On the Way to Two, Three, or Four Kurdistans?

Abstract

The land of the Kurds, Kurdistan, is not a state, but a relatively closed settlement area that is predominantly inhabited by Kurds. Until 1920, it belonged mainly to the Ottoman Empire before being divided between three states: Turkey, Iraq and Syria. The borders of this territory have changed frequently and are not known in detail. For centuries, the eastern part of the Kurdish settlement area has belonged to Iran. There are several factors that have caused demands for a Kurdish nation state to diminish. Even today, there is still no common Kurdish standard or written language, and clan and regional consciousness among Kurds is far stronger than any shared Kurdish national consciousness. Above all, an All-Kurdish national movement would have to assert itself against four states and against the international consensus on the preservation of the status quo of these states. Kurdish national efforts have in recent decades therefore focussed more on attaining minority rights, territorial autonomy or federative statehood within the existing states. However, the attitude towards these efforts on the part of the majority population in the four states is one of fear and the suspicion that they are only intended to be of a transitory nature prior to full state independence.

A test case for a federative integration of the Kurds will in the coming years be Iraq, after US troops and their allies have been withdrawn from the country. The borders of the autonomous region of Kurdistan are still the subject of severe dispute today. In particular, the issue of the assignment of the oil-rich province of at-Tamim to Kirkuk remains unresolved. Here, much depends on the policies adopted towards the Kurds by Turkey, which in recent years has taken its first cautious steps towards recognising the cultural needs of the Kurds within its own country, while at the same time decisively rejecting ideas of granting independence to the autonomous region of Kurdistan in Iraq. The emergence of the Sunni Islamic State in parts of Iraq and Syria has added entirely new fuel to the fire of the Kurdish issue on the international political agenda.

Despite the breakup of the multinational states of Eastern Europe, attempts should be made to create forms of autonomy and federalisation that minimise the risk of the disintegration of existing states. The strengthening of municipal autonomy could be a modest step towards recognising the ethnic identity of the Kurds. In Iraq, the ethno-religious nationalisation of the parties and the autonomy of the region inhabited by the Kurds is probably now irreversible. In Syria and Iran, the repression of the Kurds continues uninterrupted. It is an open question as to whether the Kurds, like the Arabs, southern Slavs and the Germans, will diverge into several nations, or whether in the long term they will join to form a single nation after all.