Kurdish Independence Movement - In Defense of Kurdistan

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• published: 12 Nov 2014
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He maintained the United Nations must recognize a Kurdish state for it to be viable. He also said the millions of Kurdish Diaspora in Europe, the US, Russia and other nations should lobby their governments to advance Kurdish interests. “I think that after independence is declared the sense of patriotism among our people will surge,” Amariani said. “And perhaps after some time, many will even go live there.” It rather means that only an independent state could answer our plight. I speak for the Kurds of Iraq. We haven’t had a happy experience with Iraq. Genocide, imprisonment, persecution and deportation have been our share in that country. There isn’t a single Kurdish family that doesn’t carry the scars of a loss. Many mothers are still waiting for the bones of their sons and daughters—buried by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s—to be found and brought home from the southern deserts of Iraq. In Iraq we have a term, “Kurdish-Arab brotherhood,” that was coined and promoted by successive regimes. But the truth is more like Kurdish-Arab suspicion and distrust. The Kurds see Iraq as the cause of all their miseries and Iraq thinks the Kurds are the reason that the country has never been stable. A country for the Kurds will also spare the world a lot of headache. Western leaders have to pause for a moment and think how many times they have had to rush in and save the Kurds from Iraq. It has happened three times in my own life. In 1991, when I was 12 years old, we prayed that the West would come and save us from a vengeful Iraqi army that had just been defeated by the allied forces in Kuwait, and they did. They imposed a no-fly-zone in northern Iraq and prevented a genocide. Again in 2003, we hoped that George W. Bush would topple Saddam Hussein because we feared a retaliatory chemical attack from Baghdad. Now for a third time in less than 30 years, I see again the Western powers sending fighter jets to protect the Kurds from yet another catastrophe. For how long is the world going to do this? If they are not tired of it, the Kurds definitely are. It is absurd to tell the Kurds to stay with Iraq and then scramble fighter jets every 10 years to save them from that same country. Part of the hostility towards the Kurds from their neighbors is because they see us as allies of the West. So now as the West is marking the centenary of the First World War that divided the Middle East and left the Kurds without a state, it is time they redeemed themselves and let the Kurds join the world community as a sovereign state. The artificial borders of the Middle East aren’t so sacred to cling to so dearly, nor is Kurdistan a sleeping giant to be afraid of. Autonomous for 20 years, the Kurds have already passed the test for statehood. The Kurdistan Region is a place where religious and ethnic groups live side by side and the Kurds have maintained friendly relations with the East and West without holding our past tragedies against anyone. Ayub Nuri is a Kurdish journalist from Halabja, Iraqi Kurdistan