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THE KURDISH KEY TO THE MIDDLE EAST |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Thursday, 28 September 2006 |
Among the most fascinating folks in the world are people
known as the Kurds. They are older than
history. The Land of Kurda is mentioned
in Sumerian clay tablets - the world's oldest writing - over 5,000 years
ago. The Land of Kurda - Kurdistan -
was ancient five millennia ago.
The Kurds had been living there for thousands of years before
3,000 BC - and they are still living there today, in the mountains of what is
now northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southeastern
Turkey.
They number in the tens of millions - five million in Iraq,
ten million in Iran, three million in Syria, between twenty and thirty million
in Turkey. They are by far the largest
ethnic group on earth without their own country.
This has always made them a threat to the countries that
divide up their homeland of Kurdistan.
Always. The Kurds have been
fighting the Persians for 2,500 years, the Arabs for 1,300 years, the Turks for
500 years. Western governments look
upon the Kurds as a problem which threatens to break apart the fragile map of
the Middle East into chaotic pieces:
Now at last, the time has arrived to look upon the Kurds as
an opportunity rather than a threat, not as a problem but a solution. The emerging reality is that the Kurds are
the key to peace, freedom, and democracy throughout the entire Middle East.
I am writing this in the oldest continuously inhabited city
in the world - Arbil in northern Iraq.
Unlike other claimants to that title such as Damascus and Jericho, Arbil
has been continuously inhabited for millennia by the same people, the
Kurds. ("Arbil" or "Irbil" is the name
on the map, it's Saddam-era Arabic name.
The original Kurdish name is Hewlar, pronounced how-lair.)
Every day in the newspapers there are headlines about "the
civil war in Iraq." There is no civil
war here, in Iraqi Kurdistan. There is
no terrorism, no IED attacks, no car bombings, no suicide bombers, no gangs of
Shia murderers slitting the throats of Sunnis and vice versa.
In their place is a construction boom. Everywhere you look in Arbil ( a city of
close to two million) and Iraqi Kurdistan's second largest city, Sulaymanieh
(over one million), you see built or being built beautiful new homes, office
buildings, hotels, car dealerships, and shopping malls.
The "civil war" is taking place in the Sunni and Shia
regions of tripartite Iraq. It is the
third part, Kurdish Iraq, that is holding Iraq together. The Kurds are already the key to
keeping Iraq intact. When is it going
to dawn on Washington that they are the key to solving the Middle East's other
intractable problems?
It won't until it somehow acquires the wisdom to support
Kurds in Iran - there are twice as many Kurds in Iran as in Iraq - struggling
to liberate Eastern (Iranian) Kurdistan from the nightmare tyranny of the
Mullacracy in Tehran. Kurds like
Hussein Yazdanpanah, leader of the Revolutionary Union of Kurdistan (RUK) whose
guerrilla fighters have been conducting anti-mullacracy activities for a generation.
I am writing this in his home. I am looking at a photograph on the wall of his dining room. It was taken in 1980, after Ayatollah
Khomeini declared a Holy War on the Kurds for not accepting his dictatorship.
An execution squad of Khomeini soldiers are kneeling and
firing their rifles point blank at a line of Kurdish captives. Several of the Kurds have just been hit, and
you see their knees buckling and their bodies thrown back with the shock of the
bullets. They are Hussein Yazdanpanah's
relatives.
His family has been fighting the Mullacracy since its
inception in 1979. But actually, his
family has been fighting for Kurdish freedom for the last 500 years.
Note what they and Kurds in general have not been
fighting for: Islam.
Kurds are reluctant Moslems, who recite to their children
stories of how Islam was forced upon their ancestors by Arab conquerors in the
7th century. They pay
literal lip service to Allah, mouthing prayers in Koranic Arabic they don't
understand. The ancient Kurdish
language is far, far different from Arabic - thus while many Kurds also speak
colloquial Arabic, very few of them read the classical Arabic of the Koran.
It is the month of Ramadan right now, a time of fasting and
religious observance, but many young Kurds are ignoring it. That's here, in Iraqi or "South" Kurdistan
(southwestern Turkey is North Kurdistan, while eastern Syria is West
Kurdistan).
In Iranian or East Kurdistan, belief in Islam is
collapsing. The mullacracy has
disgraced Islam in the eyes of young eastern Kurds and are thus rejecting it en
masse.
More and more, they are returning to their original religion
of Zoroastrianism. "Zoroaster" is the
Anglicized pronunciation of Zardasht, a religious teacher from the
Urumia area (now in Eastern Kurdistan near where Turkey, Iraq, and Iran come
together) who lived around 1200 BC.
He taught that the earth was the battleground between the
forces of good, represented by the god Yazdan (also named Ahura-Mazda), and the
forces of evil, represented by the god Ahriman. The way to overcome evil and to take the path to heaven, he
counseled was Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds.
Cyrus I (590-529 BC), founder of the Persian Empire, adopted
the worship of Zardasht or Zoroaster and declared it to be the state religion
of Persia. The Three Magi who visit the
infant Jesus in the manger at Bethlehem in the Book of Matthew were
Zoroastrians.
In the mid-7th century AD, the invading Arab
hordes forced the Kurds and Persians to abandon their religion and accept Islam
at the point of a sword. After 13
centuries, that sword has lost its edge for the Kurds as they return to their
ancient faith.
One of them is Hussein Yazdanpanah, whose name means "Under
the shadow (protection) of God."
Yes, there are mosques and minarets and muezzins calling
people to prayer here in Iraqi Kurdistan.
You see older women (although never the younger) wearing a nun-like
black cloak called a hijab. But
Kurds take their ethnic identity as primary.
Their religion comes in second.
Thus the Kurds have a long, long history of religious
tolerance. Adherents of a religious
sect formed of a mix of paganism, Zoroastrianism, and Islam known as the Yezidis
flourish among them. Their often-odd
beliefs such as proscriptions against wearing the color blue and never eating
lettuce are easily accepted.
The descendants of the Empire of Assyria that reached its
peak in the 7th century BC adopted Christianity in 3rd
and 4th centuries AD. The
Christian Assyrian community has been a part of Kurdish culture ever
since. There are a number of Christian
churches of varying denominations here in Hewler (Arbil) and elsewhere in Iraqi
Kurdistan.
Yet for all of this, just about no one in Washington seems
able to apply it to Iran.
It's not just the invertebrates of the State Department
allergic to regime change in principal - it's even astute folks like Charles
Krauthammer and Fred Barnes who say on Fox News they don't know of an
alternative to the only choices they see:
militarily attack Iran or capitulate to the Mullacracy and make the best
deal we can.
They, like most everyone else, are unaware of the potential
of the Kurds to liberate Iran. It's not
just that Eastern or Iranian Kurdistan is exploding with dissent, or even that
liberation movements like the RUK and KDPI (Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran)
are organizing that dissent.
It's that the Eastern Kurds are not demanding secession from
Iran, but autonomy within a federated Iran - just like what the Southern or
Iraqi Kurds have achieved in Iraq.
They realize that the dream of an independent, united
Kurdistan - North (Turkey), South (Iraq), West (Syria), and East (Iran)
Kurdistan all in one sovereign nation carved out of the map of the Middle East,
is just that - a dream.
The reason is Turkey.
The Kurds of Iran, Iraq, and Syria are grossly outnumbered by the Kurds
of Turkey and have no wish to be dominated by them. In a fully united Kurdistan, they would be.
Worse, the Kurds of Turkey are plagued with a totalitarian
Marxist terrorist organization called the PKK, the Kurdish Workers Party.
Everyone here in Iraqi Kurdistan, every liberation movement
in Iranian Kurdistan, hates the PKK.
Originally set up by KGB agent Yevgeni Primakov in the 1970s and
sponsored by the Soviets to destabilize NATO-member Turkey, the PKK is now
sponsored by the Mullacracy of Iran.
The main base of the PKK with several thousand PKK guerrillas, is near
Urumia in Iran near the Turkish Border.
A liberated Iran would end this support, and the Iraqi and
Iranian Kurds could then help the Turkish Kurds eradicate the PKK and bring
autonomy to a Turkish Kurdistan within a fully democratic Turkey. (Turkey doesn't even recognize the existence
of their Kurds, calling them "Mountain Turks."
All attempts to have Kurdish schools, newspapers, and other expressions
of Kurdish identity are brutally suppressed.)
Even with that eventuality, Iranian Kurds have no intention
of merging with Turkish Kurds who outnumber them so greatly. Thus support from the United States - money,
military and political training, supplies - for them represents the third
alternative, the way out of the dilemma to attacking or capitulating to the
Mullacracy.
In an attempt to find out how viable this third alternative
is, I am about to be taken inside Iran with a group of RUK guerrillas. Surreptitiously crossing a heavily-guarded
border with armed guerrillas is not something to be undertaken lightly. But it is the only way to see for oneself.
Next week, I'll tell you what I experienced, and then we can
discuss further how the Kurds are the key to achieving freedom in Iran and
democracy in the Middle East. In the
meantime.... Wish me luck.
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