CENTRAL NEWS
The revolutionary peoples’ war and national unity is the strategy that will determine the future of Kurdistan, in a war where absolutely everything is on the table on the part of the Kurds. It will define the blurred line between existence and determination, a paradox in which the peoples of Kurdistan have been living for over three hundred years.
A brief overview of the bloody history of Kurdistan points to the first official partition of Kurdistan on 17 May 1639, after a 150 year long war between the Safavid (Iranian) and Ottoman (Turkish) empires. The partition was sealed in the Qasr-i Shirin or Zuhāb treaty, dividing Kurdistan between Iran and Turkey. Following years of Kurdish unrest, the Lausanne treaty was signed on 10 August 1920 promising Kurdish autonomy but also dividing it into a further two between Iraq and Syria; Article 64 of the Treaty is as follows:
“If within one year from the coming into force of the present Treaty the Kurdish peoples within the areas defined in Article 62 shall address themselves to the Council of the League of Nations in such a manner as to show that a majority of the population of these areas desires independence from Turkey, and if the Council then considers that these peoples are capable of such independence and recommends that it should be granted to them, Turkey hereby agrees to execute such a recommendation, and to renounce all rights and title over these areas.”
This Treaty was superseded following negotiations with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. The more recent history of the Kurds consists of many massacres such as Dersim, Zilan, and Maras to commemorate a few, and a fascist assimilation and annihilation policy being implemented on the Kurds under the name of Şark Islahat Plan, or ‘the East Reform Plan’ which was put into motion in 1925. An extract from the Plan is as follows:
“Our mission is to make Turkish people in the Turkish homeland. We will cut off the elements that will oppose Turkishness and Turkism. The qualities that we will seek in the service of the motherland are, above all, that the man is Turkish and Turkist.”
In this way, different studies were carried out in each city in Turkey-occupied Northern Kurdistan, approaching each fraction of society with a different tactic. People who had taken part in rebellions against the State were either forced to immigrate to Turkish cities or they were ‘punished.’ In cities such as Dersim, Xarpet, Meres, and Meleti, thousands of women were raped in efforts to dishonour and deter society while hundreds of young Kurdish girls were abducted and placed in Turkish cities after being trained.
Evidently the people of Kurdistan are under no less pressure today, nor has the genocide of Kurds come to an end. With increasing political arrests, economic and invasion attacks, demographic change projects, assimilations through psychological warfare and dehumiliation attempts, the pressing Kurdish issue has reached the bone. The demographic diversity and neolithic identity of the people of Kurdistan denies being governed by the same enslaving nation state mentality, which is an exhausted guarantor of capitalism and therefore selfishness, jealousy, and patriarchy.
The only systematic way of being governed in Kurdistan is self-governance; a communal way of life that provides practical democracy in proportion to the needs of society and every individual segment of it. This socialist system is governed through the means of democratic confederalism and is formed of a harmony of colours in a fair rather than equal framework.
to be continued…
