Khorshid Delli
The way the mind view issues politically is ultimately the result of historical accumulations, political action, and ideological vision in the form of a concept formed throughout history and social and political practice. There is a kind of suspicion in the form of concerns in the political mind, in the view of the Kurds and Arabs of each other, as any discussion or talk between Arab intellectuals and Kurds include mutual blame, and each side has his justifications, arguments, vision, and convictions which are based on his view of the other.
In the Kurdish consciousness, there is a profound conviction that their brothers in history, geography, and religion did not attach importance to their cause, that they suffered injustice by them at the hands of the region’s regimes over the past centuries and decades, and that the Arab media deals with their issue only from a modern, up-to-date perspective not based on the cause of a people subjected to exclusion, marginalization, and deprivation under national and religious slogans and authoritarian justifications.
The Kurdish view of the problematic relationship with Arabs goes beyond the issue of the absence of a legal and constitutional formula for organizing the relationship between the Arabs and Kurds, to the Arab political mind with its different nationalist, leftist, liberal, and Islamist trends in its various ways. According to this, the general framework for this mind stems from great slogans, and the Kurds are considered as a secondary peripheral issue which can be postponed indefinitely. Some people often take this issue out of the logic of geographical, historical, and social contexts and place it within the framework of theories saturated with the spirit of hostility and conspiracy against the Arab nation through alliances with the United States and establishing relations with Israel without the prevailing Arab currents applying this rule to itself.
Thus the Kurd who claims his national rights and recognition of his identity turns into a counter-racist who must be fought, if not killed. Perhaps, depending on this ideology, tyranny was established, thoughts became limited to ideological slogans and cultural vocabularies were dictated to fanaticism. Proceeding from all above, any Kurdish demand to re-establish the former Iraqi state and the Syrian state today was confronted with iron and fire, instead of being a review of reason, thought and ideology and a call to abandon tyranny and confiscating the rights of non-Arab peoples and minorities, until the modern Arab state reflected tyranny, oppression, and contrast with the original components who formed the identity of the state.
In turn, there is a rooted blame by the Arabs towards the Kurds in the form of questions and visions in the political mind, and it often stems from priorities and concerns related to ideology on one hand, and the Kurdish cause as a whole on the other hand. The Arab elites’ minds are preoccupied with a question: why is the Kurdish cause strong in Iraq and Syria in a way it is not in Iran and Turkey, knowing that the number of Kurds in Turkey exceeds the number in these countries combined, and their number in Iran is greater than their number in Iraq? Besides, some Arab intellectuals, especially from the national mainstream, often view any Kurdish demand regarding the right to self-determination with great fear, as they often place this right for the Kurds in the context of the conspiracy against the Arab nation, and even go as far as describing such a demand to as a demand to establish Israel again. Even though such description lacks logic and accuracy, at least Kurds are Muslims and have lived on their historical land for a long time, unlike the Israelis, most of whom were brought from various countries of the world to settle on Palestinian land, while Kurdistan is a geographical term and a centuries-old truth.
Perhaps there are legitimate questions on the level of thought and politics, but answering them requires thinking beyond ready-made judgments in order for the political approach to the cause to be realistic and rational to serve common interests. It is strange enough that despite all the developments and present facts, thinking about such crucial issues remained captive in the closed historical box of the mind.
The vision of Islamic currents may not be much different from that of the Arab nationalist parties in this field. Political Islamic currents often built their vision towards national and religious minorities based on unity without recognizing the Kurdish national autonomy.
Rather, Arab Islamic currents start from political ideological alliances with political systems that supported the war against the Kurds under various pretexts at a time when these currents do not hesitate to raise slogans demanding the removal of injustice from Muslim minorities in different parts of the world, such as the Rohingya in Myanmar. Meanwhile the rights of the descendants of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, who conquered the Temple in Jerusalem, may be ignored.
Perhaps the stances of Muslim Brotherhood groups in this regard are the best evidence for this, as it stems from the determinants of Turkish politics that were based on the denial of true Kurdish identity, and beyond that the ideologies of terrorist organizations affiliated with political Islam such as ISIS and al-Nusra were based on the legitimacy of killing Kurds as non-Muslims.
Although the stances of some left-wing and Arab socialist forces were theoretically more advanced than nationalist and political Islam stances on the Kurdish issue, the attitudes of these powers remained within the framework of the intellectual and cultural elites’ vision without turning into a concrete reality that can be built upon politically in building a practical and scientific approach to the Kurdish issue.
What is remarkable about the attitudes of these forces is that during the past decades, and specifically during the Soviet era, they supported the right to self-determination for various peoples of the world, from Latin America to Africa and the Far East, but in the Kurdish case it was approached in a limited way. Perhaps this made their theoretically advanced attitudes inefficient and unable to be built upon, as it quickly faded under the impact of current developments.
In fact, because of these outdated perspectives, it can be said that the reality of the Arab-Kurdish relationship suffers from an intellectual and political imbalance related to visions, attitudes, concepts, and practices before it relates to the absence of legal and constitutional frameworks for regulating this relationship and rights at every turn or event in order to establish the future.
Perhaps reaching a positive relationship in terms of history, geography, and common and future interests requires intellectual, political, and cultural review, and such a review must be an entry point for breaking the ideologies that have shaped the thought and developed it into canned slogans. One would hope that this review establishes a new understanding of the value of historical, geographical, and cultural facts, and endeavors to get rid of those ready-made visions and theories that have always looked at national and religious minorities from a place of suspicion, doubt, and conspiracy.
It is proven that the Kurds are an ancient people who have unity of land, language, customs, culture, and will, as well as the experience of political and military struggle, national awareness, and aspiration to freedom and the future, all of which are important for Arabs to understand in order to build a historical relationship with the Kurds. This relationship would serve the two peoples on the basis of cooperation and mutual respect in the form of victory for one will to look to the issues of the region, and perhaps all of the above require an open and honest dialogue away from theories and preconceptions.
The question here relates to common destiny in the form of mutual recognition of rights, identity, and the creation of equal relations based on equality and justice. However, without that thought, they remain prisoners of a closed box.