Safe in their northern no-fly zone where they have prospered quietly for over a decade, the Iraqi Kurds are now playing for very high stakes indeed. To optimists among them, at the very least the war seems to offer an opportunity for enhanced autonomy within a federal Iraqi state. Maybe, if they are particularly lucky, they will be able to gain an independent mini-state of their own. Some of the dreamers, thinkers and activists among the Kurds feel that they may even hit the jackpot and finally see a state of Kurdistan—a state which would unite all 30 million of the region’s Kurds under a single flag and within safe and secure borders. The Kurds are the world’s largest national grouping who still lack a country of their own, and now the dream of independence appears to be in reach.
But the war presents the Iraqi Kurds with threats as well as opportunities, and if history is anything to go by, the optimists should temper their hopes with a strong dose of reality. By almost any estimation, the Kurds are among the greatest victims of the 20th century’s grisly history.
Led by powerful but scheming friends, they were first offered a state by the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, signed in the aftermath of the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire was broken up. This was in accordance with US President Wilson’s widely publicised promises of independence for subject peoples. But this offer was later withdrawn, and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne saw the Kurds dispersed between Turkey and Iran, and the new states of Iraq and Syria. Localised revolts were crushed and national aspirations were thwarted—especially in Turkey, where for generations the Kurds were forbidden to use their own language, and were even described as ‘mountain Turks’.
In the early 1970s the Kurds of northern Iraq rose up in revolt against the Ba’athist government of Baghdad. They were armed and supported in this revolt by the Shah in neighbouring Iran, and by extension the Shah’s superpower patron the United States, and were holding their own against Baghdad. But in 1975 the Shah decided to make peace with Iraq in return for a border readjustment involving navigation rights on the Shatt al-Arab waterway. The Algiers Agreement was signed by a much younger Saddam Hussein who had not yet assumed the Presidency. With the signing of the Algiers Agreement, the Kurds were deserted by