The Kurdish war

CHAPTER I

When I arrived at the Emir's diminutive flat near the Metro Dupleix I found that his wife was if and in bed. She looked very oriental, I thought, and probably very Kurdish too, as she lay back among her pillows in the bed alcove, apologizing for not being able to cook lunch and thanking me for the pink azalea in a pot that I had brought. Afterwards I recalled it as a fine-boned, delicately featured face; but I must have been misled by the shadows of the alcove, for when I met her and her husband again nearly a year later I saw that it was a robust and cheerfully handsome face. Madame Bedir Khan, I discovered, is Polish; and the Emir, who teaches at the Ecole des Langues Vivantes, usually prefers to be known as doctor. This is not to demonstrate a type of disenchantment or that I went to Kurdistan with romantic ideas and came back with plain ones: merely that the Kurds are never quite what they seem, even the adopted ones like Madame Bedir Khan. The Kurdish war is a bit like that, too. The Arabs, Turks and Persians see it as an almost unbroken series of bloodthirsty, pillaging forays by wild tribesmen, but the Kurds (and on the whole I think they are right) look on it as a long national struggle which began in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

The Emir (the title suits him better than plain doctor) Bedir Khan's great-grandfather, the Prince of Bhotan, was the first Kurdish national leader of any consequence; and apart from being somewhat blood-boltered by the massacre of 10,000 Assyrian Christians, he emerged with honour from his defeat by the Turks in r 84.77. He and his family went into exile in the following year, the Year of Revolutions, and if there was no immediate sign that what was happening elsewhere made any impact on them, the family was later to play an important part in promoting and keeping alive the idea of Kurdish nationalism. They published a newspaper, Kurdistan, which they …