The Kurds Ascending
Michael M. Gunter
Palgrave & Macmillan
For the first time in their modern history, the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey are cautiously ascending. In northern Iraq the two U.S. wars against Saddam Hussein have helped to create a Kurdistan Regional Government (K RCI). The KRG has become an island of democratic stability, peace, and burgeoning economic progress, as well as an autonomous part of a projected federal, democratic, post-Saddam-Hussein Iraq. If such an Iraq proves impossible to construct, as it well may, the KRC! is positioned to become independent. Either way, the evolution of a solution to the Kurdish problem in Iraq is clear. Furthermore, Turkey’s EU candidacy has had the fortuitous side effect of granting that country’s ethnic Kurds their full democratic rights that have hitherto been denied. Although this evolving solution to the Kurdish problem in Iraq and Turkey remains cautiously fragile and would not apply to the Kurds in Iran and Syria because < they have not experienced the recent developments their co-nationals in Iraq and Turkey have, -it does represent a strikingly positive future that until recently seemed bleak.
Michael M. Gunter is a Professor of Political Science at Tennessee Technological University. £ I le is the author of seven critically praised scholarly books on the Kurdish question, including ^ Historical Dictionary of the Kurds.
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