JANROJ YILMAZ KELES 10 December 2014, Opendemocracy.net
With
Kurds in Iraq and Syria under attack from the Islamic State, many young Kurds in
Europe have been joining resistance forces—a trend occluded by the media focus
on European-born jihadists.
A
Kurdish protest against IS in London. Flickr / Alan Denney. Some rights
reserved.
Kurds, of whom there are estimated to be
30-35m, comprise the largest ethnic community in the Middle East after Turks,
Arabs and Persians—and the largest in the world without a state. Most live in
the disputed territory of Kurdistan. which covers east and south-eastern
Turkey, northern Iraq, west Iran and northern Syria. Various revolts in pursuit
of an independent Kurdistan or autonomy within these national borders have
wrought no significant political or structural changes, except in Iraq, where
Kurds have had a de facto state since 1991.
The Kurdish question has remained largely
hidden from the international community due to the coercive policies of the
host states—their nadir the massacre in Halabja, where 5,000 people were killed
by the Iraqi regime in 1988.The most significant change followed the first Gulf
war in 1991, when a Kurdish uprising in Iraq, brutally suppressed, forced the
international community to establish a safe haven and no-fly zone in the
Kurdish region.
As a result of the long war between the
Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Turkish state, over 3m people were
displaced by the military in the 90s. Many fled to Turkish cities or Western
countries. The PKK is involved in talks with the AKP government to find a
peaceful settlement to the Kurdish question in Turkey. Since the Syrian crisis,
Kurds in Rojava (western Kurdistan / northern Syria) have become a global
political concern but their counterparts in Iran are yet to be so regarded.
The Kurdish diaspora, product of war,
displacement and migration, has made the question of Kurdistan a transnational
political subject. Though worldwide, this diaspora is concentrated in Europe.
Persecution
The movement of Kurds to the EU differs from
those who migrated to fill labour shortages or following enlargement. Some,
mainly from eastern Turkey, did travel as Gastarbeiter but
most fled from discrimination, persecution, war and hardship in the wider
contested territory of Kurdistan.
The flow to Europe began in the early 60s and
increased in the 70s and 80s, as the movement for autonomy in Iraq faced
repression and Kurds in Iran took refuge from the oppressive policies of the
Shah and his Islamist successor. But most Kurds who have arrived in the EU
since the 80s have escaped from the battleground between the Turkish state and
the PKK.
The statelessness of Kurds has affected their
lives in settlement countries, where they have been registered according to
titular nationality—rendering them invisible in official data. The estimated
number of European Kurds is 1.5m or fewer, most (around one million) living in
Germany. They include more than 200,000 Yazidis (or Ezidis), the target of
states and fundamentalist groups in the Middle East—most recently of Islamic
State (IS) in the Mount Sinjar area of Iraq—due to their religious and, to an
extent, their ethnic background.
A Kurdish ‘imagined community’ has been
constructed in Europe, and elsewhere, via homeland-oriented organisations as
well as transnational communications and transport technologies. This poses a
considerable challenge to the nationalistic hegemony of the implicated states.
The engagement of the diaspora with homeland politics has played a crucial role
in post-conflict reconstruction in Iraq, in organising petitions, fundraising,
holding demonstrations, lobbying the settlement-country government and
connecting the cause and homeland organisations to international political
structures. Indeed, the diaspora in Europe and the US has been able to speak on
behalf of the subordinated Kurdish population in homelands where expression of ethnic
identity, language and political position is denied.
The diaspora, however, has neither an ascribed
ethnic identity nor a single political aim, due to contemporary Kurdish
fragmentation. It should not be considered a bounded group with a fixed customary
practice but rather hybrid and changeable. While some Kurds have taken to
European streets to protest against mistreatment at home, others have joined
the Kurdish forces to fight against these states and most recently against IS
attacks on Sinjar and Kobane.
If the media have only recently noticed
that some young people are heading to Kurdistan to fight against IS, joining the Kurdish
guerrilla groups has in fact been a trend since 1985. In particular, as the war
between the PKK and the Turkish state intensified, the conflict spread to
Europe, especially Germany, through Turkish and Kurdish organisations,
political actors and media. The PKK has become a powerful Kurdish party
straddling multiple nation-states, mobilising refugees and second-generation
Kurds for homeland politics. Latterly, other conflicts in different parts of
Kurdistan have further politicised the diaspora community and given rise to
deterritorialised solidarity among Kurds around the world.
While the Kurdish authorities in south Kurdistan
/ Iraq and Rojava / Syrian Kurdistan say they need weapons rather than
‘fighters’, a few hundred young people have recently joined Kurdish forces, in
particular the peshmerga in south Kurdistan. Their parents
stem from different parts of Kurdistan and various socio-economic backgrounds.
Some are university students from middle-class families. An equally large group
came to Europe as youngsters but later decided to go back to join Kurdish
forces—they have usually studied to high-school level. Not only young people
are joining the movement, however: the German newspaper Bild reported
that more than 50 Yazidi/Ezidi men had travelled to Sinjar to fight IS and
provide humanitarian aid and Die Welt said a ‘German Ezidi commander’ had been killed in Iraq.
Complex
The reasons why young people give up life in
Europe and join Kurdish forces—including the peshmerga, the PKK and
the People's Protection Units / Women's Protection Units (YPG-YPJ) in
Rojava—are complex. First, stateless diasporic communities (Kurds, Tamils,
Palestinians, Kashmiris and so on), being different from labour migrants,
experience a sense of loss, feelings of displacement, a strong ethnic identity
and a solidarity with people in the homeland. Allied to the ‘myth of return’
common among diaspora, these create a ‘diasporic consciousness’, in that their background, expulsion and sense of
belonging are central to who they are and how they behave.
A crucial element of the stateless diaspora is
the dream of a real or imaginary homeland. This is a key reason why many
Kurdish young people in Europe have decided to join the Kurdish forces in the
region. In comparison with previous generations, global communications—in
particular, Kurdish satellite TVs and the internet—have compressed time and
space, connecting Kurds in different political and geographical arenas. In
these spaces they can not only meet for the first time and create a sense of
belonging, sharing experiences and exchanging ideas, but can also follow the
mistreatment of Kurds by the Turkish, Iranian and Syrian regimes, as well as
non-state groups such as IS or al-Nusra. Transmitted images of torture, lethal
attacks against Kurds and the desperation of people in the region connect the
movers with the stayers and reduce the emotional, political and cultural
distance.
In this sense, the Kurdish diaspora remains
loyal to a homeland it no longer inhabits. Members feel a moral obligation to
engage in solidarity with co-ethnics ‘suffering from oppression’ and
a sense of guilt that they have abandoned their homeland for the West.
These social norms play an important role in altruistically inspired
activities, whether becoming involved in homeland politics in the settlement
country or joining armed forces in the homeland.
Secondly, after almost a century of persecution
and war, Kurdish political movements in Turkey, Iraq and Syria have become
genuine actors working towards a state (in Iraq) or democratic autonomy (in
Syria and Turkey). Engaged European Kurds believe that it is time to ‘push
ahead’ and realise their dream. Against this background, for those well
connected through social media and Kurdish satellite TV stations, reports of IS
atrocities have triggered massive reactions—in particular in Germany where most European
Kurds live, including 200,000 Ezidis.
Some see the IS attacks as part of a
co-ordinated plan by regional countries to ‘destroy Kurdish political gains’
and believe that the international community does not care enough about the
suffering of Kurdish people. And there are enough reasons for this distrust:
until the US-led airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, many young members of the diaspora
believed strongly that the UN, the US and the EU would again let down the
Kurds. The old saying that the Kurds have ‘no friends but the mountains’ was
repeated by many in online and offline conversations. Hence the case for direct
action by going to the region to fight IS.
Many recalled how the then US secretary of
state, Henry Kissinger, had supported the Kurds in Iraq in 1975 but had then
withdrawn American support after mediating between Iran and Iraq, signing the
Algiers agreement to secure US interests in the region. As for today, the
Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been accused of anti-Kurdish politics—particularly with his claim that the
IS-besieged Kurdish city of Kobane in Rojava/Syria was “about to fall”.
Thirdly, most European Kurds who join the
Kurdish forces have been directly affected by events in Kurdistan, having lost
family members in previous conflicts. Now these young people go to the Kurdish
region, as they see it, to protect relatives still living there.
Indeed some have themselves experienced state
violence in Turkey, Iraq, Syria or Iran. A significant segment of the Kurdish
diaspora in Europe has been traumatised by torture and other severe
human-rights abuses in the homeland. And the images of killing, kidnapping and
displacement of Ezidis in Sinjar and Kurds in Rojava, in particular in the
besieged city of Kobane, bring back memories of displacement and maltreatment.
The sense of powerlessness and the lack of immediate action by the
international community over the kidnapping of Kurdish women and children, and
their selling as sex slaves, has added to diaspora frustration.
Finally, the search for a grand narrative also
drives young people on a long and dangerous journey. A young Kurd from Berlin
explained the motivation: “Because the Kurdish cause is a burning political
issue and this issue has an impact on our identity. It creates a collective and
solidaristic identity amongst Kurds. It doesn’t matter where you live. If I say
Kurdish identity I am talking about a politicised Kurdish identity that stands
up for our rights. I am interested in a new Kurdish identity, not the past …
Because I see a society which is rapidly forming here and in Kurdistan.” For
such second-generation Kurds, identity is a political project to defend Kurds
from oppression and build a new Kurdish society—not a search to recover lost
traditions.
Advice
While the UN Security Council has passed a
resolution restricting the movement of foreign fighters intent on joining IS,
and many countries have discussed the potential threat associated with their
return, some EU countries have said they would not conduct legal proceedings
against European Kurds fighting
against IS “unless they committed war crimes” and “used banned weapons”.
This is because they are not considered a threat to society or the political
system in their settlement countries. The UK has, though, advised its
ethnically Kurdish citizens not to get involved in fighting in the region and
to “stay out of the conflict”.
Evidently, the European Kurdish fighters are
perceived differently from those who join IS or al-Nusra, possibly
because the Kurdish young people are fighting for their ‘ethnic/national
rights’ in a delimited space—Kurdistan—rather than seeking to export, impose
and disseminate their ideology through violence to other societies in Europe.
And the European Kurds in the region are integrated in organisations which work
closely with the international community, including states and/or NGOs, and
have declared they will comply with international conventions—unlike the
foreign-born jihadists, “mediaeval in character”, who are notorious for beheading, rape and the
mass killing of members of other ethnic and religious communities.
About the author
Dr Janroj Yilmaz Keles is a research fellow at Middlesex University,
with interests in migration, globalisation, the labour market, stateless
diaspora, transnational political activism, ethnicity, representation, media,
nationalism and ethno-nationalist conflict. His book Media, Diaspora
and Conflict: Nationalism and Identity amongst Turkish and Kurdish Migrants in
Europe is forthcoming.
Link to his articles at Opendemocracy
1.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/janroj-yilmaz-keles/european-kurds-rallying-to-fight-is
