undermining their capabilities.
Those who think that federalism is a great leap forward for the Kurds should realize that federalism or no federalism Iraq would still be known as an Arab country, not an Arab-Kurdish-and-minorities country, and would still be part of the Arab world, which Arab Iraq has every right to do, but, by the same token, IT MUST LET GO OF THE KURDS TO BE PART OF THEIR OWN WORLD, TOO! What is legitimate for one must be legitimate for all! We must reject the “Live and let die” philosophy of our tormentors. Every individual has an inborn urge to be called by his own name and not someone else’s, be recognized as himself and be known for what he is --- hardly a new discovery but as ancient as man himself. And every nation, which is the sum of all the individuals who make up that nation, has the same urge to be recognized as such and be known for what it is, and it is the greatest crime for any other nation or group of them to deny it the right to have that recognition --- which is precisely what Arab Iraq and all the other occupiers of Kurdistan have been doing to the Kurds. We Kurds must continue to strongly challenge this crime, as we have done from the very beginning of their ugly occupation, but we must challenge it in a different way from the way we have been doing in the past, and that is by empowering ourselves instead of our occupier enemies. We must not ask them or their supporters for our freedom; we must take it!