Mapping a Potential Kurdish State

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

Since the Middle East’s more than 30 million Kurds, spread across at least five countries, have never formed a state of their own, no one knows what the boundaries of a sovereign Kurdistan might be.

Cartographic knowledge and power are intertwined. Throughout history, maps have been powerful political instruments used to depict claims over territories, boundaries, citizens and human resources. 

Kurdish ones are no exception, as Kurdish nationalists continue to cartographically construct Kurdistan.

After the First World War and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Western allies made provision for a Kurdish state in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. 

Such hopes were dashed three years later, however, when the Treaty of Lausanne, which set the boundaries of modern Turkey, made no provision for a Kurdistan and left Kurds with minority status in various new countries. 

Kurdish interests were swept aside in favour of other nationalisms that labeled them “Mountain Turks,” “Kurdish Arabs,” and so on, in the new states set up after 1918. Many were told that speaking Kurdish was now akin to treason. 

Turkish Kurds, who comprise at least 20 per cent of the population of the country, have ever since been oppressed by government policies that did not allow them to express themselves.  

Turkey crushed Kurdish revolts in 1925, 1930 and 1938. A Kurdish separatist group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was formed by Abdullah Ocalan and has been involved in armed conflict against the Turkish state since 1984. 

Since then, more than 40,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.

Iraq put down Kurdish uprisings in the 1960s and 1970s. Between 1986 and 1989, the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein conducted a fierce campaign against the Kurds which climaxed with a chemical weapons attack on the town on Halabja. 

The closest they’ve come to having a state is their de facto self-governing entity in northern Iraq, which they managed to create after the downfall of Saddam in 2003. It sovereignty is not acknowledged by any of its neighbours.

Maps as well as guns are among the weapons used by Kurdish irredentists. They claim a Greater Kurdistan region that extends from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, absorbing within it considerable portions of the countries that have denied the existence of a Kurdish state.

These maps have acquired a power of their own and reflect the political ambition of Kurdish nationalists.

Yet while the Kurds have long talked of reuniting their people in a greater Kurdistan, today their population still remains carved up among many states, themselves unwilling to cede any of their territory.

No one knows what shape the Middle East will take once the dust of the current conflicts settles.

Will it include an emergent Kurdistan, perhaps born out of the current Kurdish jurisdiction in northern Iraq? Will there emerge one united Kurdistan or many? It’s impossible to guess.