Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [50]
Some of the answers to these questions must lie in the mountains, I thought. Mountain people all over the world—Scotland, Appalachia, Afghanistan, Chechnya—are a notoriously independent, stubborn, rebellious, and proud lot. Isolated in their craggy fortresses, they are accustomed to taking care of themselves, and don’t cotton well to being told what to do. There’s a reason why one of the first great rebels of all time, the Greek god Prometheus, “guilty” of bringing fire to man against Zeus’s wishes, was banished to a mountain in the Caucasus.
And some of the answers must lie in the extraordinary repression the Kurds have suffered—and survived; as the hackneyed saying goes, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. In the last two decades alone, the Kurds have endured multiple aerial bombings and lethal chemical attacks, the ruthless destruction of thousands of their villages, the assassination of their leaders, killings and kidnappings, torture and inhuman prison conditions, crippling economic conditions, the banning of their language and culture, and the deprivation of that most basic right of all: the right to call themselves “Kurds.”
This last violation occurred in Turkey, one of the most democratic of Middle Eastern countries, between 1924 and 1991, during which time Kurds were declared to be “mountain Turks who have forgotten their language.” Anyone who said otherwise risked arrest and torture. In contrast, modern Iran and Iraq, despite their repressive regimes, have never denied the Kurds their identity. Up until 1975, Saddam Hussein even made regular visits to Kurdistan, posing for the cameras in Kurdish dress, while Iran’s Islamic government has always granted the Kurds some basic cultural—though not political—rights.
How do a people function after such a horrific history? How do they rebuild after attempted genocide? How does trauma shape and filter lives?
The Arabs have an old term for places such as Kurdistan—bilad es-siba’, meaning “land of lions”—i.e., land not controlled by central government. Once applied to the most inaccessible areas of the Middle East, including its mountains, deserts, and marshes, the term connotes regions inhabited by isolated peoples who listen more to their hearts and traditions than to “civilization.” Some scholars even once posited a kind of division of labor “between the tame and the insolent, the domesticated and the independent” with the rebels keeping “the urban civilization of the Middle East refreshed and in motion.” But in our age of telecommunications and cyberspace, urbanization and globalization, it’s questionable how much longer such lands will exist—if indeed they still do. Once remote Kurdistan, for one, is now in the throes of rapid modernization, with the Internet, satellite dishes, and supermarkets making their arrival. How are the Kurds coping with jumping one hundred years in the space of a decade, maintaining a sense of self as their traditional world tips, whirls, and shudders around them?
I wanted to travel to Iraq to explore these questions. I wanted to find out more about these mysterious, stubborn, seemingly inextinguishable people called Kurds. And the world needs to know more about them, too, I told my friends and editors—the Kurds are important; they’re central to the future of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria, and hence to the whole Middle East.
Recommended Resources
Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence, by Aliza Marcus (NYU Press, 2007). Marcus reported on the Kurds for The Boston Globe and The Christian Science Monitor for eight years before writing this in-depth book, the first (in English) about the PKK. (She was also put on trial in Turkey for her reporting.) Marcus traces the beginnings of the PKK, in 1978, to the present day, including the capture of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the PKK. Marcus