DAVID POLLOCK

ENDING A CENTURY OF SUBJUGATION: SYKES-PICOT’S KURDISH LEGACY

THE KURDS, straddling the contemporary borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and numbering some 35 million, are sometimes described as the largest ethnic group in the world without its own country. In truth, that dubious honor probably belongs to India’s (and Sri Lanka’s) Tamils, Pakistan’s various provincial populations, and many others in the subcontinent; but never mind. Kurdish aspirations to overturn or at least dilute the century-old Sykes-Picot lines are certainly among the most important contemporary international ethnic issues.

For the Kurds are indeed very numerous; they are often very attached to their own distinctive language, culture, history, and overall ethnic identity; and many of them remain self-consciously bereft of the independence more or less promised to them by the Western victors of World War I a century ago. Today, their resulting predicament lies at the center of some of the region’s most acute conflicts. Its resolution one way or another is necessarily a key ingredient in any long-term plan to pacify and stabilize the entire “northern tier” of the broader Middle East.

The promise of Kurdish independence was not technically part of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided most Kurdish-populated territory between Britain and France while offering independence to no one. Rather, as part of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s push for “self-determination” at the Versailles Peace Conference and then in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, the Kurds obtained a commitment to the possibility of sovereign nationhood. Within a few short years, however, that commitment was forcibly crushed.

The Kurds first rose up in rebellion against Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s new Turkish government, which claimed much of their homeland and about half of their total numbers, but they were soon defeated. Meanwhile, the British annexed the old Ottoman Vilayet (province) of Mosul and vicinity, along with a considerable Kurdish population, to their own new League of Nations mandate over Iraq. The French, also in line with Sykes-Picot, took over the mandate in Syria, on the southern edge of historic Kurdistan. In addition, the new government and armies of Reza Shah in Iran retained that country’s largely Kurdish far northwestern provinces firmly under Tehran’s autocratic control.

By the time of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which roughly codified the new national borders of these areas, there was no further mention of Kurdish independence; however, from then until now—increasingly in recent decades—many Kurds have kept that dream alive. The forces of this movement took entirely different forms, however, at very different times, in the various countries into which the Kurds have been divided.

And the Kurds have also been famously internally divided, not only among but also within each of those new international boundaries. Rival clans, factions, parties, personalities, dialects, ideologies, regional alignments, and other cleavages have all taken a heavy toll. Moreover, many Kurds became loyal citizens of their respective new central governments, while others resumed the fight for self-government.

In Iran, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, some of them briefly collaborated with the Soviet Union in setting up a new Kurdish “Republic of Gilan” based in Mahabad. Tehran quickly squelched that prospect, with strong support from Britain and the United States. In Turkey, after more than half a century of enforced assimilation and relative quiescence, some Kurds started a guerrilla insurgency against Ankara in southeast Turkey in 1984 under the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) banner. That futile uprising has continued, in fits and starts, until this day.

In Iraq, the Kurds in the north also rose up against their central government, first in the 1970s and again in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, after Saddam Hussein’s genocidal Anfal campaign against them in 1988. Their resistance was compromised by internal divisions

into the archrival Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and their associated militias, culminating in a fratricidal mini–civil war in 1996. However, under U.S. protection from the air, Iraq’s Kurds have now successfully carved out a self-governing, relatively stable region that has endured for the past quarter century, despite many internal and external security and economic challenges.

This Kurdistan Autonomous Region, with a native population

of five million—plus nearly two million mostly Arab refugees and internally displaced persons—boasts its own Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), with its own president, parliament, and army (the Peshmerga). Its oil-based economy is struggling, however, and

remains dependent on pipelines and other support from neighboring Turkey, Iraq, or both. Most strikingly, after two decades of very uneasy and occasionally hostile relations, the KRG and Turkey have in the past five years become the closest of friends, in political, military,

and economic terms.

In Syria, with the smallest Kurdish population in both absolute and relative terms, the roughly three million Kurds concentrated in northern enclaves along the Turkish border remained comparatively quiescent until quite recently. They managed a brief campaign of

protest and civil disobedience in 2004–5, only to fall back under Bashar al-Assad’s harsh repression. Nevertheless, soon after the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011, Assad’s forces largely withdrew from those Kurdish areas, leaving them with a sort of de facto autonomy

that continues today.

Ironically, since mid-2014, the Kurds in both Iraq and Syria have on balance benefited from the rise of a new common enemy: the    Islamic State (IS). In August 2014, IS very nearly overran the KRG capital of Erbil, but was pushed back by the Peshmerga—with both

U.S. and Iranian backing. Ever since, the United States (and other coalition countries) has provided Iraq’s Kurdish forces with direct military aid, both in the air and on the ground, and relaxed its earlier insistence that the KRG subordinate its economy to Baghdad. In Syria, the United States has likewise provided direct military support to the main local Kurdish party and militia fighting against IS: the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and People’s Defense Units (YPG). The result, intended or not, is to strengthen Kurdish autonomy in each country.

But not Kurdish independence. The United States and most other countries, particularly Turkey and Iran but also far beyond, plus the weak central governments in Baghdad and Damascus, all remain firmly opposed to that. So, when KRG president Masoud Barzani repeatedly warns of a coming referendum on independence, the most knowledgeable observers are inclined to write that off as a bluff or a bargaining chip cleverly designed to maintain his internal position while extracting the best possible deal from his neighbors and other interlocutors.

Similarly, when the PYD this month announced formal plans for an autonomous “federal” Kurdish region in Syria, it managed the remarkable feat of uniting in opposition every one of its neighbors and more: the Assad regime, the Syrian opposition, Turkey, the United States, and even the rival KRG just across the river in Iraq. Only Russia announced that this might be a reasonable approach to resolving the Syrian civil war. At the same time, both the PYD and Turkey have for the most part avoided direct confrontations across their common border—even though Ankara officially considers the PYD part of the “terrorist” PKK. That leaves Syria’s Kurds with de facto but not de jure autonomy within their own slivers of the country.

Inside Turkey, meanwhile, both the central government and the PKK have for now tragically abandoned their halting rapprochement of 2013–2015 and resumed outright low-intensity war. The PKK demands Kurdish autonomy; the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara has contemplated at least offering its Kurdish citizens more cultural and local political freedoms. The gap between the two seemed to be narrowing just a year ago; it now seems very wide, but might well one day be bridged—if not perhaps with the PKK, then with other authentic Kurdish parties, such as the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). This is one instance where the cliché “no military solution” probably really does apply.

Least and least promising on this list, from the standpoint of Kurdish rights, is Iran. With Iran never part of Sykes-Picot, that imperialist legacy cannot be blamed for the plight of Iran’s seven to ten million Kurds. Although they participate in what passes for Iranian national politics, they are denied any real local autonomy or even identity. Their governors are appointed by Tehran, and are often not Kurds. Their language is barely tolerated; only in the past year has the first Kurdish-language institution of higher education inIran been permitted to open. Any open dissent is brutally repressed, as in the Mahabad riot last year. Executions of Kurdish and many other alleged miscreants are up substantially under President Hassan

Rouhani, at ten times the rate per capita of Saudi Arabia across the Gulf. And Iran as usual stoops to playing the sectarian card: many of its favored Kurdish citizens are from the minority Shiite portion of that population, centered in the provincial city of Sanandaj. Some

anti-regime Kurds, of either sect, derisively call those collaborators jash (donkey), as they once did with the coterie of pro-Saddam Kurds in Iraq.

For the Kurds, in conclusion then, where does Sykes-Picot go from here? Several quick points are in order, all based on the preceding analysis.

First, the old borders are still surprisingly durable.

A pan-Kurdish project is simply not in the cards, for reasons not only of state sovereignty but also of  intra-Kurdish divisions.

Second, relatedly, the full independence or secession even of one national piece of ethnic Kurdistan, including from Iraq or Syria, is probably also not on the medium-term horizon.

But third, Kurdish local autonomy or “federalism” of some kind is an increasingly plausible—and likely constructive—option, not just in Iraq but also in Syria, and maybe eventually in Turkey as well.

And fourth, again relatedly, the recent exceptionally warm ties between Ankara

and Erbil strongly suggest that this particular “age-old ethnic conflict” need not be an insurmountable obstacle to political expedience. Someday, believe it or not, Turkey may find an autonomous Kurdish region on its Syrian border every bit as amenable to its interests as the one on its Iraqi border.

For U.S. policy in the region, the implications are equally clear.

Washington can usefully support not Kurdish independence, let alone pan-Kurdish aspirations, but real Kurdish autonomy within three of the four countries in question: in Iraq, in Syria, and in the longer term, subject to agreement with Ankara, even in Turkey. Call it “Sykes-Picot light.” As for the fourth country in this mixture, Iran, the nuclear deal and other realities unfortunately make its Kurdish question utterly unanswerable for the United States, or any other interested parties. Least and least promising on this list, from the standpoint of Kurdish rights, is Iran. With Iran never part of Sykes-Picot, that imperialist legacy cannot be blamed for the plight of Iran’s seven to ten million Kurds. Although they participate in what passes for Iranian national politics, they are denied any real local autonomy or even identity. Their governors are appointed by Tehran, and are often not Kurds. Their language is barely tolerated; only in the past year has the first Kurdish-language institution of higher education in Iran been permitted to open. Any open dissent is brutally repressed, as in the Mahabad riot last year. Executions of Kurdish and many other alleged miscreants are up substantially under President Hassan Rouhani, at ten times the rate per capita of Saudi Arabia across the Gulf. And Iran as usual stoops to playing the sectarian card: many of its favored Kurdish citizens are from the minority Shiite portion of that population, centered in the provincial city of Sanandaj. Some anti-regime Kurds, of either sect, derisively call those collabora­tors jash (donkey), as they once did with the coterie of pro-Saddam Kurds in Iraq.

For U.S. policy in the region, the implications are equally clear. Washington can usefully support not Kurdish independence, let  alone pan-Kurdish aspirations, but real Kurdish autonomy within three of the four countries in question: in Iraq, in Syria, and in the longer term, subject to agreement with Ankara, even in Turkey. Call it “Sykes-Picot light.” As for the fourth country in this mixture, Iran, the nuclear deal and other realities unfortunately make its Kurdish question utterly unanswerable for the United States, or any other interested parties.