The betrayal became the latest in a long litany of Western betrayals of the Kurds. The Treaty of Sevres in 1920 promised the Kurds self-determination in their homeland, but was quickly forgotten. In the 1920s, the British promised the Kurds of Iraq measures of local autonomy and respect for Kurdish rights, but these promises were likewise left by the wayside. In 1946, Britain and the United States convinced the Soviet Union to withdraw its support for the nascent Republic of Kurdistan in Mahabad, Iran, leading to the military defeat of the first Kurdish statelet and the hanging of its leaders.
In the early 1970s, CIA operatives working with the Shah of Iran encouraged Iraqi Kurds to revolt again against Baghdad, only to abandon them as soon as Baghdad made border concessions to the Shah at a meeting in Algiers. Thousands died for nothing. In the late 1980s, Saddam Hussein’s regime attacked Iraqi Kurds with chemical weapons supplied by European countries – and the United States remained largely silent due to Iraq’s ongoing war with its Iranian enemy.
When Kurds and Shiites rose up against Saddam in 1991, again abetted by Washington (now that Saddam had ‘gone rogue’ and invaded Kuwait), the mandarins in the State Department and CIA told President Bush Sr. to do nothing – lest Iraq fall apart and a Kurdish and Shiite state emerge from the revolt. Only the threat of half a million or more Kurdish refugees inundating Turkey as a result of Saddam’s counter-offensive convinced the Americans to set up a safe zone for the Iraqi Kurds.
This safe zone saved thousands and provided the Americans their most useful local ally in the 2003 war to overthrow Saddam. It also allowed for the emergence of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, although American diplomats and ‘experts’ – including those of the Iraq Study Group of 2006 – kept trying to water down that autonomy to the point of meaninglessness.
In Turkey, Washington armed the Kemalist state with all the latest weaponry and said little as Ankara emptied thousands of Kurdish villages in its dirty counter-insurgency campaign of the 1990s. Whole towns were decimated in Turkish Kurdistan more recently when Erdogan resumed that war in 2015. The Americans even captured Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan in 1999 and handed him over to the Turks.
Despite this historical litany of betrayals and anti-Kurdish policies, Arabs, Turks, and Persians have nonetheless maintained often virulently anti-Western discourses and attitudes. The Islamic Revolution in Iran saw the American embassy itself taken hostage – an ironic outcome given the fact that US President Carter’s admonishments played a major role in preventing the Shah of Iran forcibly putting down the protests which eventually ousted him from power. Arab leaders avoided getting too close to America and many European states because their populations would not like it. In Turkey the left-wing parties, the Islamists, and even most of the Kemalists seemed to agree on just one thing over the years – their disdain for America and Europe.
The Kurds, in contrast, never stopped offering the hand of friendship to the West. One might reasonably wonder why. Some offer an explanation rooted in Kurdish culture or character. As a political scientist, this columnist would like to offer an alternative answer: Arab, Turkish, and Persian nationalisms developed in opposition to the West, as a result of European imperialism and colonialism. This remained true even in Turkey, where the “Sevres complex” convinces Turks that even today the West plots against Turkey as it plotted against the Ottoman Empire.
Kurdish nationalism, by contrast, developed in opposition to Arab, Turkish, and Persian imperialism, and internal colonialism. Central governments run by extreme nationalists in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran oppressed the Kurds and their identity for decades. It therefore made eminent sense for Kurds wishing to escape such oppression to look to the enemies of Arab, Turkish, and Persian nationalism for help.
It seems a great pity that they never found sustained help from the West, however. A world with a couple of Turkic and Persian states (if one includes the likes of Azerbaijan and Tajikistan) and some twenty-two Arab states can’t seem to make room for even one Kurdish state. Instead, policy makers in Europe and America seem to always calculate that Turkish, Arab, and Persian allies – no matter how insincere, ephemeral, or even actively hostile – remain more important than the Kurds.
The West should reconsider such a misplaced calculus. Anti-American and anti-European sentiment seems baked into the origins and DNA of Arab, Turkish, and Persian nationalists as well as that of various Islamists. Not so for the Kurds, as they demonstrate time and again – with assistance in capturing Saddam and al-Baghdadi, with thousands lost fighting the Islamic State on behalf of the whole world, and with a secularism and liberalism that seems hard to find elsewhere in the region.
While no amount of assistance seems to turn most Arab, Turkish, and Persian populations into friends of the West, the Kurds remain so – despite betrayal after betrayal. Imagine what an ally they would make if the West actually helped them in a sustained and sincere manner.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
