Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [291]
It was difficult to say what the Kurds really were. Their name itself originally meant “nomad.” They had little coherent history, merely conflicting myths about their origin. There had been no great Kurdish kingdoms and few Kurdish heroes except Saladin. Kurds were divided by tribes, by religion (most were Sunni Muslims, but there were Shias and Christians as well), by language and by the fact that they were scattered among different nations. They had a reputation for being unruly. A German ethnographer was forgiving: “At bottom their vices are chiefly those of the restless life they lead in a land in which organized government has been unknown for the past eight centuries.” They fought each other, outside authority, whether Ottoman or Persian, and other peoples. The Ottomans had used Kurdish Muslims in their slaughter of Armenians. At the end of the war, the British and Indian troops who occupied the area managed to keep an uneasy peace.46
Unlike other emerging nations, Kurdistan had no powerful patrons in Paris, and the Kurds were not yet able to speak effectively for themselves. Busy with their habitual cattle raids, abductions, clan wars and brigandage, with the enthusiastic slaughter of Armenians or simply with survival, they had not so far demonstrated much interest even in greater autonomy within the Ottoman empire, where the majority lived. Before the Great War, the nationalisms stirring among the other peoples of the Middle East had produced only faint echoes among the Kurds. Even the main center of Kurdish nationalism, consisting of a few small societies and a handful of intellectuals, was in Constantinople. The only Kurdish spokesman in Paris in 1919, a rather charming man, had lived there so long that he was nicknamed Beau Sharif. He did his best, drawing up claims for a vast country that would stretch from Armenia (if it came into existence) down to the Mediterranean. Much of that territory was also being claimed by the Armenians and by Persia.47
Britain was the only one of the powers with more than a passing interest in seeing a Kurdistan on the map. The United States, sympathetic to the Armenians, had no love for the Kurds. The French had put in a claim for a mandate mainly as a bargaining tool; when Britain confirmed its possession of Syria in the autumn of 1919, France dropped any pretense of interest. It continued, however, to oppose a British mandate over Kurdistan.48
Lloyd George and his advisers were primarily concerned with getting and protecting their mandate of Mesopotamia, with its promise of important oil deposits; they would have preferred not to have a slice of Ottoman territory running across the north. A Kurdistan would have the advantage of protecting the southern boundary of Armenia, if it survived, and so providing yet another barrier between Bolshevism and British interests. It would also neatly block the French in Syria and southern Anatolia from extending their influence north. The British assumed Kurdistan could be run cheaply, under local chiefs, on the pattern of the northern frontiers of India. They argued that the Kurds themselves wanted British protection; the Kurds disobligingly spent much energy in 1919 rebelling against British occupation forces and murdering British agents.49
Throughout 1919 and 1920, as they tried to settle the Turkish treaty, the British funded various Kurdish groups that claimed to be able to bring the Kurds under British protection. A Major Noel, the “Kurdish Lawrence,” went on a mysterious mission to the Kurdish areas in the summer of 1919 to stir up an independence movement. He only infuriated the nationalist Turks and his own colleagues. As the British political adviser in Constantinople