Young Kurds Are Discovering Their Cultural Roots
By Alan Kabki

Fianancil Times

Nov 23, 2004

Sir, Damjan De Krnjevic-Miskovic and Nikolas Gvosdev, in their article "Kurds should not let language deepen divisions" (November 16) describe young Kurds in semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan not speaking Arabic as "a disturbing trend". They seem not to be happy that young Kurds prefer, besides Kurdish, to learn English instead of Arabic. They forget that Kurds are not Arabs (or Turks or Iranians), and that they have been forced for centuries to speak Arabic (or Turkish and Persian in Turkey and Iran).

They talk about "language separation" as a cause of "dissolutions of a panoply of other shared political, social and economic interests". First of all, Arabic is not a common language between Arabs and Kurds, which means it is not a matter of separation at all.

Second, these shared political, social end economic interests do not exist between Arabs and Kurds. The artificial union within Iraq is based on force and mass murders by Saddam Hussein and his predecessors. The price of this "union" was the lives of thousands of Kurds. For Kurds this is not a "union" but subordination to Arabs.

Mr De Krnjevic-Miskovic and Mr Gvosdev's comparison of the Kurdish issue with the problems in the Balkans is wrong: Kurds are divided into four countries and desire to reunite with their families and language companions and not with their age-old oppressors. Recently more than 1.7m signatures were collected in Iraqi Kurdistan from people calling for a referendum about the future of Kurdistan. This is the desire of the Kurds to separate from their occupiers and to unite with other parts of Kurdistan.

Do the authors want Kurds to become Arabs and learn the "lingua regionala" Arabic? What about the Kurds divided into Iran, Turkey and Syria? Should also they melt in the culture and language of these countries?

This is not about Iraq only - it is also about Kurdistan. This is not about language only - it is also about recognition of a nation and its participation in the political field. Maybe even more important, it is about the young Kurds' rediscovery of their roots. The authors make the same mistake as Tito and Atatürk did in Yugoslavia and Turkey, respectively. Do not forget: there are between 30m and 40m Kurds living in Kurdistan.