Historians claim that Kurdistan has existed since 612 BC. C.. During the Arab-Muslim invasions, the Kurds ended up converting to Islam without losing their own identity, despite being divided into different principalities. The Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire disputed these territories, but the Kurds ended up aligning themselves with the former for religious reasons and in exchange for a certain autonomy, which began to be questioned at the beginning of the 19th century. In 1920 and after the First World War, Kurdistan had to become a State through the Treaty of Sevrest – which would draw new borders in the Middle East. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, this was the reward to the Kurdish people for their support of the Allied powers during the war. This treaty was never ratified and in 1923 it was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne, which omitted the commitment to create a State called Kurdistan, which benefited the former allies of the United Kingdom and France. With this agreement, the Kurds were divided between Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Armenia.
Currently, the Kurds represent the largest minority without a state of their own, with fifteen million people in Turkey, eight million in Iran, five in Iraq, one million in Syria and half a million between Armenia and Azerbaijan, although today the existence of a shared identity due to the borders that divide them. Its division into borders that do not take into account identities, persecutions and the lack of recognition or autonomy in most countries explain the discrepancies and conflicts that have lasted to date in a territory with important reserves of natural resources and that currently is immersed in a cross-border war against Daesh, a group that has the desire to create a caliphate that would occupy, among other territories, a large part of the former Kurdistan.
This is not an article with forecasts or solutions. It consists of an analysis of the Kurdish situation, the reasons that could explain the events that almost a century ago determined the division of the old and little-recognized Kurdistan and the proposal of two alternatives—the armed conflict in Turkey or the attribution of autonomy in Iraq— to confront the demands for self-determination of a people who have been persecuted for years and who in turn have responded with violence.
Geopolitics explains everything
When comparing the borders proposed by the Kurdish delegation at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the 1945 San Francisco United Nations conference with the division promised by the Allied powers in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, it is striking the reduced extension of the latter. In 2017, part of its territory is recognized in Iraq and Iran, but it represents a very small part of the territory inhabited by the Kurds and is very far from the border proposed in 1919. Is there any explanation behind the setback in granting autonomy to the Kurds? Kurds of 1923?
As usual, the reason is geopolitics. First of all, the territory occupied by the Kurds is rich in oil. For the benefit of its friendships, the United Kingdom wanted to grant part of the territory to Iraq, while France did the same with Syria. Despite the division, in Turkey and Syria the Kurds continue to live in the territory from which practically all of the national oil is extracted, while in Iran they represent 20%. Iraqi Kurdistan, with 74% of the country’s total extraction, is where oil generates the most disputes. The Iraqi Government’s will was to control exports and distribute their benefits among all regions of the country, but the autonomous region of Kurdistan, which saw this distribution as a detriment to the benefits they could obtain, chose to begin the direct export of oil with the construction of an oil pipeline that carries crude oil to the Turkish port of Ceijan and continues to Europe. This shows the difference in the Turkish government’s relations with the Kurds within its borders and with the Iraqi Kurds. The consequences of ignoring orders from Baghdad could have been serious if the Iraqi government did not depend on the Kurdish armed forces —peshmergas— to contain the advance of Daesh, since this situation increases fear of the demands for independence of the Kurdish region. Thus, oil was one of the reasons to avoid the creation of a State that could have controlled this resource and today continues to determine the power relations between the Kurdish people and the countries into which they are divided.
On the other hand, the former Kurdistan extends across the basins of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, highly precious sources in countries where water scarcity is a risk. In this case, we must look mainly at the Kurdish population that lives in Anatolia (Turkey). In this region of nine provinces, the infrastructure of the Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP) is being deployed. This is a program to achieve the full economic and social development of the southeastern provinces of the country by taking advantage of the water potential of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which will facilitate irrigation, the generation of hydroelectric energy and the control of droughts and floods. . If we take into account that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK for its acronym in Kurdish) and the Kurdish people in general have demands for self-determination in Turkey and that they are precisely the predominant ethnic group in the territory where the GAP program must be developed, the conflict is served.
Even so, the disputes are not only internal, but the countries in the lower basins of the two rivers – Syria and Iraq – consider the construction of dams in Turkey as a threat to their water supply and a clear detriment to the control of this resource. Daesh and other terrorist groups have threatened to bomb infrastructure after seeing the rivers in Syria and Iraq receding. Therefore, water and its control become the second reason that could explain the decision to divide Kurdistan through the treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which today continues to be one of the causes of conflicts between the Turkish Government and the PKK and with the Governments of Iraq and Syria.
To expand: “GAP: a great plan for sustainable development”, Aysegul Kibaroglu, 2006
Taking into account the above, it can be stated that, during the 1920s, Kurdistan was a territory with precious natural resources and the allied powers followed the “Divide and conquer” strategy to avoid absolute control of oil and water by of the Kurds, for the benefit of their allies in the Middle East. In any case, at present it makes little sense to talk about the border proposal made by the Kurdish delegation in 1919, since the division that was imposed in 1923 is today a separation de facto, which is perceived in the absence of collective demands, which have been transformed into particular requests for the four countries where the Kurds live, related in many cases to the management of natural resources, in addition to claims of a political and identity nature.
Autonomy as a reward in Iraq
In 1961 Mustafa Barzani, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party (PDK), led a rebellion that lasted five years, until the Kurds managed to establish an autonomous region. This agreement with the Iraqi Government was broken in 1975, which would trigger a war that lasted more than 15 years. In 1988, when Kurdish guerrillas allied themselves with Iran in the Iran-Iraqi war, the state army hunted down and killed thousands of Kurds. The position with the United States in the fight against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991 changed the course of the Kurdish people in the country, but the rivalry between the PDK and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) did not cease. The former had the complicity of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the United States, while the PUK received support from Iran during the Iraqi civil war, which lasted until 1997, when the Kurdish leaders overcame their differences. In 2003, the US invasion of Iraq, which aimed to overthrow the Hussein regime that they had supported years before, gave way to the creation of a unity government that respected the demands of the United States and allowed the creation of an autonomous region to the Kurds with linguistic, teaching and media skills.
The autonomous region of Kurdistan in Iraq, with 6.5 million inhabitants, is an example of economic progress that was achieved through complicity with Western powers. Thus, from Baghdad there was no alternative to the transfer of power and, although during the first years there were attempts to retreat, after the support that the Kurds are providing in the recovery of the territory occupied by Daesh, there should be no going back on the concession. of autonomy. What’s more, it is possible that, as happened after the Gulf War, Western powers will pressure to give more power to the Kurds, who could be unconditional allies with oil reserves. In fact, in 2014 France gave sophisticated weapons to the Kurdish army to combat the self-named Islamic State or Daesh, which demonstrated the legitimacy of the autonomous region at the international level. Likewise, the capital of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan is developing economically at a much faster rate than the rest of the country, but so are inequalities and foreign food dependency. Erbil has become a city of foreign investments that must be protected.
The desire to control the region’s oil reserves has united the PUK and the PDK, but it also increased disagreements with Baghdad, which did not want to give up more Kurdish control over exports. Recently, relations between Erbil and Baghdad have improved due to the critical support being provided by the peshmergas in the ‘reconquest’ of Mosul. For all these reasons, Iraqi Kurdistan could become a fiefdom protected by Western powers to guarantee the security of investments and oil exports.
To expand: “Poised to profit”, Vicken Cheterian in Le Monde diplomatique2013
Open wounds in Türkiye
In the early 1920s, Atatürk, leader of Turkish independence, needed the support of Western powers and pledged to grant autonomy to the Kurds. When he came to power, he did not fulfill his promise: he banned their language, denied them their political representation and even denied their existence. This positioning has been maintained to this day. This violation of rights caused the Kurdish liberation movement to strengthen with the PKK, founded in 1978 by Abdullah Ocalan. In 1984, the PKK began an open war against the Turkish Government for the independence of the…