Kurds searching for home of their own

March 21, 1996

The world's 25 million Kurds, scattered across the globe, are marking their New Year -- Noo-Rooz. It's a festival of spring as much as it is a celebration of their national identity.


The history of the Kurds has been one of broken promises, failed deals, repression by the governments of the region, and internal feuding.The Kurds are a non-Arab, Sunni Muslim people who speak a language related to Persian and live in a mountainous area the size of France straddling the borders of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Armenia and Syria.Divided by their language, by their leaders and by other nations' borders, the Kurds rarely come together for any reason.



Their common thread is that they are mostly poor and largely powerless. They are the largest ethnic group in the world without its own country. In its fight for a homeland, the Turkish-based Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) has killed thousands of people and taken its battle to Western Europe, where many Kurds have emigrated. Turkey has the largest Kurd population: between 10 million and 15 million.Thousands of Kurds have died, as well, in Turkish clampdowns both in Turkey and, a year ago, across the border in a Turkish military incursion into Iraq.

The PKK has vowed not to give up.

"We will fight to the very end, to the last of our people, to achieve victory," said PKK representative Dogar Cudi. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the subsequent victory by allied forces over the Iraqi army in February 1991 sparked a rebellion against Baghdad by the Kurds as well as other Iraqi dissidents.

 Iraqi Kurds took control of about one-fifth of the country in just weeks. But the win was short-lived. The Iraqi army quickly crushed the Kurds. About 800,000 Kurds fled to Turkey and about one million moved across the border to Iran. Pushed by public concern and graphic images of the refugees' suffering,Western leaders agreed to help.

Using bases in Turkey, the United States, Britain and France responded by imposing a no-fly zone over northern Iraq. In the meanwhile, the two major Iraqi Kurdish factions have been fighting for autonomy within Iraq, rather than independence from it. But they have also been fighting each other since late 1994.