16 - 22 October 2017-min

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16 - 22 October, 2017
W
A
Editorial
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By David Kilgour
Author & Lawyer
ith a scattered population of 28-35
million, indigenous Kurds are one of
the largest ethno-cultural communities in
the Middle East. They have long sought to
create an independent national homeland
as reluctant residents of adjacent regions of
Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
Elsewhere, the world was transforming
itself over more than a century from
approximately 53 independent countries in
1900 to about 193 today. In the Middle East
alone, Arabs today have 22 states; Turks,
Iranians and Jews each have one.
Kurds have aspired to the creation of
“Kurdistan” since the early 1900s. With
the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World
War One, Western allies provided for a
Kurdish state in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres.
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By Mark Parkinson
@Mark_Parkinson
markp.india@gmail.com
markparkinson.wordpress.com
s Seth Godin points out in the blog post
link below – change is never going
to come from those who signed up for the
status quo, for certainty, for an environment
within which getting everything right is the
expected norm.
Seth Godin Blog Post – In Search of
Familiarity
A Case For Kurdistan
Unfortunately, when the boundaries of
modern Turkey were established three
years later, the promised Kurdish state had
vanished. All attempts since to found one
have been crushed.
The oppression patterns in Turkey and Iraq
are illustrative of the continuing obstacles to
Kurdish independence in all five nations and
led to the old saying, “Kurds have no friends
but the mountains”. They comprise 15-20%
of the Turkish population, but for generations
Kurdish names and costumes were banned,
the use of their language was restricted, and
they were insultingly termed “Mountain
Turks”. In 1978, Abdullah Acalan launched
the PKK seeking an independent state within
Photo Credit : Shutterstock
Turkey; the violence which began six years
later saw more than 40,000 persons killed
and hundreds of thousands displaced.
In the 1990s, the PKK reduced its demand to
greater cultural and political autonomy and
a ceasefire resulted from 2012 until 2015.
Hundreds have since died from Turkish
military attacks on PKK camps in northern
Iraq.
Turkish President Recep Erdogan, seeking a
Sunni-dominated Syria, struck at the Syrian
Kurds’ Democratic Union Party (PYD). By
disrupting logistics between the PKK in Iraq
and the PYD in northern Syria, he weakened
the most effective ground force fighting
ISIS. Assisted by the U.S.-led coalition’s
airstrikes, the Kurdish peshmerga soldiers
nonetheless retook almost all Kurdish
territory and protected not only Iraq’s
infrastructure but also their own population
and 1.6 million refugees seeking sanctuary
with them. Recently, Erdogan is threatening
military intervention, and asserts that
blocking Kurdish independence is “a matter
of survival” for Turkey.
In Iraq, Kurds experienced their worst
treatment during the decades of Baathist
rule, when Saddam Hussein ethnically
cleansed tens of thousands of them in the
1970s. In the closing days of the Iran-Iraq
War, his regime used poison gas to murder
at least 3,200 Kurdish civilians, summarily
executed men and boys, and sent entire
villages to concentration camps.
President George H.W. Bush’s no-fly
zone in 1991 provided Iraqi Kurds some
protection against Saddam and a measure of
autonomy. They used the opening to develop
institutions of self-government that stand
out as beacons in the region today. Most
Kurds are Sunni Muslims, though there
are also Christians and Jews among them.
They have deep historical ties to their land;
culture sets them apart from neighbors. They
are a functioning and largely-corruption free
democracy.
The successes of their peshmerga soldiers in
confronting ISIS in Iraq and Syria, including
heroic efforts to protect Yazidis facing
genocide from ISIS, has enlarged both
Kurdish determination and international
Recruit the Restless
gone so many years since Dr Ken Robinson
spoke up in the first TED conference about
what needed to change in education if we
were to avoid short changing a generation of
youngsters in their preparation for a vastly
different world, yet we have really seen so
very little change.
In fact, when we see the obsessive zeal
applied to the gathering and endless tweaking
of data, we have to suspect that people
have inadvertently set about entrenching
and solidifying the existing ways of doing
things.
NEW DELHI TIMES
respect for them. They remain a key ally of
the US-led coalition fighting ISIS; many lost
their lives seeking to end the ISIS nightmare.
On July 1, Kurdish president Masoud
Barzani announced his intention to call
a referendum on independence in part
because Iraq has already been “effectively
partitioned”. The referendum was held on
September 25 with a turnout of about 78 per
cent among five million eligible voters and
about 93 percent of the votes cast in favor of
independence.
The Kurdistan Regional Government
characterized it as binding, although it later
said the result would only trigger the start
of state building and negotiations with Iraq.
The Kurdish people have more than earned
their right to independence and the European
empires, which drew the Middle East
boundaries mostly to suit their own interests,
are now mercifully gone.
It is long overdue for the United States,
Canada, and other democratic governments
to stand with the Kurds instead of abandoning
them again. American allies in the region,
Europe and Asia are watching carefully.
Kurdistan, moreover, would help all members
of the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS to
push back against Russia and perhaps even
to be an effective regional counter to Iran’s
proposed Shiite crescent from Sanaa to
Beirut.
David Kilgour, a lawyer by profession,
served in Canada’s House of Commons for
almost 27 years. In Jean Chretien’s Cabinet,
he was secretary of state (Africa and Latin
America) and secretary of state (Asia-
Pacific). He is the author of several books
and co-author with David Matas of “Bloody
Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for
Their Organs.”
In fact, worse, it’s not enough to just recruit
good people who believe that they are ‘safe
hands’ to educate children.
Not only will these people not initiate
change, they will resist it by every means at
their disposal.
They’ll demand data and evidence in
bucketloads. And, even when you produce
evidence they’ll have to refute it, doubt it
and ultimately fall back on, “my way has
served well in the past.”
This is almost certainly the reason why we’ve
Too many have convinced themselves that
the old way is perfect, provided we can just
measure more, gather more data and carry
out more assessment.
Instead of humanising an education of
curiosity, creativity and engagement with thew
world around, we’ve sought incremental
improvements in the existing systems by
focusing on turning children in to so many
data points to be graphed and mapped
through to academic success.
The curious, the challengers, the restless –
they do show their faces in the education
world, but too often in programmes like
Teach for America, Teach for India, Teach
for Malaysia. They stay for a couple of
years, but too often see that they’re never
really going to change the system, so treat
Photo Credit : Shutterstock
it as an interesting experience before they
head off to other fields where change is more
accepted. We have to figure out how to get more
restless people in to our profession, and then keep
them here long enough to make a difference.
www.NewDelhiTimes.com