[Translated from the revised edition of Michel Mourre's Dictionnaire encyclopédique d'histoire (Paris: Bordas, 1996), vol. 3, pp. 3155-56.]

KURDS

A people of Indo-European origin and Sunni Muslim religion established in Kurdistan, in eastern Turkey, in Soviet Armenia, northeastern Iraq, and northwestern Iran. Semi-nomadic herders, the Kurds form a warlike people that has fiercely struggled for centuries to maintain its independence. In the 10th and 11th centuries, several small Kurdish principalities existed. In the 16th and 17th centuries, most Kurds fell under Ottoman domination, which they resisted with growing anger. The Treaty of Sèvres (1920) seemed to give legal recognition to Kurdish aspirations by foreseeing the creation of an independent Kurdistan, but the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) no longer mentioned this plan. From that time forward the Kurds, whose number amounted in the 1990s to something on the order of 20 million, have found themselves dispersed among Turkey (10 million), Iran (6 million), Iraq (4 million), Syria (0.8 million), and Nakhitchevan, then part of the Soviet Union (60,000). Kurdish revolts occurred in Turkey in 1925, 1930, and 1937, and in Iraq in 1922, 1931, and 1945. An ephemeral "Republic of Kurdistan" was even founded in 1946 by Iraqi Kurds. Beginning in the 1950s, the Kurdish rebellion led by Barzani became one of the most serious problems of Iraqi politics. From 1961 to 1970, the fighting that took place in Iraqi Kurdistan was so deadly that some spoke of the genocide of the Kurdish people. The Mar. 11, 1970, agreement, according to which the Baghdad government promised autonomy to Kurdistan, opened a more peaceful period, but fighting resumed in March 1974, after Barzani rejected the autonomous status elaborated by Baghdad. Following the Iran-Iraq agreement of Mar. 6, 1975, the Kurds lost the support of Iran, which closed its border in the region of Kurdistan.

The Kurdish revolt would have been crushed had discord not arisen between Syria and Iraq, and if war had not broken out in 1980 between Iraq and Iran. Supported at first by Syria, where one of their leaders, Jahal Talabani, had found refuge, the Kurds engaged in a classic guerrilla war against Iraqi government forces, which in the end established a security zone 10 to 20 kilometers [6 to 12 miles] in width along the Turkish and Iranian borders; all Kurdish villages there were razed and the inhabitants moved to villages controlled by the army. On Apr. 20, 1979, Turkey signed an agreement with Iraq which aimed at the complete elimination of the Kurdish revolt: on Apr. 25, martial law was declared by Ankara in sixteen provinces with Kurdish populations, and harsh repression ensued (4,000 Kurdish prisoners, according to official statistics).

But to the east, the situation changed when the new Islamic power triumphed in Iran. Hostile to the resurgence of separatism, Iran undertook a pitiless struggle against the peshmergas (Kurdish fighters). The war between Iraq and Iran saw each of the Kurdish movements ally itself with the government fighting against its own state. For the Kurds of Iraq, the upper hand finally gained by the Iraqi army had as a consequence horrible massacres (in which lethal gas was used against civilian populations, notably in 1988 in the town of Halabja, where 5,000 died). Many Kurds from Iraq took refuge in Turkey, where a new outburst of separatism was feared.

The Second Gulf War [Trans. note: Mourre's Dict. ency. d'hist. calls the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) the "First Gulf War" and what most Americans call the Gulf War the "Second Gulf War" (1990-1991); we are now in the midst of the "Third Gulf War," from this perspective. --M.K.J.] dramatically brought the "Kurdish problem" to international attention. Following Iraq's defeat, an uprising broke out in the northern part of the country, conducted by the two principal Kurdish movements, the Democratic Party of Kurdistan (DPK) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), whose traditional rivalry really disguised clan divisions. The repression organized by the Iraqi regime moved international public opinion and brought about a humanitarian intervention on the part of the U.N., which created "zones of refuge" in northern Iraq and forbade Baghdad's planes from crossing the 36th parallel, which marks approximately the southern limit of where Kurds live. [This sentence is not entirely correct. As Time reported on Nov. 19, 2002: "The U.S., Britain and France began in 1991 denying Iraq the right to fly in parts of its own airspace as a way of implementing U.N. resolutions urging protection for the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Shiites in the south from the wrath of Saddam. But the 'no-fly' zone was never specifically mandated by the U.N. Security Council, and was rejected from the outset by Iraq as a violation of its sovereignty. Iraq's objections were backed by Russia and China, and in 1996 France withdrew its participation." --M.K.J.] Having achieved virtual independence from Baghdad, Iraqi Kurds organized democratic elections in 1992, but in 1994 armed combat broke out again among the various movements. The de facto autonomy of the Iraqi Kurds worried Iraq's neighbors, so much so that the DPK decided in December 1992 to ban all military activity on the part of foreign Kurdish movements that had taken refuge on the territory it controlled. This decision did not prevent Iran from bombing Iraqi Kurdistan in the summer of 1993, however, or prevent Turkey from attacking, in March-May 1995, with more than 35,000 soldiers whose mission was to fight the men of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), an armed opposition group fighting against Ankara.

In Turkey itself, the Kurds tried to have Ankara recognize their specificity, which in accordance to Kemalist nationalism had always been denied, to the point that the private use of the Kurdish language itself was forbidden until 1991. The arrival in power in April 1993 of Turkish President Suleiman Demirel, thought to be more hard-line on the Kurdish question than his predecessor, led to a resumption of the guerrilla war waged by the PKK. The latter unleashed a terrorist campaign aiming at interests located in Turkey, but also abroad, so as to bring Turkish Kurds' demands to international attention. The Turkish government refused any negotiated solution (in February 1994, eight deputies of the Democratic Workers' Party, the political branch of the PKK, were arrested and imprisoned) and even appeared to delegate the management of the Kurdish problem to the army, whose exactions in the southeastern part of the country became the object of international condemndations. Between 1984, the beginning of the PKK's offensive, and 1995, the number of victims of the armed struggle was estimated at 13,000, hundreds of Kurdish villages having been torched by Turkish forces and their populations forcibly resettled.

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Translated by Mark K. Jensen
Associate Professor of French
Department of Languages and Literatures
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0003
Phone: 253-535-7219
Home page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/
E-mail: jensenmk@plu.edu