The panel was organized with Besikci to shed light on the challenges Kurds have faced ever since the creation of the League of Nations in January 1920 and the crushing of Kurdish revolutions by the Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian governments.
Following the First World War, the West had engaged in programs of disarmament and set up the League of Nations to replace war with diplomacy, but it was a total failure, Besikci said.
Besikci says that the League of Nations was designed to prevent the repetition of conflict, but the outcome proved otherwise as it deprived many nations, notably Kurds from having a state of their own, leading to a string of revolutions.
"The partitioning of Kurds was a systematic policy, it was an anti-Kurdish system," Besikci said.
"The League of Nations was designed for all nations to determine their future and rights, but at this very time Kurdistan was partitioned," Besikci added, calling it "heart-wrenching" and saying this initiated a "very delicate phase" for Kurds as the largest nation without a state.
He described the League of Nations as a failure in the first place because it did not manage to "spread peace" and "prevent the breakout of additional wars, though it had been “designed for that specific purpose."
"Therefore, the Second World War was much bloodier compared with the First World War," he said.
In April 1946, the League of Nations was dissolved, handing over all of its assets to the United Nations.
According to Besikci, the UN also failed to address territorial issues across the Middle East, which have remained unresolved to date, including that of Kurds.
"Because the UN was founded on the very same ideas and principles," he said, adding "following world war two, the global political atmosphere saw huge dynamics, but that global anti-Kurdish mindset never changed."
Besikci, who was born in 1939 and is an honorary member of the international writers’ association, PEN, was imprisoned for 17 years for the books and articles he wrote on Kurds and Kurdistan. Nearly all of his 36 books, which remain groundbreaking works on the Kurds, were banned in Turkey at one time or another.
While he was working at the sociology department of Ataturk University in Erzurum, he was dismissed from his post and arrested in 1971 for his writings on the Kurdish population in Turkey. He was released in 1974 but arrested eight times over the next 25 years. He served 17 years in prison on propaganda charges.
Until 1991, Turkey’s Kurds did not even enjoy the right to speak their own language or celebrate their culture.
In the Kurdistan Region, Kurds were granted semi-autonomy in the March 11th Agreement of 1970 reached between the Iraqi government and the Kurdish leadership under Mullah Mustafa Barzani, after a decade of revolts against the regime under Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.
After a Kurdish uprising and a decade of genocidal acts, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the Kurdistan Region Parliament were established in 1992.
"Still, Kurds have many enemies," the intellectual warned. "Therefore, it is important for Kurds and their leadership to engage with the international community through bolstering their diplomatic and economic relations with them.”
