Khadija Magardie
Just mention the word “Kurdistan” and Bakhtiar Amir’s eyes light up. Amir, a Kurdish rights activist, is at the World Conference against Racism in Durban to petition the international community to remember the Kurds of Iraq.
Kurds have existed in the Middle East since ancient times, but centuries later are still fighting for a place in the sun.
The land they refer to as Kurdistan has no distinct geographical boundaries, and spans territory between Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. In Iraq alone, about half a million Kurds live as “internally displaced” people.
Poor, denied access to proper education, and other rights such as commercial rights and rights to farm their own land, the Kurds are among the silent victims of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.
It is difficult to estimate the exact number of Kurds because the four states where they live either do not recognise their existence or minimise their numbers.
According to Amir, the Kurds are “by far the largest ethnic group in the world who have no recognised country”.
During the Gulf War, world attention was drawn to the plight of the Kurds when they became the first victims of the Iraqi regime’s chemical and biological weapons onslaught.
Their lives were immortalised in the film A Time for Drunken Horses by acclaimed Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi. One of the starkest images of the film, shot entirely in winter, was of a band of Kurdish men trying to eke out a living by smuggling goods across the border into Iran, leading horses through heavily mined territory.
The refusal by the Iraqi regime to give the Kurdish people maps of the mined areas in the already meagre lands they occupy has made settlement difficult and farming virtually impossible.
Amir says all the basic human rights of the Kurdish people have been violated in several ways, such as restrictions on teaching their native language, the depopulation of Kurdish areas in some countries to make way for local settlement and, most tragically, denying them a right to self-determination.
Moreover, he says, the world has forgotten the Kurds.
“Perhaps because they trade with the countries that oppress us, or because they stood by while Saddam killed us, I don’t know,” he says.
Amir’s attendance at the conference has borne some fruit. For the first time, he says, a Kurdish leader has had a meeting with the Arab League to talk about their plight.
The Arab League president, Amr Moussa, assured him that he would look into the suggestion of having a special conference to discuss the Kurds.