The Kurdish Question
“A thousand friends are too few, one enemy is many”
(Kurdish Proverb)
Lying in the heart of the Near and Middle East Kurdistan constitutes an ethnically homogenous territory of half a million square kilometres, inhabited by a compact mass of twelve million people. That is to say, the Kurds represent more than a quarter of the population of the three states in which they nearly all live.
The Kurdish question is essentially the struggle waged by the Kurdish people, forever a century, to achieve its liberation.
The Kurdish question is the instinctive natural spirit of this people, which wishes to remain Kurdish, to speak its language freely, and to preserve its national heritage.
It wishes to have its own schools, its own publications and a healthy participation in the progress of humanity.
These rights cannot be denied to any people, no more to the Kurds than any other.
The Kurdish question consists of trying to convince those states which have divided Kurdistan between them, to act towards the Kurds in a manner consistent with the moral and legal prinziples universally recognised, and written into the United Nations Charter, and into the Charter of Human Rights, - Charters that these states have signed of their own free will.
Finally, on the international level, the Kurdish question is the right of the Kurdish people to be treated with justice, to have its dignity respected, and not to be sacrificed to this or that economic, political or strategic interest.
First of all, it is necessary to correct the somewhat arbitrary ideas about the Kurdish people that exist in many countries - in so far they have any ideas on this subject at all.
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The Kurdish Question
Emir Kamuran Bedir-Khan.
1960
