The Largest Nation without a Country
There is a people in the Middle East living in four different countries, their numbers are only estimated as the countries where they live might not want to acknowledge the actual number of the population as they don’t want them to be empowered just because of their vast numbers. As many as forty million people try to survive day by day and not just to provide for their families but keeping their heritage alive against all odds. They have their own language, their own traditions, customs, and history of over three thousand years. Despite all this, their villages are destroyed, the people living their displaced. Even if they have their villages in the mountains, they might not have health care or schools available to them.
A few decades ago we used to hear about them in the media. Of course as they picks up stories, they drop them when new ones come along and we would never hear anything about this large group of people ever again. So what is this ethnic group of forty million people that has no country of its own?
They are the Kurds. The Kurdish people, who know exactly where their country’s boarders would be, Kurdistan exists because there live their people, there they speak Kurdish, follow their customs, and their culture. They eat Kurdish food, they even have their own calendar! They know their own history even if it has never been taught in schools!
An estimated 3,000 Kurdish villages in Southeast Anatolia were virtually wiped from the map, representing the displacement of more than 378,000 people. During the 1990s, the Turkish military reportedly deployed the US manufactured helicopters Sikorsky and Cobra to drive the Kurdish population out of their villages. It did not stop until recently if it stopped at all.
Depending on the country they live in, they fight for their own identity and human rights the way they know how and the way they can. When they lose their villages, their families, their human rights, they go and arm themselves and fight back. This is why they are labelled terrorists. Who was the one terrorized the other first? The one that destroyed the villages and houses, killed people and traumatized thousands or tens of thousands of people; or the ones who will not take it?
Now they lay their arms and conform. Fighting did not work and it is a question if non-violence will bring them respect and all that they deserve.
This is the 21st century and I was really hoping it would be the century of respect, human rights and the idea of let live. I still believe what we are experiencing now with all the dictators in the world is just a hiccup and humanity will finally grow up and find within itself to look after the whole of the species, all humans with respect for who they are and what they desire.
This is what borders of countries should reflect. Giving voice to the people there, how they want to shape their own lives and how they want to socialize. There is such a thing as the character of a nation or ethnic group!
Kurds also respect their women when it is so rare in a Muslim environment. despite of the fact that many of them took up Islam as that is the prevailing religion of the region, they integrated and live by their own cultural beliefs. They are proud, unrelenting people.
As any ethnic group in the world, they need to be respected, their language and culture should be taught in schools. They should have their own representatives to give voice to the mass of people in the countries they live in and governments they are governed by.
Without schools the language cannot grow. People will lose it because they are forced to speak the official languages. The Kurdish language however is one of the few in the world that is written and not just spoken! It deserves to be preserved and it deserves to be elevated to be the language of forty million people, that is more than the population of many countries in the world!
There are 196 officially recognized countries in the world which even includes the Vatican, with a population of less than a thousand and with no reproduction and natural growth of the population! I am not speaking against the Vatican or Lichtenstein or Switzerland or any other recognized countries. What I mean is that we owe some mono-ethnic groups the privilege of their own governance, and greater autonomy. It might be unrealistic to ask for their own country, as they are up against four powerful autocratic states, but their land could be easily accessible so all their people, regardless of the official countries they live in, they could coordinate their education, their language, and their culture.
Without autonomy and free access they lose their integrity. There are already Turkish, Iraqi, Syrian or Iranian Kurds. They use different writing systems and their official languages are different. Without coordinated schooling, their own entertainment and arts, they become fragmented, they lose their mono-ethnic character.
Please, give them their basic human rights, so they would not have to live in fear, and on the edge when they want to preserve their identity! In the long run nobody will lose and everybody will gain by giving these people the Human Rights others enjoy without even thinking about it! (There are some people who will lose, the autocrats and dictators, but then that’s good riddance!)
