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When Kurds Draw the Map of the Middle East

June 6, 2017 By administrator

Kurds Draw the Map of the Middle East

Kurds Draw the Map of the Middle East

By Vicken Cheterian,

In the second half of the 20th century, when the central conflict in the Middle East was around the Palestinian question, there were few analysts who said that the 21st century would see a greater conflict in the region, this time centered on the Kurdish question. They argued that just like the Palestinian people, who were stateless and lived under foreign occupation and therefore struggling for national independence, the Kurds had the same problem but four times as complex. The Kurdish people lived under four states – Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria – four states that were going through centralization process and therefore bringing huge pressure on the Kurdish traditional autonomy and its social fabric. Often, these states did not even recognize the existence of the Kurdish people – as in Turkey and Syria. In the age of nationalism, the Kurdish question was ignored by the states, and by the opposition parties alike. The Kurds were the major stateless people, and this anomaly could not continue, they argued.

Yet, history has its own ways of doing things, and the Kurdish question emerged much earlier than anyone expected. Two developments put the Kurdish question on the Middle Eastern map. The first was the 1980 military coup in Turkey, which practically destroyed the powerful Turkish leftist movements, leaving behind vacuum that had to be filled by a new force. As a result, a small Kurdish latecomer with the name “Kurdistan Workers’ Party” or PKK emerged as a major actor. PKK entered the field of armed struggle with a Stalinist-nationalist ideology quite late, as the party was founded in 1978 and it launched its armed campaign in 1984, which makes it one of the latest guerilla groups that uses a mixture of nationalist-Marxist ideology for its armed struggle. A decade later only Islamist groups would play a similar role. PKK was in alliance with the Baathist regime in Damascus, with bases in Syria and training camps in Lebanese Bekaa Valley. Yet, the salvation of PKK will come with its divergence of bases and networks – in the Kurdish communities in Europe and more important with establishing bases in the Kandil mountains on Iraqi-Turkish border hence outside Syrian control. When PKK was chased out of Syria in 1999, these two bases permitted PKK to survive, reorganize, and re-launch its armed struggle in 2004.

The other major event was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The event turned Middle Eastern geopolitics upside down, and we are still living its aftershocks. Saddam Hussein’s misadventure, two years after the end of a disastrous war with Iran turning against his Gulf and American allies, led to the downfall of the Iraqi state in the next decade. It also led to the emergence of a new state on the map, which eventually became the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq. This was happening as the Cold War was coming to an end, and a new geopolitical map was being drawn. It was a time when each and every player, superpower or a local militia group, was trying to find a new role. Now it is evident that for the US strategy in post-Cold War Middle East, the Kurds of Iraq but also elsewhere have a role to play.

Many underestimated the emerging Kurdish factor, namely Turkey. Instead of understanding the emergence of a new, powerful reality and working with it, Turkish political strategists desperately fought against it. Turkey opposed the emergence of KRG, only later to build close commercial collaboration with Erbil. Turkey continued to fight against its own Kurds, even after the Kemalists lost power to Erdogan. This conflict with the Kurds has put Ankara not only against the trend of history in the Middle East, but also against its own allies within NATO. Ankara opposed US invasion of Iraq in 2003, closing down its Incirlik base to US military operations. In 2012, Ankara opposed to Kurdish role in Syria, fearing the emergence of yet another Kurdish de facto state to its southern borders, and instead betting on radical Islamist militants. Both bets have clearly failed.

The visit of Turkish President to Washington in May this year made things clear concerning the role of the Kurds. Erdogan was hoping that Trump would correct the “mistakes” of the Obama administration, namely to distance itself from alliance with PKK-PYD in Syria. Two days before Erdogan’s visit to Washington, the US announced that it was going to arm Syrian Kurdish units of PYD with heavy weapons, including anti-tank guided missiles. The fact that Trump-Erdogan meeting lasted only 22 minutes including translation means that no meaningful discussion took place between the two leaders. Trump was to follow Obama’s policy of considering PYD its major ally inside Syria. In other words, the role of PYD in Syria is not a question of US administration and its policies, but it is a strategic choice; for US military planners not only the Iraqi Peshmerga counts in their fight against ISIS, but also PYD-PKK is to lead the attack on ISIS “capital” of Raqqa. For Washington, Paris or Berlin, the Kurdish role is evidently more important than the Incirlik airbase, and Turkish role as Western partner in the Middle East.

The emergence of Kurdish factor has a number of shortcomings. The first is the internal divisions within the Kurds, which reflects deep historic, social and geographic realities. In Iraq, the Barzani and Talabani leaderships reflect deeper divisions, geographic identities and tribal loyalties, which at times came into violent clashes as during 1994-97 inter-Kurdish wars. The divisions are equally important within Turkey. First, there are the “village guards” or Kurdish militias armed by the Turkish military to fight against the PKK. These village guards belong to Kurdish tribal chiefs, or aghas, who can trace their lineage back to Hamidiye Cavalry, who in the 19th century were armed by the Ottomans to play the role of auxiliary to the army. More important, today there is an important Kurdish middle class in major Turkish cities such as Istanbul, Ankara or Adana, who are not interested to see the emergence of an independent Kurdish state, but rather prefer to live in a democratic Turkey where rule of law and minority rights are respected. It will be the Turkish xenophobic push, rather than the Kurdish nationalist pull, that could make this group join the cause of the guerillas.

Second, Kurdish political groups built alliances full of contradictions. In the 1980’s and 90’s, PKK received support from Syrian authorities to fight Turkish military, while thousands of Syrian Kurds did not even have nationality, and did not enjoy basic cultural rights. How will a reinforced regime in Damascus treat the Kurdish autonomy “Rojava” in the north? Similarly, in Iraq Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) is in alliance with Ankara, while Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) is close to Baghdad-Tehran. Kurdish nationalism, much like Arab nationalism, is pluralist in nature, and rejecting this fact would be ignoring reality.

Lastly, Kurdish nationalism is a latecomer, when the entire regional politics is in post-nationalist epoch where sectarian identities have become important. Kurds are largely Sunni Muslims, but also Alevi, Shiite and other religious groups. Kurds have also been impacted by Islamic radicalism and sectarianism, for example the Kurdish Mullah Krekar was the one who introduced Abu Mus’ib al-Zarqawi to northern Iraq in 2003, and many ISIS members are Kurds from Iraq, Turkey or Syria. Religious differences were also clear in the case of Yazidis of Sinjar. When ISIS attacked Yazidis in August 2014, their areas were under the protection of Peshmerga forces. But Peshmerga did not fight, and evacuated its forces, leaving the Yazidi civilians to the jihadi fighters. Evidently, the Kurdish leaders did not see the Yazidis as part of “their group” and did not feel obliged to defend them. This has created a deep divide between the Yazidi population of Sinjar area, and the KRG authorities. More generally, it is yet to be seen how the growing Sunni-Shiite polarization could affect the emerging, yet fragile, Kurdish identity and mass consciousness.

Source: agos

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Kurds, map, Middle East

Artsakh Atlas published in three languages

November 22, 2016 By administrator

artsakhThe newly published electronic atlas of Artsakh available in three languages – Armenian, Russian, and English, – provides scientific, yet brief information about the region, Shoghine Hovhannisyan, chairwoman at Duty of Soul NGO stated during the presentation of the work on Tuesday.

In her words, the 40-page work offers an all-embracing picture of Artsakh (including the occupied northern part) with photos as well as maps of ethnic distribution, scriptoria, educational institutions and cultural monuments.

“The aim of this work to make the history and culture of Artsakh accessible both to the Armenian public, especially the politicians engaged with Artsakh issues and to the foreign audience. This is a weapon on the diplomatic front to be used against Azerbaijan,” Mrs. Hovhannisyan said.

The electronic versions of the Atlas have been prepared by Duty of Soul NGO the with the support of the Foundation studying Armenian architecture and implemented within a grant programme of the Youth Foundation of Armenia. The atlas is available at the website of the Foundation http://www.raa-am.com/Arcaxqartezagirq/imeges/Arcakhq__En.pdf.

Shoghine Hovhannisyan informed that the Russian and Armenian versions of the work will be presented by the end of the year or at least in the beginning of the next year.

The head of the foundation studying Armenian architecture Samvel Karapetyan, present at the presentation, said that preference had been given to the maps drafted by foreign authors.

“There are number of maps depicting Armenia with Artsakh within its borders that had been drawn by foreigners. A map dating 1985 was entitled Artsakh – not Karabakh, which means that in the 19th century the land was known as Artsakh. It remains unknown the reason for the later dismissal of the name Artsakh from circulation and preferring Karabakh instead,” Karapetyan noted.

He next informed that the atlas features the educational institutions with details such as the dates of their foundation, the manuscripts kept, while the map of the historical monuments is split due to the great number of the sights with separate categories for churches, towers, fortresses, monuments, etc.

Furthermore, as Karapetyan informed, the Artsakh Atlas is supplemented with maps of various specific specialization.

To note, the Artsakh Atlas was initiated within a grant competition of the Youth Foundation of Armenia, a partner organization chosen by the RA President.

 

Source Panorama.am

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Artsakh, Atlas, map

Turkish expention projects map descused publicly on television

October 24, 2016 By administrator

turkey-expension-mapExpansionist projects of Turkey presented to the Turkish TV with views of Greece, Bulgaria, the Kurdish regions of Iraq (Mosul, Kirkuk).

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: expansion, map, Turkey

Turkish map includes parts of Iraq, Syria and Palestine replaces Israel

October 19, 2016 By administrator

erdogan-expention-mapAlsumaria News / Baghdad
Pro-Turkish newspaper President Recep Tayyip Erdogan published, while the Turkish leadership reiterated its position on the Egyptian participation in the process of Mosul map for Turkey includes parts of Iraq, Syria and Bulgaria.

And circulation of media workers and activists picture of the cover of the newspaper widely, denouncing Erdogan of trying to restore the glories of the Ottoman Empire, as they called them.

And includes the alleged map published by the newspaper “Delilish” Turkish pro-Erdogan under the title “Is this land carved out of Turkey?”, Kirkuk, Mosul and Irbil, Aleppo, Idlib and Hassakeh and parts of Bulgaria and Armenia, a memorandum of the national department that (Milli Misak) a sealed agreement by the Ottoman Parliament is due for 1920, the claim that these parts of the territory of Turkey.

The map below drop the name of Palestine replacing him as “Israel.”

It was Erdogan told the international law conference in Istanbul that his country will join the process of liberalization of Mosul, and that any talks on the fate of the city linked to Turkey’s national security.

Erdogan’s remarks came in conjunction with the start of the process of liberalization of Mosul from the grip of the “Daesh,” the Turkish government refused to withdraw its troops from the battle, despite a request from the Iraqi government.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: expansion, map, Turkey

Azerbaijan: Meydan TV publishes map showing Aliyev clan’s property across world

April 30, 2016 By administrator

er.thumbAccording to the results of journalist investigations, information about Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev and his family members’ property worth billions of dollars has been periodically published in the international media. The property is both in Azerbaijan and abroad.

Azerbaijani online channel Meydan TV assisted by PIN (People in Need) has created a map of Aliyev clan’s property, on which the property plundered from the Azerbaijani population and found in different parts of the world and Azerbaijan is presented.

The map can be found here:  Such countries as Italy (Sardinia), Panama, Britain (London, the Virgin Islands), Czech Republic (Karlovy Vary, Prague), Russia (Moscow), Rumania (Bucharest), Turkey (Istanbul), Georgia (Tbilisi), and Dubai are particularly noted.

According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) data, in the recent years, the Aliyev clan has been involved in numerous secret business operations on several continents. It controls a considerable part of the Azerbaijani economy, gold mines, tourism, mobile communication companies, and banks through offshore companies and intermediaries. It also obtained elite real estate in various European cities and in the Persian Gulf countries.

Azerbaijani journalists, who investigated and exposed the presidential clan’s secret affairs, suffered a lot for that. They became a target for slanderous campaigns, and then they ended up in jail on trumped-up charges, as many human rights organizations state. More than 80 local political activists and oppositionists were imprisoned for criticizing the Aliyev regime, which quickly becomes the most repressive one in the region.

In June 2015, the Aliyev clan was actively involved in the organization of the European Games in Azerbaijan. While around 6000 sportsmen participated in the contests, most of the European leaders boycotted the games in protest against the aggravating human rights situation in Azerbaijan. Only a few officials from Eastern Europe, including Rumanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta, were present at the opening ceremony of the Games at the Heydar Aliyev stadium in Baku.

According to Azerbaijani economist Gubad Ibadoglu, around $200 billions of dollars have been transferred from Azerbaijan to offshore zones օn the islands in Latin America, Oceania, and Europe. To that end, banks of Muslim countries, real estate transactions abroad, gold, and stocks were used, and, as a result of the money transfer to the offshore zones, each Azerbaijani family lost tens of thousands of dollars in its budget.

 

Source Panorama.am

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Aliyev, Azerbaijan, map, meydan, property. world, tv

Armenian Genocide 1915-2015: Commemoration Map around the world

February 20, 2015 By administrator

Symble-standardCivilNet has prepared a map of some of the events taking place around the world to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. These events are primarily conferences or unique initiatives. We welcome your comments, suggestions and input to make it more comprehensive. Contact via info@civilnet.am.

Filed Under: Articles, Genocide Tagged With: armenian genocide, google, map

The Middle East That Might Have Been the region’s borders right.

February 13, 2015 By administrator

By Nick Danforth February 13, 2015

Nearly a century ago, two Americans led a quixotic mission to get the region’s borders right.

How the King-Crane Commission envisioned the Middle East map

How the King-Crane Commission envisioned the Middle East map

In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched a theologian named Henry King and a plumbing-parts magnate named Charles Crane to sort out the Middle East. Amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the region’s political future was uncertain, and the two men seemed to provide the necessary combination of business acumen and biblical knowledge. King and Crane’s quest was to find out how the region’s residents wanted to be governed. It would be a major test of Wilson’s belief in national self-determination: the idea that every people should get its own state with clearly defined borders. published on http://www.theatlantic.com

After spending three weeks interviewing religious and community leaders in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and southern Turkey, the two men and their team proposed that the Ottoman lands be divided as shown in the map above. Needless to say, the proposals were disregarded. In accordance with the Sykes-Picot Agreement Britain and France had drafted in secret in 1916, Britain and France ultimately took over the region as so-called mandate or caretaker powers. The French-administered region would later become Lebanon and Syria, and the British region would become Israel, Jordan, and Iraq.

Today, many argue that a century of untold violence and instability—culminating in ISIS’s brutal attempt t0 erase Middle Eastern borders—might have been avoided if only each of the region’s peoples had achieved independence after World War I. But as the King-Crane Commission discovered back in 1919, ethnic and religious groups almost never divide themselves into discrete units. Nor do the members of each group necessarily share a vision of how they wish to be governed.

The King-Crane report is still a striking document—less for what it reveals about the Middle East as it might have been than as an illustration of the fundamental dilemmas involved in drawing, or not drawing, borders. Indeed, the report insisted on forcing people to live together through complicated legal arrangements that prefigure more recent proposals.

Among other things, the authors concluded that dividing Iraq into ethnic enclaves was too absurd to merit discussion. Greeks and Turks only needed one country because the “two races supplement each other.” The Muslims and Christians of Syria needed to learn to “get on together in some fashion” because “the whole lesson of modern social consciousness points to the necessity of understanding ‘the other half,’ as it can be understood only by close and living relations.”

But the commissioners also realized that simply lumping diverse ethnic or religious groups together in larger states could lead to bloody results. Their report proposed all sorts of ideas for tiered, overlapping mandates or bi-national federated states, ultimately endorsing a vision that could be considered either pre- or post-national, depending on one’s perspective. In addition to outlining several autonomous regions, they proposed that Constantinople (now Istanbul) become an international territory administered by the League of Nations, since “no one nation can be equal to the task” of controlling the city and its surrounding straits, “least of all a nation with Turkey’s superlatively bad record of misrule.” Although the authors had been tasked with drawing borders, it seems that once they confronted the many dilemmas of implementing self-determination, they developed a more fluid approach to nationhood and identity.

Disagreement among the region’s residents about their own future certainly helped the commission reach this conclusion. The commissioners traveled from city to city accepting petitions and taking testimony, compiling a rare record of Arab popular opinion from the period. This early polling exercise captured a wide range of views—some overlapping, some irreconcilable.

Some 80 percent of those interviewed favored the establishment of a “United Syria”—an outcome that, far from settling the question of what self-determination would look like, forced the commission to wrestle with the crucial issue of what should happen to minorities. Many of the Christians living in this hypothetical future state, particularly those in the Mount Lebanon region, spoke out forcefully against being part of a larger, Muslim-dominated entity. Many called for an “Independent Greater Lebanon,” whose territory would be roughly equivalent to that of the modern state of Lebanon.

The commissioners’ proposed solution was to grant Lebanon “a sufficient measure of local autonomy” so as not to “diminish the security of [its] inhabitants.” But their explanation for why this autonomy should fall short of complete independence seems to challenge the logic of self-determination: “Lebanon would be in a position to exert a stronger and more helpful influence if she were within the Syrian state, feeling its problems and needs and sharing all its life, instead of outside it, absorbed simply in her own narrow concerns.”

The broader conclusion they reached about human affairs was similarly at odds with the principle of self-determination, and it anticipated the 21st century’s recurring debates about where the Middle East’s borders really belong. “No doubt the quick mechanical solution of the problem of difficult relations is to split the people up into little independent fragments,” they wrote. “But in general, to attempt complete separation only accentuates the differences and increases the antagonism.” Even when they conceded exceptions—for instance, in the “imperative and inevitable” separation of the Turks and Armenians given the Turks’ “terrible massacres” and “cruelties horrible beyond description”—King, Crane, and their team nonetheless concluded that “a separation … involves very difficult problems” and could easily backfire.  

Ultimately, the King-Crane proposal relied on European or American supervision, through the mandate system, to fudge different degrees of sovereignty and ensure minority rights in multi-national states. Placing different mandates under the same mandatory power became an easy way to separate peoples while maintaining an administrative link between them: Syria and Mesopotamia, for instance, could both be under British supervision, while Turkey and Armenia could both be overseen by the United States. There is a telling condescension to the commissioners’ insistence on foreign administration as the best way to implement “self-determination,” but it wasn’t that different from the widely shared belief at the time that oversight from a supra-national body like the League of Nations would also be necessary to ensure minority rights in the new nations of Eastern Europe.

In some ways, it also wasn’t that different from the British and French belief, evident in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that continued imperial rule was necessary to manage local differences. There are echoes of this conviction in the anti-nationalist imperial nostalgia that exists in some quarters today. Indeed, part of the reason the British and French felt so comfortable drawing “arbitrary” borders was that they believed they would remain in a position to manage relations across them. In this sense, Anglo-French imperialism relied on controlling borders and suppressing self-determination within the region, while the King-Crane commission was more interested in trying to find a balance between them.

This balance has yet to be achieved. Today, some people argue that Iraq would be better off divided into smaller states, and that Syria might split up on its own, while others—including ISIS—have insisted that the solution is to do away entirely with borders like the one between Iraq and Syria and to create a much larger entity. But both solutions, along with the countless alternative maps proposed for the region, remain focused on redrawing borders rather than transcending them. And for what it’s worth, neither a subdivided Syria nor a union between Syria and Mesopotamia were outcomes that many locals campaigned for when King and Crane came to visit.

All of this suggests a need to look beyond the current paradigm of borders. The people of Scotland, for example, recently decided that their preferred relationship with London involved a mix of dependence and independence rather than leaving the U.K. altogether or allowing England to have total sovereignty over their affairs. And in Syria, a federated arrangement that parcels out control of the country’s territory without breaking it apart could be a faster route to peace than complete victory by any one side.

Of course, recognizing the limitations of nation-states, in the Middle East or elsewhere, does not imply that with a little more foresight the Arab world could have transitioned directly from Ottoman imperialism to post-national European modernity. Historical forces worked against implementing more flexible alternatives to the nation-state system then, and they still do today. But the current regional uncertainty may require the same kind of imagination the King-Crane commission brought to its analysis. A century later, it’s clear that the question of what political arrangements can help people “get on together in some fashion” remains just as difficult as ever.

  • Nick Danforth is a doctoral candidate in Turkish history at Georgetown University. He writes about Middle Eastern history, politics, and maps at midafternoonmap.com.

Filed Under: Genocide, News Tagged With: Armenia, borders, map, Middle East, US, Woodrow Wilson

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