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The Kurds are often referred to as the world's largest non-state nation. The population is estimated at between 25 to 35 million, which makes them the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, outnumbered only by Arabs, Turks, and Persians. The majority live in Kurdistan, a borderless homeland whose territory is divided among the neighboring countries of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Some Kurdish populations are scattered throughout western and central Asia and, since the 1960s, can also be found in Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries.

The territory's rich natural resources have supported nomadic populations practicing animal husbandry, as well as rural and urban economies rooted in agriculture, long-distance trade, and regional markets. According to historical and archeological evidence, the region was the site of the world's earliest agrarian societies, cities, and states, all of which coexisted uneasily in a web of antagonisms that were rooted in cleavages based on class, empire, ethnicity, religion, race, and gender.

Although the Kurds appear to be an indigenous people of Western Asia, living largely astride the Zagros Mountains, their territory was home to numerous other civilizations and peoples, as well. Most of these (except for Assyrians, Armenians, and Jews) are now extinct or have been assimilated into the Kurdish population. The landscape is full of relics of monumental construction projects ranging from ancient irrigation networks to bridges and citadels, side by side with evidence of the ongoing destruction of life and property through conquest, wars, massacres, and forced population movements.

Pre-Modern States

We have more knowledge about the Kurds in the years following the conquest of the region by Islamic armies in the seventh century. Kurdistan lay very close to Baghdad, the capital of the Islamic caliphate. It was the site of incessant wars among the armies of the caliphs, as well as governors, Kurdish rulers, and conquerors coming from as far as the Roman empire in the west and Mongolia in the east. Although the conflicts were primary over land, taxes, and the recruitment of military service from the population, ethnic and religious differences also provided justifications for conquest and subjugation. Unrestrained violence, including atrocities against both civilians and combatants was widespread, and was aimed, in part, at intimidating the adversary and the population into submission. To give one example, the army of Adhud al-Dawla, ruler of the Buwayhid dynasty centered in Baghdad, besieged the Hakkari Kurds in 980, forced them into surrender on a promise of sparing their lives, but then crucified them and left their bodies hanging along 15 miles of roadside near Mosul.

Several factors helped to reshape the ethnic composition of Western Asia. For one, the Oghuz Turks arrived in the region from the Asian steppes in the eleventh century. Also important was the formation of the Seljuk dynasty (11th through 13th centuries) and Turkoman dynasties (Aq Qoyunlu and Qara Qoyunlu), which were followed by the fall of the caliphate in 1258 in the wake of the Mongol invasion. According to historian Vladimir Minorsky, "the Kurdish element was exhausting itself" in these unceasing wars. It is during this period, however, that the Kurds emerge as a distinct people, their territory becomes identified by outsiders as Kurdistan, and Kurdish statehood emerges in the form of mini-states and principalities.

Some of the indigenous populations of Kurdistan include the Armenians, Assyrians (Christians), and Kurds (mostly Muslims). There are also other goups, such as the Yezidis, who are followers of minority religions, as well as scattered minorities such as the Jews. These peoples survived the intensive colonization of the region by Turkic (Oghuz, Turkoman, Ottoman) and Mongol nomadic and tribal peoples from central Asia. The homogenizing force of centuries of conversion, forcible population movements, and massacres was offset by the inability of feudal states to centralize power and therefore assimilate their conquered peoples of the region into the language, culture and religion of the conquerors. Equally important in preventing the total annihilation of the indigenous populations was the labor-intensive nature of feudal agrarian production. Without a sizeable productive labor force, the fertile lands of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, and Mesopotamia could not sustain elaborate state structures. Although some Kurdish territories were Turkicized due to conquest and the violent elimination of Kurdish ruling families (especially by the Aq Qoyunlu dynasty, 1378–1508), as well as by massacres and deportations, some Kurdish mini-states were, nonetheless, gaining ground.

By the early sixteenth century, Western Asia was under the rule of two rival Turkish dynasties, the Ottomans and Safavids, which in 1639 drew their borders along the Zagros mountain range. Armenia and Kurdistan were thus divided, and the region experienced intermittent wars. The two empires pursued a policy of administrative centralization by removing hereditary Kurdish principalities. However, the Kurdish mini-states benefitted from the rivalry between the dynasties, and some survived until the mid-nineteenth century. Shah Abbas I (1588–1626), was suspicious of the loyalty of the Kurdish rulers of principalities of Biradost and Mukriyan. He supervised and personally participated in the massacres of the rulers and their subjects (1610–1611), and resettled Turkish tribes in their territory. He deported another 15,000 Kurds from another region of Kurdistan to northeastern Iran. An eyewitness to the mass killings, the Shah's official chronicler Eskandar Monshi Torkman, whose History of Shah Abbas the Great was translated into English in 1971, detailed with pride the "general massacre" of the Mukri Kurds and noted that the shah's "fury and wrath" could not be allayed "but by shedding the blood of those unfortunate ones" and that the "slicing of men" and the "enslavement of women and girls . . . had been inscribed on the annals of time by destination." He labeled the Kurds as "base-born," "human beings of savage disposition," and "impious."

The Modern Nation-State

In the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman Turkey and Iran began adopting a more European style of administrative and military centralization. The two states used their armies to overthrow the six remaining Kurdish principalities, and extended their direct rule over all parts of Kurdistan. With the emergence of modern style nation-states in Iran (after the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 to 1911) and Ottoman Turkey (especially after the 1908 Young Turk revolution), the Kurds were incorporated into the state as citizens rather than a distinct people enjoying the right to self-rule. Feudal and tribal relations continued to prevail in the predominantly rural society of Kurdistan, but Kurdish nationalist ideas began to appear in the poetry and journalism of the last decade of the nineteenth century.

World War I turned Kurdistan into a battlefield between the Ottomans, Russians, Iranians, and British. The Ottoman government committed genocide against Armenians and Assyrians in 1915, and forcibly transferred some 700,000 Kurds to Western Turkey in 1917. At the same time, the tsarist Russian army conducted massacres of the Kurds in Sauj Bulagh in 1915 (now Mahabad, Iran), Rawandiz (Iraq), Khanaqin (Iran) and throughout the eastern parts of Kurdistan. As in previous wars, both armies committed crimes against humanity, including enslavement, murder, extermination, rape, sexual slavery, sexual violence, persecution. They also engaged in such war crimes as willful killing, inhuman treatment, unlawful deportation and transfer, attacking civilians, pillaging, and cruel treatment. The Russian army also committed gendercide—the killing of adolescent and adult males—in the massacre of Sauj Bulagh, and carried away some 400 women and girls for abuse. Armenian and Assyrian militias participated in the Russian massacres, and some Kurdish tribal, feudal, and religious leaders acted as accomplices in the genocide of Armenians and Assyrians. At the same time, many Kurds sheltered Armenian victims, and Assyrians helped starving Kurds.

The dismantling of the Ottoman empire in World War I led to the division of its Kurdish region and the incorporation of that territory into the newly created states of Iraq (under British occupation and mandate, 1918–1932), Syria (under French occupation and mandate, 1918–1946), and Turkey (Republic of Turkey since 1923). The formation of these modern nation-states entailed the forced assimilation of the Kurds into the official or dominant national languages and cultures: Turkish (Turkey), Persian (Iran), and Arabic (Syria, and, in a more limited scope, Iraq). In Turkey and Iran, in particular, the political power of religious, tribal, and feudal leaders was uprooted. State violence was the principal means of integration and assimilation. According to historian Mark Levene, (Ottoman) Turkey had turned Eastern Anatolia, which includes Armenia and Kurdistan, into a "zone of genocide" from 1878 to 1923. This "zone" has persisted into the twenty-first century.

Kurdish resistance to assimilation was diverse and extensive, including a series of armed revolts in Turkey (1921, 1925, 1927–1931, 1937–1938), Iran (1920–early 1930s), and Iraq (early 1920s, 1940s). These revolts were led, often jointly, by heads of religious orders (sheikhs) and feudal and tribal chiefs (aghast) as well as an emerging group of nationalist intelligentsia, political activists, and deserting army officers, who were mostly urban and secular. The repression of these revolts was most brutal in Turkey and Iran.

The region was not a theater of war in World War II, except for the northern part of Iranian Kurdistan, which was occupied by the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1946. After the war the four countries acceded or ratified the 1949 Geneva Conventions (Turkey, 1954; Iran, 1957; Iraq, 1956; Syria, 1953) and its 1977 Additional Protocols.

Turkey

The intent to commit genocide is inscribed, explicitly, in Turkey's Law No. 2510 of 1934, which stipulated the transfer of non-Turks to Turkish speaking regions, where they would not be allowed to form more than 5 percent of the population. This law provided for the depopulation of non-Turkish villages and towns, resettlement of Turks in non-Turkish areas, and other assimilationist projects, such as the establishing of boarding schools, which were intended to turn non-Turkish children into monolingual Turkish speakers. The law was applied a year later in the wake of Law No. 2884, which decreed the systematic turkification of the Dersim region, renamed as Tunceli, through military control, boarding schools, the banning of the Kurdish language and culture, changing place names, and deportation.

This forced turkification project led to the Dersim uprising, which the army and the air force brutally suppressed from 1937 to 1938, and the repression of which some researchers consider to be an act of genocide. The Turkish Republic considered popular uprisings to be reactionary and religious opposition to the civilizing and westernizing policies of the Turkish nation-state. The Kurds were branded as tribal, uncivilized, illiterate, primitive, backward, dirty, and ignorant. Any expression of Kurdish identity was treated as a crime against the "indivisibility of the Turkish nation" and "territorial integrity" of Turkey.

Dersim was the last uprising until the armed resistance of 1984–1999, led by Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, in Kurdish acronyms). Nonetheless, various governments continued Turkification through the deliberate elimination of Kurdish as a spoken and written language, and through ethnocide—eliminating Kurdish culture and ethnic identity. The use of the Kurdish language, music, dance, dress, personal and geographic names, and even listening to broadcasting and recorded music were all criminalized by the Turkish state.

Because of Turkey's aspirations to full membership in the European Union, the parliament acceded to pressure and legalized the private use of spoken Kurdish in 1991. A decade later the parliament removed some of the constitutional and legal restrictions on the language. However, linguistic genocide continues to be the official state policy.

During its repression of the PKK, which it labeled counterinsurgency operations, Turkey declared a state of emergency in parts of its southeastern (Kurdish) territory. According to the Human Rights Watch Turkey committed "gross violation of its international commitments to respect the laws of war" (1995, p. 7). This included forced displacements, indiscriminate shootings, summary executions, and disguising the identity of perpetrators, as well as violations of international law, including summary execution, torture, forcible displacement of civilians, pillage, destruction of villages, failure to care for civilians displaced by government forces, injury of civilians, destruction of civilian property, inhumane and degrading treatment, kidnaping of civilians to act as porters and as human shields against attack, disappearances, life-threatening conditions of detention and inadequate medical attention leading to death. The Human Rights Watch also noted that the United States, Turkey's close ally and its major weapons supplier, was deeply implicated, and, much like NATO, chose to "downplay Turkish violations for strategic reasons" (1995, p. 13). It also charged that the PKK, which was not party to the Geneva Protocols, also engaged in "substantial violations of the laws of war," including "summary executions, indiscriminate fire and the intentional targeting of non-combatants" (1995, pp. 12–13).

During the operations, according to a Turkish parliamentary commission, the armed forces displaced 378,335 villagers while destroying or evacuating 3,428 rural settlements (905 villages and 2,523 hamlets) from the mid-1980s to 1997. These figures are generally treated as underestimations. The Turkish security forces further destroyed the infrastructure of rural life in the Kurdish region, and thus threatened the survival of the Kurds as a distinct people. Other crimes included systematic sexual violence against women in custody.

Iran

Especially under Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925–1941), Iran undertook a policy of forcible Persianization of the Kurds through linguicide and ethnocide as well as war, killing, jail, and deportations. As early as 1923, speaking Kurdish had been banned in schools and other state institutions, and by the mid-1930s, a total ban on the language and culture was imposed. Under the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979), crimes against humanity and war crimes were committed in military operations against the Kurds. The Islamic regime that followed the Shahs continued the persianization policy, although on a more limited scale. During its suppression of Kurdish autonomists, which began once it came to power, the government committed crimes against humanity including murder, extermination, imprisonment, and torture, and war crimes such as wilful killing, inhuman treatment, appropriation of property, denying a fair trial, unlawful deportation and transfer, attacking civilians, execution without due process, and attacking undefended places.

Iraq

Iraq was the only country, other than the Soviet Union, where the existence of the Kurds was recognized and the Kurdish language was allowed limited use in primary education, local administration, and the mass media. However, Iraq did institute a policy of containing Kurdish nationalism through arabization. The government committed crimes against humanity and war crimes during the long conflict with Kurdish autonomists, which raged intermittently from 1961 to the 1990s. During the first Ba'ath regime's offensive against the Kurds in 1963, the Mongolian People's Republic asked the UN General Assembly to discuss "the policy of genocide carried out by the government of the Republic of Iraq against the Kurdish people," and the Soviet Union referred the case to the Economic and Social Council. Mongolia later withdrew the request, and the Economic and Social Security Council refused to consider the Soviet request.

The second Ba'ath regime (1968–2003) constructed a cordon sanitaire along its northern borders with Iran and Turkey by destroying hundreds of Kurdish villages soon after the defeat of the Kurdish armed resistance in 1975. In 1983 it killed all the adolescent and adult males of Barzani Kurds, numbering about 8,000. In addition, during its war with Iran (1980–1988), in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, the regime used chemical weapons against both the Iranians and Iraqi Kurds who lived in a number of settlements, including the town of Halabja (March 16, 1988). Moreover, the oil-rich Kirkuk region was arabized by forcibly uprooting Kurds from the city and villages. The 1988 campaign of mass murder, code-named Operation Anfal ("spoils" of war, also the title of a chapter in the Koran), is widely considered a genocide. According to a 1993 report by the Human Rights Watch, it entailed the killing of more than 100,000 Kurds, the disappearance of tens of thousands of noncombatants, the destruction of 4,006 villages (according to Kurdistan Regional Government), the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers, the arbitrary arrest and jailing of thousands of women, children, and the elderly under conditions of extreme deprivation, and the destruction of rural life.

Syria

Although the Kurds of Syria have not engaged in armed conflict with the state, they were targeted for ethnic cleansing beginning in the early 1960s. Some 120,000 Kurds were stripped of Syrian citizenship. According to a 1991 report by the Middle East Watch, the Syrian government planned for the depopulation of Kurdish regions by creating an "Arab belt" along the Turkish border, evicting peasants from 332 villages, and replacing them with Arab settlers.

Soviet Union and Caucasia

Although the Kurdish communities of Soviet Caucasia and Turkmenistan enjoyed cultural and linguistic rights, thousands of Caucasian Kurds were subjected to two waves of forced deportation to the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kirgizia, and Uzbekistan in 1937 and 1944. During the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Muslim Kurdish populations of Armenia and Nagorny-Karabakh were largely displaced in the course of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan between 1990 and 1994, when, according to the Human Rights Watch, both countries "systematically violated the most basic rule of international humanitarian law."

Prevention, Education, and Political-Judicial Reform

Since ancient times, mass killing and related crimes have been a permanent feature of life in the region. Modern genocide in Kurdistan is distinguished from earlier crimes by its rootedness in the nation–state and its nationalist ideology, which safeguards the territorial integrity of the homeland.

While there is little progress in reversing state politics, citizens, both Kurds and non-Kurds, have taken significant steps toward recognizing, documenting, and resisting genocide in literary words, academic research, conferences, film, and journalism. Much remains to be done, however, toward legal-political reform, promoting genocide education, and monitoring early warning signs of impending crimes.

SEE ALSO Ethnocide; Gas; Iran; Iraq; Linguistic Genocide

Amir Hassanpour