Kurds

ETHNONYMS: Self-designation: Kurd, Kurmandz

Orientation

Identification, Location, and Demography. According to Statistical data for 1989, the total population of Kurds in the USSR was 152,717. Of these, 56,127 were in Armenia; 33,331 in Georgia; 25,425 in Kazakhstan; 12,226 in Azerbaijan; 14,262 in Kirgizia; 4,387 in Turkmenia; 1,839 in Uzbekistan; and 56 in Tajikistan. The areas of dense settlement are in Transcaucasia (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia). According to the 1979 census, the Kurds of Azerbaijan are not included among the major (more numerous) nationalities of the Azerbaijan Republic, because of natural and artificial assimilation. In Kazakhstan and Central Asia live the descendants of Kurds from the former Kurdistan District. The population figures are somewhat low, since in Kazakhstan many Kurdish inhabitants are registered as Turks or Azerbaijanis. Kurds live scattered in Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldova. At the present time a significant part of the Kurdish population has left Central Asia, Transcaucasia, and Kazakhstan for the Krasnodar region. Kurds staunchly retain a national self-consciousness. The majority of Kurds are Muslims—mostly Sunnis, some Shiites. A number of Kurds (called "Yezidis") are adherents of the syncretistic religion known as Yezidism. The religious distinctions have tended to separate the communities into separate Yezidi and Muslim settlements.

Linguistic Affiliation. Soviet Kurds speak the northern dialect (Kurmandz) of the Kurdish language, which belongs (along with Talysh and some other languages) to the Northwestern Subgroup of the Iranian Group of the Indo-European Family.

History and Cultural Relations

The appearance of Kurdish kin-tribal confederations in Transcaucasia dates from the tenth century, and in the eleventh century the famous Kurdish dynasty of the Seddadis ruled over an enormous territory from the city of Elisavetpol (modern Kirovabad in Azerbaijan) to the city of Ani (in modern Turkey). Toward the end of the nineteenth century the Kurdish population in Transcaucasia was concentrated in the Aleksandropol, Novobayazet, Surmalin, Sharuro-Daralagez, and Erevan districts of Erevan Province (Armenia); the Aresh, Jebrail, Javanshir, and Zangezur districts of Elisavetpol Province (Azerbaijan); and the Akhalkalaki, Akhaltsikhe, and Borchalin districts of Tiflis Province (Georgia). Individual clans appeared in Transcaucasia after the Russo-Persian wars of 1804-1813 and 1826-1828. These were either the inhabitants of those villages that, in accordance with the conditions of the Gyulistan and Turkmanchay agreements, came under Russian authority, or they were nomadic Kurds in Transcaucasian territory. At the beginning of the nineteenth century several Kurdish tribes presented the Russian authorities in Caucasia with a request to allow them to settle in Russia and accept Russian citizenship.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, as a result of the genocide of the Yezidi Kurds and the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, as well as the Kurds' search for better pasturage for their cattle, the Yezidi Kurds fled with the Armenians to Armenia and the Muslim Kurds migrated to Azerbaijan, where the majority population professed Islam. Thus the Kurdish population in Transcaucasia split along confessional lines. Subsequently, in the 1920s, many Kurds left Azerbaijan for Armenia (where some villages of Muslim Kurds were created in the Basargechar, Dilizhan, and other regions); at the same time some went from Armenia into Georgia. In Georgia the Yezidi Kurds are mostly an urban population, living in Tbilisi, where they came in search of work. The Muslim Kurdish population settled primarily in Azerbaijan, in the Kelbajar, Lachin, Kubatlin, and Zangelan regions. In the 1920s these regions, with their center in the city of Lachin, became the Kurdistan District of Soviet Azerbaijan. At the beginning of the 1930s the Kurdistan District was transformed into the Kurdish National Autonomous Region, but in connection with the new administrative division of Azerbaijan the region was abolished. In 1937 there was a forced deportation of the Kurdish population from Azerbaijan and Armenia and, in 1944, from Georgia.

Language and Literacy

In the past most of the Kurds of Transcaucasia were illiterate. In the Russian Empire the Kurds had no national schools. In 1921, according to the first agricultural census, 1 out of every 100 adult Kurds was literate (1.44 percent of male Kurds in the Kurdistan District and a mere 0.04 percent of female Kurds). From the 1920s various measures for popular education among the Kurds were implemented. The most important problem was the creation of a written language, textbooks, grammars, and dictionaries in the Kurdish language, despite the fact that the Kurdish language was not studied until comparatively late in Europe (the first Kurdish grammar was published in 1787). In 1921 a Kurdish alphabet was devised in Armenia on the basis of the Armenian alphabet. A Kurdish alphabet using Latin letters was created in Armenia in 1929. In 1944, also in Armenia, a Kurdish alphabet using Cyrillic characters (with the addition of seven signs for the rendering of specific phonemes) was promulgated, although this led to some isolation of the Soviet Kurdish readership. (All Kurdish literature abroad is published in the Latin and Arabic alphabets.) A major role in the creation of the Kurdish alphabet, textbooks, grammars, dictionaries, and artistic literature was played by Kurdish pedagogues, writers, and scholars (Arab Shamilov, Amine Avdal, Ajie Jindi, Jasme Jalil, Museib Akhundov, Bakhchoe Slo, K. K. Kurdoev, Ch. Kh. Bakaev, and many others).

Government programs led to the reduction of illiteracy among adults. In the 1922-1923 school year in Armenia there were five Kurdish elementary schools with more than 260 pupils. At the end of the 1930s Kurdish schools were reorganized, and the Kurds were allowed the option of studying their native language. In 1925 more than fifty schools were opened for the Kurds of Armenia and Azerbaijan (and in Tbilisi an evening school), at which both men and women studied. Kurdish teacjers received training in technical schools and institutions of higher education. A Kurdish technical school was opened in Armenia in 1928, another in Azerbaijan in 1933. A group of young Kurds studied at the workers' high school of the Leningrad Institute of Oriental Languages under the guidance of academician I. A. Orbeli. At the present time the Kurds generally have a command their native language, but their knowledge of other languages depends on the language of the surrounding people, the language in which they have been educated, and other factors; they may be familiar with Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Russian, or other languages. According to statistical data for 1989, out of the general population of 152,717 Kurds, 123,006 considered Kurdish their native language, 6,817 Russian, and 2,289 another language; 43,889 were fluent in Russian and 61,683 in other languages.

Settlements

Their difficult historical fortunes notwithstanding, the Kurds of the former Soviet Union have staunchly preserved their traditional customs, a material and intellectual culture having common roots with that of the Kurds of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. This is manifested in economic and cultural forms, the typology of settlements and habitations, national costume, carpet making, cuisine, the observance of religious rituals, and folklore.

Among the Kurds of Armenia, patronymic and kin-tribal settlements existed up to the 1930s and 1940s, which attests to the long retention of traditional family structures. The majority of Azerbaijani Kurds seem not to have retained a memory of their clan and tribal backgrounds; this is reflected in the settlement patterns of Kurdish villages in Azerbaijan. A village was usually founded near a spring. Public buildings did not exist in the villages. Some Muslim villages had a religious school (mekteb ); among the Yezidis, the children of well-off parents studied at the homes of the sheikhs. Kurdish villages had no mosques for Muslim Kurds or prayer houses for Yezidi Kurds. In Azerbaijan the Kurds prayed in the Azerbaijani mosques; in Armenia, where Yezidi Kurds predominated, the religious functions of the village were celebrated in the house of the sheikh. The villages had no markets or market squares; Kurds went to Armenian or Azerbaijani villages to buy or sell produce and the products of home industry. Kurdish graveyards were located near the village. Kurds in Armenia had patronymic graveyards; those in Azerbaijan had nonpatronymic graveyards alongside Azerbaijano-Kurdish graveyards. In the 1920s to the 1930s the Kurdish village gradually changed. In the republics of Transcaucasia new villages began to be created for those who had adopted a sedentary form of life. The Soviet state rendered material assistance to Kurdish peasants in the construction of new settlements. In the major Kurdish towns, particularly in Armenia, new dwellings, farms, and mills were erected. The new towns had sociocultural and economic centers with village soviets, schools, and reading rooms. The results of this process were especially evident in the Kurdish villages of Armenia in the 1950s to the 1980s.

The change in the external appearance of the Transcaucasian Kurdish villages is connected with a change in the way of life and the dwelling place. Until the beginning of the twentieth century the basic types of habitation were the tent (kon, chadïr, reshmal ) for the nomadic and seminomadic population, and the winter dwelling (mal, khani ), an underground or half-underground mud hut for the seminomadic and sedentary population. The Kurdish homestead was a single, horizontally oriented complex consisting of an underground or half-underground hut, stable, sheepfold, and storeroom (in some parts of Azerbaijan, the oreintation was vertical). The main construction material was unfinished brick, unpolished stone, or sometimes tufa (in Armenia). Houses in the plains had flat roofs, those in the mountains cupola-shaped roofs with an aperture (kolek ) in the ceiling for light and smoke. The ceiling beams rested on wooden columns (stun ). A hearth (tandur ) in the earthen floor was used to heat the home, bake bread, prepare food, and enact ritual ceremonies. The hearth has a sacred place in the life of the Kurds.

Economy

Subsistence and Commercial Activities. The primary occupation of the Kurds of Transcaucasia in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth was the vertical transhumance of livestock. Before departing for the pastures in the spring, the Kurds would form into obas, temporary and voluntary unions of several large families that lasted until their return to winter quarters in late fall. The fundamental objective in the creation of the oba was the assurance of adequate care and maintenance for the cattle. Obas were either of the jol type, in which members contributed equally toward the upkeep of the cattle, or the type in which one of the more prosperous flock owners accepted the sheep of the other members of the oba into his flock. The number of families forming an oba depended on the number of sheep and goats owned by each family. In addition to nomadic cattle rearing there was also cattle rearing in pastures. A number of tribes combined pasturing of livestock with dry-land agriculture (grains, tobacco).

Clothing. Older women still wear the national costume. It consists of a shirt (kras ), baggy pantaloons (khevalkras ), vest (elek ), skirt (navdere, tuman ), apron (salek ), armlets (davzang ), woolen belt (bene peste ), hat (kofi, fino ) or silk head shawl, woolen stockings (gore ), and shoes. Ancient and modern decorations of all types (beads, rings, earrings, bracelets) and gold and silver coins on the kofi headgear are an obligatory component of female dress. In the past, Kurdish women wore nose ornaments (kerefil ) and foot ornaments (kherkhal ). The men's folk costume as a whole has gone out of use, but individual elements were worn until the first half of the twentieth century in Azerbaijan. The traditional national costume of the Kurds of Transcaucasia consisted of a shirt, wide trousers, a vest, a woolen belt, woolen socks, and shoes. A dagger thrust in the belt was formerly regarded as an inseparable element of the masculine costume.

Food. The Kurds have a distinctive national cuisine. From the beginning of spring the women stock up on produce (dairy products, meat, cereal, flour, vegetables) for the fall and winter. Semiprocessed dairy products are frequently used in many dishes, for example the refreshing beverage dau, from which various soups and curds are prepared. Curds can be fashioned into small balls (kyashk ) that are dried under the burning sun. In winter, when the cows' milk yield drops and it is impossible to get dau, Kurds crumble a ball of kyashk, soak it overnight in warm water, and consume the thick liquid the following day. They also make various sorts of cheese (e.g., panire sari and a stringy cheese called panire reshi ) Meat dishes include grilled mutton and Caucasian shashlik. Among the more common cereal dishes are porridges and soups prepared from processed grains (wheat, barley, and rice). Noodles (reshte ) made from flour are prepared for storage.

Industrial Arts. Domestic crafts, particulary those directly associated with the processing of wool, were important in the economy of the Kurds. Kurdish women have long been famous for the manufacture of carpets (with and without nap) and felt and woolen items for clothing and daily life. The carpets are adorned with depictions deriving from folk legends, tales, and religious beliefs—particularly those of the Yezidis. At the end of the nineteenth century Erevan and Elisavetpol provinces, as well as Akhaltsikhe District in Tiflis Province—that is, areas with a large Kurdish population—specialized in the production of woolen handicraft articles. The Kurds were also noted for the production of brass and unglazed ceramic utensils. Jugs with a broad, steady base were used for keeping meat, milk, and butter. The Kurds made bags for the storage of butter and cheese, as well as churns, out of hides with the hair turned outside and specially processed. In the rich forests of the Kelbajar and Lachin districts of Azerbaijan, the peasants manufactured wooden beehives. In some regions of Transcaucasia the men were involved in working stone; carving gravestones in the shape of a sheep, horse, or lion; and making mortars and vessels for water.

Religion and Expressive Culture

Religious Beliefs. Islam spread among the Kurds in the seventh and eighth centuries. Many Muslim rites and beliefs coexisted with pre-Islamic cults associated with lakes, stones, graves, trees, fire, and an ancestor cult. Among the Muslim Kurds reverance toward pirs (holy places) was widespread. Three types of these were distinguished. The first—stone mounds, formed by the casting of stones at places considered sacred—were revered primarily by the nomadic Kurds. Part of the mound was frequently covered by pieces of fabric hung on bushes or saplings by women. The Kurds believed that these pirs would save them from misfortune. The second type, created by sedentary Kurds, was associated with the graves of saints and the cult of the ancestors. On certain days the villagers brought offerings, usually baked bread and sweets, to these graves. The third kind reflected the cults of trees, stones, and water; these cults had devotees among both the sedentary and nomadic population.

The beliefs and rites of the Yezidi Kurds are strictly clandestine; no one who is not born a Yezidi can have access to them. The Yezidis recognize the existence of two principles—a good one, embodied in God, and an evil one, embodied in Malek-Tauz (represented as a peacock). They have cults associated with fire, the moon, trees, water, stones, and the sun. Malek-Tauz is depicted in the form of a bird standing on a high bronze or brass pedestal (senjag or sanjaq ). The founder of the sect of the Yezidis was Sheikh Adi, who lived in northern Mesopotamia (Iraq) in the twelfth century. His temple is located 70 kilometers from the city of Mosul. The Yezidis have their own sacred books, written in the thirteenth century: the Kitabe Jilva (Book of the Revelation) contains the essence of Yezidi dogma, and the Maskhafe Resh (Black Book) sets forth the legend of Yezid, son of Moawiya, and the various rites and customs.

Arts. The Kurdish nation is justifiably proud of its extremely rich oral literature—poems, tales, songs, proverbs, and legends, many of which have achieved popularity among other peoples (Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Persians, Turks, Arabs, and Assyrians). Kurdish folklore extols the moral beliefs of the people: reverence for elders (particularly women), hospitality, courage, valor, and the love of freedom. Among the most widespread Kurdish epics are "Mam i Zin," "Dïmdïm," and "Zambilfrosh." The creation of Kurdish alphabets led to the flowering of a written literature. Soviet Kurdish literature draws on the progressive traditions of an extremely rich folklore. Literature arose among the Soviet Kurds in the 1930s, particularly among the Kurds of Armenia. Kurdish writers (Vazire Nadri, Otare Sharo, Jardoe Genjo, and others) gave their people numerous creations (in verse and prose) telling of the tragic fate of the Kurdish nomads before the Soviet Revolution, of their life and traditions, and of popular education (especially among women). In the war years Kurdish literature focused on patriotic subjects, such as the destiny of the Kurds in the struggle with fascism. Soviet Kurdish literature continued to thrive in the postwar period. The works of poets and prose writers are permeated with themes about the homeland and the struggle of nations for peace (Jardoe Asad, Usve Bako, Kachakhe Murad, Miroe Asad, Mikaele Rashid, Karlene Chachan, Ferike Usv, etc.). Soviet Kurdish writers have been particularly concerned about the lives of their kin in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria; about their courageous struggle for an independent Kurdistan ("the land of the Kurds"); and about the national-territorial rights of the many millions of Kurdish people.

Kurdish writers, forming a section of the Armenian writers' union, are giving their people a large number of literary works on national themes: family life, hospitality, courage, fortitude, and so on. In addition to literature in their language, the Kurds have a newspaper, Pia Taxe (The New Road), that first appeared in Erevan in 1928. Kurdish scholars are active in many areas, especially the study of Kurdish language, literature, and history within the Armenian Academy of Sciences. The Kurdish Cultural Center was formed in Moscow in 1989 for the further development of the culture of the Kurds. The center first published the newspaper Golos Kurda (The Kurdish Voice) in Russian and is also preparing publications on the language, literature, history, and ethnography of the Kurdish people.

See also Yezidis

Bibliography

Akiner, Shirin (1986). Islamic Peoples of The Soviet Union: An Historical and Statistical Handbook. 2nd ed., 208-215. London: KPI.

Aristova, T. F. (1966). Kurdy Zakavkaz'ia (The Transcaucasian Kurds). Moscow.

Aristova, T. F. (1980). Otrazhenie ètnicheskikh protsessov v traditsionno-bytovoi kul'ture kurdov Azerbaijana i Turkmenii" (The expression of ethnic processes in the traditional culture of the Kurds of Azerbaijan and Turkmenia). In Enicheskie protsessy u natsional'nykh grupp Srednei Azii i Kazakhstana (Ethnic processes among the national groups of Central Asia and Kazakhstan). Moscow.

Aristova, T. F. (1990). Material'naia kul'tura kurdov XIX-pervaia polovina XX v (The material culture of the Kurds in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries). Moscow.

Bennigsen, Alexandre, and S. Enders Wimbush (1986). Muslims of the Soviet Empire: A Guide, 209-213. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Musaelian, Z. S., ed. (1963). Bibliografiia po kurdovedeniiu (Bibliography of Kurdish studies). Moscow.

Ordikhane Jalil, and Jalile Jalil, eds. (1972). Kurdskie poslovitsy i pogovorki (Kurdish proverbs and sayings). Moscow.

Rudenko, M. (1974). "Novogodnie obriadovye prazdnestva u kurdov" (Traditional New Year's festivals among the Kurds). In Fol'klor i etnografiia: Obriady i obriadovyi fol'klor (Folklore and ethnography: Rites and ritual folklore). Leningrad.

T. F. ARISTOVA (Translated by David Testen)

Kurds

PRONUNCIATION: KURDS
LOCATION: Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Armenia, and Syria
POPULATION: 30 million to 35 million (2008 estimate)
LANGUAGE: Kurdish
RELIGION: Islam

INTRODUCTION

The Kurds are an Indo-European people and constitute the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East. However, they have never had their own nation. The traditional life of Kurds was nomadic. Tribes would move throughout the Mesopotamian plains and Turkish and Iranian highlands on a seasonal basis, herding sheep and goats. The end of World War I and the breakup of the of nation-states in the Middle East. This geo-political change forced the Kurds to abandon their traditional ways.

Although Kurds called the land they traveled through Kurdistan, they historically have been incorporated into either the old Islamic empires or the new Middle Eastern nation states. In AD 1514, their lands were divided between the Ottoman Turkish and Shi'ite Persian Empires, who kept control of them for the next 400 years. After World War I, the Kurds had a brief taste of self-rule. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed on 10 August 1920, recognized an independent Kurdistan. Unfortunately, the European powers dividing the Middle East after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire decided to divide the area known as Kurdistan among various states, in which Kurds would be the minority. The Kurds were forced to rely on foreign European support for protection, which guaranteed the promotion of European policies. Thus, three years later, on 24 July 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne was signed, once again dividing Kurdistan between the Turks and Persians in the states now known as Turkey and Iraq. The Kurds had another taste of independence after World War II when they were allowed a small homeland in western Iran in 1946, with the capital at Mahabad. The Shah of Iran soon came into power, however, and crushed the Kurdish state less than a year after it was established. Once again, the Kurds were without a land to call their own.

Kurdish history since 1946 has been a continuation of the struggle to maintain their cultural identity in the face of persecution and pressure to assimilate in every country where they live. Guerrilla fighters called peshmerga ("one who faces death") hide in the hills and fight for Kurdistan. A peshmerga uprising in Iraq in 1991 led to a disastrous defeat, and many Kurds fled to Iran. The long years of war and hostility between Iran and Iraq have put the Kurds in a very difficult position, because they live in both countries, and are constantly caught in the middle of the fighting. Kurdish resistance fighters have sometimes tried to use the hostilities between the two countries to their own advantage, so far without success. In Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is a radical communist paramilitary group campaigning for Kurdish independence. Not all Kurds agree with the methods and political aims of the peshmerga or PKK, but all want to have homes where they are safe and free to be themselves. Nearly 44,000 people had died in activities related to the PKK.

Kurds generally have had more national rights in Iraq than in the other modern nation-states in which they currently reside. Iraqi governments beginning in the 1930s allowed the use of Kurdish in schools, recognized the existence of a distinct Kurdish ethnic identity, and allowed for some political autonomy in the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq. Kurds suffered brutal repression under the Ba'ath political regime led by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The overthrow of Hussein's government in 2003, however, has created a sort of "nation within a nation" for Kurds in three northern provinces. The Kurdistan Regional Government allows for Kurd leaders to make decisions for the provinces with limited interference from Iraq's new government. Kurds also have been given equal voice in Iraq's central government with the country's Arab Sunnis and Arab Shi'ite populations. In addition, Iraq recognizes Kurdish as one of its two official national languages.

LOCATION AND HOMELAND

Population estimates for the Kurds range from 30 million to 35 million. It is difficult to get an accurate count because the Kurds live in remote mountain areas, many are refugees and flee from one place to another to escape persecution, and governments want to downplay their numbers and significance. The largest numbers of Kurds live in Turkey (approximately 15 million to 20 million, according to estimates from the CIA World Factbook). Large numbers of Kurds also live in Iran (8.5 million), Iraq (5.5 million), Pakistan (2.6 million to 3.9 million), and Syria (1.6 million to 1.9 million). Kurds are the second-largest ethnic group in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. They are the third-largest group (after Azerbaijanis) in Iran. Kurds also live in Lebanon, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, as well as Germany (about 400,000) and other places across Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Although they live among them, Kurds are unrelated to Turks, Arabs, and Iranians.

"Kurdistan" is generally thought of as the mountainous area at the junction of the Iraqi, Iranian, Turkish, Syrian, and Armenian borders. The average altitude is 6,000 ft and much of the territory is so convoluted that it is inaccessible. The climate is severe: temperatures can range from –29°C (–20°F) in winter to 38°C (100°F) in summer. What little precipitation there is usually falls in winter in the form of snow. The mostly barren hillsides are seriously overgrazed and, as political restrictions on the Kurds' traditional nomadic herding increase, the problem only worsens. River valleys in the Kurdish lands are fertile, supporting fruit orchards and vineyards.

LANGUAGE

The Kurdish language is related to Persian (or Farsi), the language spoken in Iran. The main Kurdish dialects are the northern Kurmanji, spoken in Turkey, Syria, and the Caucasus region (of the former Soviet Union); and the southern Sorani, spoken in Iraq and Iran. Kurmanji is more widely used than Sorani. Kurdish, like Persian, has also borrowed many words from the Arabic language. Written Kurdish differs from region to region: Iraqi Kurds use a written form of Sorani; Syrian and Turkish Kurds write Kurmanji with the Latin alphabet; and Kurds of the Caucasus region finally settled on Kurmanji written with the Cyrillic alphabet, after trying Arabic, Armenian, and Latin alphabets. Kurdish has no "th" sounds; they are considered very un-Kurdish.

Most Kurds also speak the official language of the nation-state in which they happen to live. Arabic, Turkish, and Persian are two of the most common second languages used.

The skillful use of language is highly valued by Kurds. Witty repartee and a command of poetry are considered important social assets. In Turkey, however, it was illegal to speak Kurdish, except at home, until 1991. It is not illegal to speak Kurdish in Iran or Iraq. Iraq, until recently, allowed the Kurds a greater range of cultural autonomy than did Turkey or Iran. At school and in public, Kurds must use the language of the country where they live. So they can only practice their Kurdish language arts at home.

Modern Kurdish names are mostly Arabic with Islamic significance, or Persian names of heroes of Persian history and legend. There are very few uniquely Kurdish names. A mother usually names a child. Kurds did not traditionally use surnames, so most modern surnames are tribal designations or geographic locations.

FOLKLORE

Modern-day Kurds are descendants of ancient Indo-European peoples known as the Medes who moved into the Middle East 4,000 years ago. The Medes were fierce warriors, and the Kurds continue in that tradition. The Muslim hero Saladin (Salah Ad-Din Yusuf Ibn Ayyub, AD 1137–93) was a Kurd, as were many of his soldiers. Saladin and his army fought against the Crusaders, and Saladin became the sultan of Egypt and Syria in 1174.

RELIGION

The Kurds at first resisted the Islamic invasion during the 7th century AD. But they eventually gave in after the Islamic victory near the modern-day Iraqi city of Sulaimaniya in AD 643. Most Kurds are now Sunni Muslims. About one-fifth is Shi'ite, especially in Iran. Many Kurds also belong to Sufi (Islam mystic) brotherhoods and meet to chant and dance together to worship Allah. The Sufi brotherhoods are very important in Kurdish village life. There are a million or so Kurdish Alevis in Turkey, and 40,000–70,000 Yazidis (an independent sect combining aspects of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity), mostly in Armenia and Azerbaijan. A very few Kurds are Christian.

MAJOR HOLIDAYS

The most important Kurdish holiday is the nwerroz, or Persian New Year, at the time of the spring equinox (21 March). There are special foods, fireworks, dancing, singing, and poetry recitations, all with an emphasis on Kurdish ethnicity. Even though many Kurds no longer live the nomadic life of herders, Kurds continue to have seasonal celebrations at lambing time, before moving the herds to summer pastures, shearing time, and the time of return to the village in the fall. Islamic holidays vary in importance among individual Kurds, although the Prophet Muhammad's birthday is the most important.

RITES OF PASSAGE

The greatest occasion for celebration in a Kurd's life is marriage. Kurds marry at a relatively early age (17 or 18). The bride is decked in gold bracelets, earrings, and necklaces, with new dresses and shoes. The highlight of the wedding is the public procession from the home of the bride to the home of the groom. Everyone joins in the parade, with lots of fanfare. After they reach the groom's home, the bride enters the house and sits quietly veiled in a corner of the room while the guests feast and dance outside. In some areas, there are horse-riding displays.

Parents and relatives hold a feast for the birth of a child, especially the birth of a first son. Boys are circumcised by the local religious leader during the first week after birth. In some more traditional Kurdish communities, boys are circumcised at age 10, followed by a huge party.

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

The Kurds are a patrilineal society whose various lineages have been preserved over the generations by a high degree of endogamy resulting from the frequent marriage of first cousins (a man generally marries the daughter of a paternal uncle). This practice promotes unity among kin but allows distance to develop between different lineages.

While tribal leadership among the Kurds is inherited, local leaders are chosen for their personal qualities, including integrity, generosity, and skill at dealing with government officials.

LIVING CONDITIONS

Most Kurds live in small villages in remote mountain regions. Some live in the valleys or on the plains. A typical Kurdish house is made of mud-brick with a wooden roof. In the summer, Kurds sleep on the roof where it is cooler. In some mountain villages, the houses are built so close together that those on higher elevations use their lower neighbors' roofs for extra living space. Some homes have underground rooms to use in the winter to escape the cold. There is rarely indoor plumbing; water is carried into the house in jars and cans from a central village well. There is no central heating. The few remaining nomadic Kurds live in tents made of blackened hides, and extended family members cluster their tents together in small communities.

Kurds are generally sheep- and goat-herders. Breeding horses used to be important, with the horses used for transportation, but mules and donkeys have become more common now. Families grow wheat and barley for subsistence, or rice in some areas, and raise chickens for eggs and meat. There are only a few Kurdish towns: Diyarbakir (a sort of capital for Kurds) and Van in Turkey; Erbil and Kirkuk in Iraq; and Mahabad in Iran.

FAMILY LIFE

Kurds marry fairly young and choose their own marriage partners. Few Kurds marry non-Kurds. Couples may continue to live with one or the other's family after marrying, but they have rooms of their own and separate housekeeping arrangements. Men and women both work in the fields, and boys and girls start helping at an early age. Kurdish women were traditionally not veiled except during parts of the marriage ceremony. They freely associated with men in most social interactions. If there was no qualified male heir, a woman assumed tribal leadership. Even today, when Kurdish women have had to bow to the more conservative Islamic conventions of the countries where they live, many Kurdish women fight alongside the men as peshmerga (guerrilla fighters). More than 1,000 peshmerga are women. The radical Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) encourages freedom for women.

CLOTHING

Traditionally, Kurdish women wear colorful skirts and blouses, and men wear baggy pants, vests, a red sash around the waist, and a blue silk turban on the head. Men also like to wear daggers. The typical Kurdish hat used to be a conical shape made of white felt, but today it is usually only worn by children. Nomadic Kurdish men shave their heads and wear long moustaches.

Traditional dress is becoming rarer as Kurds choose to dress like the people of the countries where they are living. In Iran, they must obey the laws of the Muslim government, so women must wear the black chador—a cloth covering their hair and clothes. In contrast, the government of Turkey has banned women from covering their hair in universities and public jobs, and so women are forced to wear more Western-style clothing. In Iraq, men wear woolen coats and vests, checkered heads-carves, and baggy pants. Women wear the Muslim-style dress, often with baggy trousers underneath.

FOOD

Bulghur (cracked wheat) used to be the staple food for Kurds, but rice is becoming more popular where it is available. The Kurdish diet includes a wide variety of fruits and vegetables (cucumbers are especially common). In the valleys where grapes are grown, raisins and grape jam are common. Meat is only eaten on special occasions. The usual beverage is tea. Particular Kurdish specialties are a type of wafer bread eaten for breakfast and any kind of grain cooked in whey. A recipe for Bulghur Bread follows.

Nane Casoki (Bulghur Bread)

2 cups bulghur
1 teaspoon salt
½ cup minced onion
2 cups boiling water
approximately 2 cups unbleached white flour

In a medium-sized bowl, combine the bulghur, salt, and onion. Pour the boiling water over the mixture and let stand for 30 minutes. Put in a food processor and process for about 20 seconds. Add 1 cup of flour and process again until it is a smooth texture. (You can also work the flour in by hand, if you do not have a food processor.) Turn the mixture out onto a well-floured surface and knead it, adding flour as necessary to keep the dough from sticking, for about 3 to 4 minutes. Cover the dough and let it rest for at least 15 minutes, or up to 3 hours.

Place a large baking sheet (or two small ones) on the bottom rack of the oven, leaving an inch of space between the sheet and the walls of the oven. Preheat the oven to 450ºF. After the dough has rested, divide it into 8 pieces and flatten each piece on the well-floured surface. With a rolling pin, roll out a piece of dough to a very thin round about 8 to 10 inches in diameter. Place the bread on a baking sheet and bake for 1½ to 2 minutes. Turn the bread over and bake for another minute, or until the bread begins to brown around the edges. (If you like a crispier bread, you may bake it longer, until it is spotted with brown all over.) Stack the baked bread and wrap in a clean kitchen towel to keep warm while you roll out and bake the rest of the dough. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Makes 8 breads.

(Adapted from Alford & Duguid, Flatbreads & Flavors, p. 175–6.)

EDUCATION

Schools are not widely available in most of the Kurdish territory. Where they are available, they are not much help. Because classes are taught in the official language of the Kurds' countries of residence, not in Kurdish, many Kurdish children find school very difficult and drop out. The Kurdish literacy rate is therefore very low. Girls often do not attend school at all because tradition holds that they are needed at home.

CULTURAL HERITAGE

Kurdish culture has a rich oral tradition, especially in epic poetry called lawj, which often tells of adventure in love or battle. Kurdish literature first appeared in the 7th century AD. In 1596, Sharaf Khan, Emir of Bitlis, composed a history of the Kurds in Persian called the Sharafnama. Almost 100 years later, in 1695, a great national epic called the Memozin was written in Kurdish by Ahmed Khani.

A Kurd named Ibrahim Mawsili founded the first Muslim Conservatory of Music after introducing Kurdish music to the ruler's court in the 8th century AD.

WORK

Most Kurds are farmers and sheep- and goat-herders. They sell products from their flocks such as leather, goat cheese, and wool. Women make crafts to sell such as carpets and cloth. Some Kurds grow tobacco to sell, and Turkish Kurds grow cotton for the market. A few mountain Kurds are still nomadic herders.

In towns, Kurds work as shopkeepers, plumbers, teachers, bankers, and so on. Kurds work as unskilled laborers in large Turkish cities, as well as in Baghdad and Mosul in Iraq, and Tehran in Iran. Some urban Kurds build on their traditional skills and specialize as bricklayers, butchers, cattle dealers, and small traders. The oil fields in Turkey and Iraq have attracted many Kurdish workers in recent times. Those Kurds who are able to go abroad find a variety of jobs and send the money back home.

SPORTS

See articles entitled Armenians, Iraqis, Syrians, and Turks.

ENTERTAINMENT AND RECREATION

Only men go out at night. They often sit at teahouses and cafés and play backgammon or dominoes. A favorite pastime is to listen to tapes or live singers at cafés. Singers have only recently been allowed to sing publicly in Kurdish.

FOLK ART, CRAFTS, AND HOBBIES

Carpet weaving is by far the most significant Kurdish folk art. Other crafts are embroidery, silk-weaving, leather-working, and metal ornamentation (especially copper inlay).

SOCIAL PROBLEMS

The greatest problem for the Kurds is the unwillingness of nations in which they live to allow them cultural autonomy. Although some Kurdish groups continue to fight for an independent Kurdistan, most Kurds wish only to be allowed to maintain their own language and culture within the states in which they live. Persecution of the Kurds has been especially traumatic in the age of nation-states. The concept of one nation with one people and one language has been adopted by the governments of Turkey, and this has led to great oppression of the Kurds in an attempt to make them conform. In Iraq, Kurds also faced persecution, although the Iraqi government did recognize their cultural autonomy. During the Iran– Iraq War (1980–88), the government engaged in systematic genocide to stop the Kurds from allying with Iran. Thousands of villages were destroyed and tens of thousands of Kurds were murdered and buried in mass graves. The Iraqi government also used nerve gas purchased from European governments against Kurdish civilians and Iranian troops, killing thousands more. One of the worst massacres occurred in the Iraqi Kurd town of Halabja, in which the entire population was killed by nerve gas. Because most countries tacitly supported Iraq against Iran, no substantial pressure was placed on the Iraqi government to stop its offensive. After the Gulf War and the unsuccessful Kurdish and Iraqi rebellion against Saddam Hussein's power, thousands more Kurds were forced into refugee camps, although part of the Kurdish territory in northern Iraq has been declared off limits by Western countries. Since 1991, Turkey has attacked Kurdish civilian centers inside the "safe haven" zone in Iraq to punish Kurds for supporting the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Because Turkey is needed to enforce the embargo against Iraq, little pressure has been placed on its government to stop these invasions. Many thousands of Kurds have now fled to Iran, and the government there is hard-pressed to provide support to literally millions of refugees from Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Afghanistan. Compounding the humanitarian tragedy is the fact that Kurdish leaders remain politically divided and unsure of a common strategy to demand their rights.

At least 44,000 people, mostly Kurds, had died in clashes between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish government as of 2008, and Turkey had spent $300 billion battling the terrorists. Kurds in Syria are not allowed to assert a sense of identity. Legal restrictions in Syria prohibit them from using their language in public, while the Iranian government continues to arrest Kurd journalists and activists for asserting rights for independence. The situation for Kurds has improved considerably in northern Iraq, where Kurds are building a regional government and encouraging tourism. Despite the instability in the rest of Iraq, the Kurdish regions are peaceful and offer hope for a future Kurdistan.

GENDER ISSUES

An international conference on Kurdish women in 2007 raised many issues that challenge Kurdish women in the early 21st century. Most of the conference attendees emphasized that equalizing relationships between men and women was an important aspect of the international struggle for Kurdish independence.

Kurdish women lack educational opportunities and often face discrimination in workplaces. Because most Kurds are Muslim, religious practices also constrain women from working independently and from expressing themselves in the literary and creative arts. Kurdish women often face domestic abuse and suffer the risk of honor killings not only in the Middle East but also in the European countries that many have migrated to. The conference established a steering committee to organize future activities, passed resolutions to urge the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq to make services for domestic violence available, and to work to increase social and political rights for women.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alford, Jeffrey, and Naomi Duguid. Flatbreads & Flavors: A Baker's Atlas. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1995.

Amnesty International Report 2008: State of the World's Human Rights. http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/Homepage (retrieved October 30, 2008).

Katzman, Kenneth and Alfred B. Prados, "The Kurds in Post-Saddam Iraq," Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, March 15, 2005. http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/44128.pdf (October 30, 2008).

King, Dr. John. Kurds. New York: Thomson Learning, 1994.

The Kurds, CAL Fact Sheet Series #4. Washington, DC: Language and Orientation Resource Center, Center for Applied Linguistics, 1981.

Linzey, Sharon. "International Conference on Kurdish Women for Peace and Equality, March 8, 2007, Erbil, Southern Kurdistan." JMEWS: Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 3.3 (Fall 2007): 103-105.

Moss, Joyce, and George Wilson. Peoples of the World: The Middle East and North Africa, 1st ed. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.

"Mountains and Waterfalls: An Unconventional Holiday in 'the Other Iraq'," The Economist July 11, 2008, http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11695930&CFID=27666117&CFTOKEN=19845424 (October 30, 2008).

"Terror in the Mountains: Renewed Violence Raises Questions About Turkey's Treatment of its Kurds," The Economist October 16, 2008, http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12429572 (October 30, 2008).

"Who Are The Kurds?" washingtonpost.com, 1999. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/inatl/daily/feb99/kurdprofile.htm (October 30, 2008).

—revised by H. Gupta Carlson

Kurds

The Kurds are often referred to as the world's largest non-state nation. The population is estimated at between 25 to 35 million, which makes them the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, outnumbered only by Arabs, Turks, and Persians. The majority live in Kurdistan, a borderless homeland whose territory is divided among the neighboring countries of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Some Kurdish populations are scattered throughout western and central Asia and, since the 1960s, can also be found in Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries.

The territory's rich natural resources have supported nomadic populations practicing animal husbandry, as well as rural and urban economies rooted in agriculture, long-distance trade, and regional markets. According to historical and archeological evidence, the region was the site of the world's earliest agrarian societies, cities, and states, all of which coexisted uneasily in a web of antagonisms that were rooted in cleavages based on class, empire, ethnicity, religion, race, and gender.

Although the Kurds appear to be an indigenous people of Western Asia, living largely astride the Zagros Mountains, their territory was home to numerous other civilizations and peoples, as well. Most of these (except for Assyrians, Armenians, and Jews) are now extinct or have been assimilated into the Kurdish population. The landscape is full of relics of monumental construction projects ranging from ancient irrigation networks to bridges and citadels, side by side with evidence of the ongoing destruction of life and property through conquest, wars, massacres, and forced population movements.

Pre-Modern States

We have more knowledge about the Kurds in the years following the conquest of the region by Islamic armies in the seventh century. Kurdistan lay very close to Baghdad, the capital of the Islamic caliphate. It was the site of incessant wars among the armies of the caliphs, as well as governors, Kurdish rulers, and conquerors coming from as far as the Roman empire in the west and Mongolia in the east. Although the conflicts were primary over land, taxes, and the recruitment of military service from the population, ethnic and religious differences also provided justifications for conquest and subjugation. Unrestrained violence, including atrocities against both civilians and combatants was widespread, and was aimed, in part, at intimidating the adversary and the population into submission. To give one example, the army of Adhud al-Dawla, ruler of the Buwayhid dynasty centered in Baghdad, besieged the Hakkari Kurds in 980, forced them into surrender on a promise of sparing their lives, but then crucified them and left their bodies hanging along 15 miles of roadside near Mosul.

Several factors helped to reshape the ethnic composition of Western Asia. For one, the Oghuz Turks arrived in the region from the Asian steppes in the eleventh century. Also important was the formation of the Seljuk dynasty (11th through 13th centuries) and Turkoman dynasties (Aq Qoyunlu and Qara Qoyunlu), which were followed by the fall of the caliphate in 1258 in the wake of the Mongol invasion. According to historian Vladimir Minorsky, "the Kurdish element was exhausting itself" in these unceasing wars. It is during this period, however, that the Kurds emerge as a distinct people, their territory becomes identified by outsiders as Kurdistan, and Kurdish statehood emerges in the form of mini-states and principalities.

Some of the indigenous populations of Kurdistan include the Armenians, Assyrians (Christians), and Kurds (mostly Muslims). There are also other goups, such as the Yezidis, who are followers of minority religions, as well as scattered minorities such as the Jews. These peoples survived the intensive colonization of the region by Turkic (Oghuz, Turkoman, Ottoman) and Mongol nomadic and tribal peoples from central Asia. The homogenizing force of centuries of conversion, forcible population movements, and massacres was offset by the inability of feudal states to centralize power and therefore assimilate their conquered peoples of the region into the language, culture and religion of the conquerors. Equally important in preventing the total annihilation of the indigenous populations was the labor-intensive nature of feudal agrarian production. Without a sizeable productive labor force, the fertile lands of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, and Mesopotamia could not sustain elaborate state structures. Although some Kurdish territories were Turkicized due to conquest and the violent elimination of Kurdish ruling families (especially by the Aq Qoyunlu dynasty, 1378–1508), as well as by massacres and deportations, some Kurdish mini-states were, nonetheless, gaining ground.

By the early sixteenth century, Western Asia was under the rule of two rival Turkish dynasties, the Ottomans and Safavids, which in 1639 drew their borders along the Zagros mountain range. Armenia and Kurdistan were thus divided, and the region experienced intermittent wars. The two empires pursued a policy of administrative centralization by removing hereditary Kurdish principalities. However, the Kurdish mini-states benefitted from the rivalry between the dynasties, and some survived until the mid-nineteenth century. Shah Abbas I (1588–1626), was suspicious of the loyalty of the Kurdish rulers of principalities of Biradost and Mukriyan. He supervised and personally participated in the massacres of the rulers and their subjects (1610–1611), and resettled Turkish tribes in their territory. He deported another 15,000 Kurds from another region of Kurdistan to northeastern Iran. An eyewitness to the mass killings, the Shah's official chronicler Eskandar Monshi Torkman, whose History of Shah Abbas the Great was translated into English in 1971, detailed with pride the "general massacre" of the Mukri Kurds and noted that the shah's "fury and wrath" could not be allayed "but by shedding the blood of those unfortunate ones" and that the "slicing of men" and the "enslavement of women and girls . . . had been inscribed on the annals of time by destination." He labeled the Kurds as "base-born," "human beings of savage disposition," and "impious."

The Modern Nation-State

In the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman Turkey and Iran began adopting a more European style of administrative and military centralization. The two states used their armies to overthrow the six remaining Kurdish principalities, and extended their direct rule over all parts of Kurdistan. With the emergence of modern style nation-states in Iran (after the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 to 1911) and Ottoman Turkey (especially after the 1908 Young Turk revolution), the Kurds were incorporated into the state as citizens rather than a distinct people enjoying the right to self-rule. Feudal and tribal relations continued to prevail in the predominantly rural society of Kurdistan, but Kurdish nationalist ideas began to appear in the poetry and journalism of the last decade of the nineteenth century.

World War I turned Kurdistan into a battlefield between the Ottomans, Russians, Iranians, and British. The Ottoman government committed genocide against Armenians and Assyrians in 1915, and forcibly transferred some 700,000 Kurds to Western Turkey in 1917. At the same time, the tsarist Russian army conducted massacres of the Kurds in Sauj Bulagh in 1915 (now Mahabad, Iran), Rawandiz (Iraq), Khanaqin (Iran) and throughout the eastern parts of Kurdistan. As in previous wars, both armies committed crimes against humanity, including enslavement, murder, extermination, rape, sexual slavery, sexual violence, persecution. They also engaged in such war crimes as willful killing, inhuman treatment, unlawful deportation and transfer, attacking civilians, pillaging, and cruel treatment. The Russian army also committed gendercide—the killing of adolescent and adult males—in the massacre of Sauj Bulagh, and carried away some 400 women and girls for abuse. Armenian and Assyrian militias participated in the Russian massacres, and some Kurdish tribal, feudal, and religious leaders acted as accomplices in the genocide of Armenians and Assyrians. At the same time, many Kurds sheltered Armenian victims, and Assyrians helped starving Kurds.

The dismantling of the Ottoman empire in World War I led to the division of its Kurdish region and the incorporation of that territory into the newly created states of Iraq (under British occupation and mandate, 1918–1932), Syria (under French occupation and mandate, 1918–1946), and Turkey (Republic of Turkey since 1923). The formation of these modern nation-states entailed the forced assimilation of the Kurds into the official or dominant national languages and cultures: Turkish (Turkey), Persian (Iran), and Arabic (Syria, and, in a more limited scope, Iraq). In Turkey and Iran, in particular, the political power of religious, tribal, and feudal leaders was uprooted. State violence was the principal means of integration and assimilation. According to historian Mark Levene, (Ottoman) Turkey had turned Eastern Anatolia, which includes Armenia and Kurdistan, into a "zone of genocide" from 1878 to 1923. This "zone" has persisted into the twenty-first century.

Kurdish resistance to assimilation was diverse and extensive, including a series of armed revolts in Turkey (1921, 1925, 1927–1931, 1937–1938), Iran (1920–early 1930s), and Iraq (early 1920s, 1940s). These revolts were led, often jointly, by heads of religious orders (sheikhs) and feudal and tribal chiefs (aghast) as well as an emerging group of nationalist intelligentsia, political activists, and deserting army officers, who were mostly urban and secular. The repression of these revolts was most brutal in Turkey and Iran.

The region was not a theater of war in World War II, except for the northern part of Iranian Kurdistan, which was occupied by the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1946. After the war the four countries acceded or ratified the 1949 Geneva Conventions (Turkey, 1954; Iran, 1957; Iraq, 1956; Syria, 1953) and its 1977 Additional Protocols.

Turkey

The intent to commit genocide is inscribed, explicitly, in Turkey's Law No. 2510 of 1934, which stipulated the transfer of non-Turks to Turkish speaking regions, where they would not be allowed to form more than 5 percent of the population. This law provided for the depopulation of non-Turkish villages and towns, resettlement of Turks in non-Turkish areas, and other assimilationist projects, such as the establishing of boarding schools, which were intended to turn non-Turkish children into monolingual Turkish speakers. The law was applied a year later in the wake of Law No. 2884, which decreed the systematic turkification of the Dersim region, renamed as Tunceli, through military control, boarding schools, the banning of the Kurdish language and culture, changing place names, and deportation.

This forced turkification project led to the Dersim uprising, which the army and the air force brutally suppressed from 1937 to 1938, and the repression of which some researchers consider to be an act of genocide. The Turkish Republic considered popular uprisings to be reactionary and religious opposition to the civilizing and westernizing policies of the Turkish nation-state. The Kurds were branded as tribal, uncivilized, illiterate, primitive, backward, dirty, and ignorant. Any expression of Kurdish identity was treated as a crime against the "indivisibility of the Turkish nation" and "territorial integrity" of Turkey.

Dersim was the last uprising until the armed resistance of 1984–1999, led by Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, in Kurdish acronyms). Nonetheless, various governments continued Turkification through the deliberate elimination of Kurdish as a spoken and written language, and through ethnocide—eliminating Kurdish culture and ethnic identity. The use of the Kurdish language, music, dance, dress, personal and geographic names, and even listening to broadcasting and recorded music were all criminalized by the Turkish state.

Because of Turkey's aspirations to full membership in the European Union, the parliament acceded to pressure and legalized the private use of spoken Kurdish in 1991. A decade later the parliament removed some of the constitutional and legal restrictions on the language. However, linguistic genocide continues to be the official state policy.

During its repression of the PKK, which it labeled counterinsurgency operations, Turkey declared a state of emergency in parts of its southeastern (Kurdish) territory. According to the Human Rights Watch Turkey committed "gross violation of its international commitments to respect the laws of war" (1995, p. 7). This included forced displacements, indiscriminate shootings, summary executions, and disguising the identity of perpetrators, as well as violations of international law, including summary execution, torture, forcible displacement of civilians, pillage, destruction of villages, failure to care for civilians displaced by government forces, injury of civilians, destruction of civilian property, inhumane and degrading treatment, kidnaping of civilians to act as porters and as human shields against attack, disappearances, life-threatening conditions of detention and inadequate medical attention leading to death. The Human Rights Watch also noted that the United States, Turkey's close ally and its major weapons supplier, was deeply implicated, and, much like NATO, chose to "downplay Turkish violations for strategic reasons" (1995, p. 13). It also charged that the PKK, which was not party to the Geneva Protocols, also engaged in "substantial violations of the laws of war," including "summary executions, indiscriminate fire and the intentional targeting of non-combatants" (1995, pp. 12–13).

During the operations, according to a Turkish parliamentary commission, the armed forces displaced 378,335 villagers while destroying or evacuating 3,428 rural settlements (905 villages and 2,523 hamlets) from the mid-1980s to 1997. These figures are generally treated as underestimations. The Turkish security forces further destroyed the infrastructure of rural life in the Kurdish region, and thus threatened the survival of the Kurds as a distinct people. Other crimes included systematic sexual violence against women in custody.

Iran

Especially under Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925–1941), Iran undertook a policy of forcible Persianization of the Kurds through linguicide and ethnocide as well as war, killing, jail, and deportations. As early as 1923, speaking Kurdish had been banned in schools and other state institutions, and by the mid-1930s, a total ban on the language and culture was imposed. Under the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979), crimes against humanity and war crimes were committed in military operations against the Kurds. The Islamic regime that followed the Shahs continued the persianization policy, although on a more limited scale. During its suppression of Kurdish autonomists, which began once it came to power, the government committed crimes against humanity including murder, extermination, imprisonment, and torture, and war crimes such as wilful killing, inhuman treatment, appropriation of property, denying a fair trial, unlawful deportation and transfer, attacking civilians, execution without due process, and attacking undefended places.

Iraq

Iraq was the only country, other than the Soviet Union, where the existence of the Kurds was recognized and the Kurdish language was allowed limited use in primary education, local administration, and the mass media. However, Iraq did institute a policy of containing Kurdish nationalism through arabization. The government committed crimes against humanity and war crimes during the long conflict with Kurdish autonomists, which raged intermittently from 1961 to the 1990s. During the first Ba'ath regime's offensive against the Kurds in 1963, the Mongolian People's Republic asked the UN General Assembly to discuss "the policy of genocide carried out by the government of the Republic of Iraq against the Kurdish people," and the Soviet Union referred the case to the Economic and Social Council. Mongolia later withdrew the request, and the Economic and Social Security Council refused to consider the Soviet request.

The second Ba'ath regime (1968–2003) constructed a cordon sanitaire along its northern borders with Iran and Turkey by destroying hundreds of Kurdish villages soon after the defeat of the Kurdish armed resistance in 1975. In 1983 it killed all the adolescent and adult males of Barzani Kurds, numbering about 8,000. In addition, during its war with Iran (1980–1988), in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, the regime used chemical weapons against both the Iranians and Iraqi Kurds who lived in a number of settlements, including the town of Halabja (March 16, 1988). Moreover, the oil-rich Kirkuk region was arabized by forcibly uprooting Kurds from the city and villages. The 1988 campaign of mass murder, code-named Operation Anfal ("spoils" of war, also the title of a chapter in the Koran), is widely considered a genocide. According to a 1993 report by the Human Rights Watch, it entailed the killing of more than 100,000 Kurds, the disappearance of tens of thousands of noncombatants, the destruction of 4,006 villages (according to Kurdistan Regional Government), the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers, the arbitrary arrest and jailing of thousands of women, children, and the elderly under conditions of extreme deprivation, and the destruction of rural life.

Syria

Although the Kurds of Syria have not engaged in armed conflict with the state, they were targeted for ethnic cleansing beginning in the early 1960s. Some 120,000 Kurds were stripped of Syrian citizenship. According to a 1991 report by the Middle East Watch, the Syrian government planned for the depopulation of Kurdish regions by creating an "Arab belt" along the Turkish border, evicting peasants from 332 villages, and replacing them with Arab settlers.

Soviet Union and Caucasia

Although the Kurdish communities of Soviet Caucasia and Turkmenistan enjoyed cultural and linguistic rights, thousands of Caucasian Kurds were subjected to two waves of forced deportation to the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kirgizia, and Uzbekistan in 1937 and 1944. During the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Muslim Kurdish populations of Armenia and Nagorny-Karabakh were largely displaced in the course of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan between 1990 and 1994, when, according to the Human Rights Watch, both countries "systematically violated the most basic rule of international humanitarian law."

Prevention, Education, and Political-Judicial Reform

Since ancient times, mass killing and related crimes have been a permanent feature of life in the region. Modern genocide in Kurdistan is distinguished from earlier crimes by its rootedness in the nation–state and its nationalist ideology, which safeguards the territorial integrity of the homeland.

While there is little progress in reversing state politics, citizens, both Kurds and non-Kurds, have taken significant steps toward recognizing, documenting, and resisting genocide in literary words, academic research, conferences, film, and journalism. Much remains to be done, however, toward legal-political reform, promoting genocide education, and monitoring early warning signs of impending crimes.

SEE ALSO Ethnocide; Gas; Iran; Iraq; Linguistic Genocide

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrews, Peter A. (1989). Ethnic Groups in the Republic of Turkey. Wiesbaden, Germany: Ludwig Reichert Verlag.

Baran, Ute (1989). "Deportations: Tunceli Kanunlari." In Documentation of the International Conference on Human Rights in Kurdistan. Bremen, Germany: Initiative for Human Rights in Kurdistan.

Besikçi, Ismail (1991). Kürtlerin Mecburi Iskâni. Ankara: Yurt Kitab-Yayin.

Besikçi, Ismail (1992). Tunceli Kanunu (1935) ve Dersim Jenosidi. Ankara: Yurt.

Bruinessen, Martin (2000). Kurdish Ethno-Nationalism versus Nation-Building States. Collected Articles. Istanbul: The ISIS Press.

Fernandes, Desmond (1999). "The Kurdish Genocide in Turkey, 1924–1998." Armenian Forum 1:57–107.

Fossum, Ludvig Olsen (1918). "The War-Stricken Kurds." The Kurdistan Missionary 10(1):5–6.

Hassanpour, Amir (2000). "The Politics of A-Political Linguistics: Linguists and Linguicide." In Rights to Language: Equity, Power, and Education, ed. Robert Phillipson. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hiltermann, Joost (2000). "Elusive Justice: Trying to Try Saddam." Middle East Report 215(Summer):32–35.

Human Rights Association (2003). House Demolitions and Forced Evictions Perpetrated by the Turkish Security Forces: A Form of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Against the Kurdish Population. Available from http://www.ihd.org.tr.

Ismael, Jacqueline, and Shereen Ismael (2000). "Gender and State in Iraq." In Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East, ed. Joseph Suad. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press.

Jwaideh, Wadie (1960). "The Kurdish Nationalist Movement: Its Origins and Development." Ph.D diss. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University.

Kuper, Leo (1981). Genocide: Its Practical Use in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Kurdish Human Rights Project (2001). State Violence against Women in Turkey and attacks on Human Rights Defenders of Victims of Sexual Violence in Custody. London: Kurdish Human Rights Project.

Kurdish Human Rights Project (2002). Denial of a Language: Kurdish Language Rights in Turkey—KHRP Fact-Finding Mission Report. London: Kurdish Human Rights Project.

Levene, Mark (1998). "Creating a Modern 'Zone of Genocide': The Impact of Nation and State Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923." Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12(3):393–433.

Levene, Mark (1999). "A Moving Target, the Usual Suspects and (Maybe) a Smoking Gun: The Problem of Pinning Blame in Modern Genocide." Patterns of Prejudice 33(4):3–24

McDowall, David (2000). A Modern History of the Kurds. London: I.B. Tauris.

Middle East Watch (1991). Syria Unmasked: The Suppression of Human Rights by the Asad Regime. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Mojab, Shhahrzad (2003). "Kurdish Women in the Zone of Genocide and Gendercide" Al-Raida 21(103):20–25.

Müller, Daniel (2000). The Kurds of Soviet Azerbaijan, 1920–1991. Central Asian Survey 19(1):41–77.

Power, S. (2003). "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Perennial Books.

Torkman, Eskandar Beg Monshi (1978). History of Shah Abbas the Great, vol. 2, tran. Roger Savory. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Ussher, Clarence (1917). An American Physician in Turkey: A Narrative of Adventure in Peace and War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Amir Hassanpour

Kurds

ETHNONYMS: none

Orientation

The Kurds have inhabited an area of rugged mountains and high plains at the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for over two thousand years. They are believed to be descended from the Medes who overthrew Nineveh in 612 b.c. Their traditional mode of subsistence is pastoralism and agriculture.

The territory Kurds conceive of as Kurdistan ("the land of the Kurds") is distributed across the present borders of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. There are other pockets of Kurds living in these countries, but outside of Kurdistan. A large group of Kurds can also be found in contiguous parts of the former Soviet Union. The terrain of Kurdistan is formed by the Eastern Taurus and the Zagros mountains and includes the steppelike plateaus to the north and the foothills of the Mesopotamian plains to the southwest. The climate is prone to extreme temperature fluctuations, from -30° C in the winter, to 45° C during the summer. Some mountain villages are completely isolated by heavy snows for up to six months of the year.

Kurdish, an Indo-European language, is most closely related to Persian. It consists of four main dialects (northern, middle, and southern Kurmanji, and Gorani), which in turn include several local dialects.

Estimates of the number of Kurds living in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the former USSR are unreliable owing to the census policies of the various countries. Estimates of the Kurdish population in the mid-1970s for all these countries combined ranged from 13.5 to 21 million.

History and Cultural Relations

The Kurds have a long and eventful history. The Greek historian Xenophon recounted his encounters with the "Karduchi" as early as 375 b.c. The Arabs who brought Islam to the area in the seventh century a.d. were the first to refer to "Kurds." Many important figures in the history of the Ottoman and Persian empires were Kurds, and the remote area inhabited by Kurds served as a buffer between empires. The Kurds have long fought for autonomy, either as self-governing provinces or as an independent nation-state.

This history has profoundly affected almost every aspect of Kurdish life and culture. Rapid social change has been occurring in the countries that divide Kurdistan, which affects the Kurds as well. The policies of the various governments have also had quite different kinds of impact on the Kurds. Whereas the Turkish government outlaws the use of the Kurdish language in public and the publication or possession of Kurdish writings or audio recordings, the Iraqi government allowed the use of Kurdish as the language of instruction for Kurdish schoolchildren during the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, the development of Kurdish literature prospered in Iraq but was severely hampered in Turkey. In addition to dialectal differences, written communication is further complicated by the use of the Latin, Arabic, and Cyrillic alphabets in the different countries. These examples illustrate the complexity of the situation and serve as a caution against overgeneralization.

Settlements

Traditionally, Kurds were either nomads who lived in tent camps and moved their herds between summer and winter pasturage, or settled agriculturists who lived in villages on the plains or in mountain valleys. Today most Kurds have settled. Those who have not live in heavy, black woolen tents, which remain standing at the winter pasturage, and use lighter tents when traveling to and from summer pastures higher in the mountains. Camps may consist of an entire clan or of a group of families who join to herd their flocks together.

Kurdish villages consist of low clay or stone houses with flat roofs. They are often built up the sides of a slope such that the roof of one house serves as a terrace for the house above it. Some villages correspond to lineages, others contain members of several lineages or of both tribal and nontribal groups; many are not organized along any kind of kinship tie. Villages often own communal pasture land, and, in some villages, private property may be sold only to fellow villagers. Kurdistan also contains several urban centers where large landowners, professionals, government workers, and laborers reside.

Economy

The nomadic pastoralists raise sheep and goats and trade wool, meat, and dairy products for grain, tea, sugar, and other consumer products available through the local markets. Other domesticated animals include cattle, donkeys, mules, and horses.

In the agricultural villages, wheat, barley, and lentils are the staple crops. Tobacco is raised as a cash crop, and walnuts, fruits, and vegetables are cultivated according to local conditions. Most agriculturists also have livestock.

Domestic industry consists of spinning, weaving, plaiting ropes, and the production of unglazed clay storage vessels.

The distribution of labor is based on the distinction between male and female tasks and that between peasants and aristocratic landowners. Women are responsible for milking and the processing of butter and cultured milk. In addition to preparing food, housekeeping, and child care, they collect firewood and manure for use as fuel, fetch water, clean grain, spin, weave, make cigarettes, harvest tobacco, carry the harvest to the threshing floor, and may help with plowing. Aristocratic women perform tasks within the home but have servants to do the work away from home, such as milking and fetching fuel.

Men plow, sow, and harvest, transport surplus grain to the town market, and make whatever purchases are needed at the market. Usually one shepard is employed to herd the flocks for the entire village. Traditionally, the agha (lineage, clan, or village leader), was responsible for the upkeep of a guest house in which visitors to the village were lodged and entertained and where village men met to discuss recent events. In return for this service, the agha was paid a tribute of approximately 10 percent of the villagers' harvest. Village guest houses are no longer as important as they once were. As the village leaders have moved away to the larger towns, the village guest houses have begun to disappear, and the men socialize instead at local tea houses.

Kinship

Kurdish kin groups are based on patrilineal descent. Several generations of one man's descendants through the male line constitute a lineage. Several such lineages compose a clan. It is assumed that all members of a clan are related through a common male ancestor, but outside groups may attach themselves to a powerful tribe and, after several generations, be incorporated as full members into a clan and tribe. A tribe consists of several clans.

Kurdish kinship terminology does not distinguish between maternal and paternal grandparents. It does distinguish between father's and mother's brothers, and between their children. Father's sisters and mother's sisters, however, are categorized together, as are their children.

Marriage and Family

Kurdish marriages are arranged between the families of the bride and groom. Ideally, a man will marry his father's brother's daughter, to whom he has "first rights." The majority of Kurdish marriages in the 1960s were reported to be between the children of two brothers. This lineage endogamy "keeps the family together" but also weakens the ties between lineages, thus increasing the likelihood of conflict. If marriage to father's brother's child is not possible, the next best choice is one of the other cousins.

Marriage negotiations are first carried out between the women of the two families, and then finalized by the men when a marriage settlement is drawn up. It states the size of the bride-wealth and how it will be used. If the groom does not pay the agreed-upon bride-wealth or does not support and clothe her according to the standards of her own family, the bride has grounds for divorce. The only other way she may obtain divorce is by repayment in full of the bride-wealth, unless otherwise stipulated in the marriage settlement. The man may divorce his wife merely by renouncing her three times.

According to the Quran, a man may have up to four wives provided he can support them all and spends equal time with each; however, few men can afford even two wives. A childless marriage is the most common grounds for divorce or the taking of a second wife.

The wedding entails the fetching of the bride to the groom's home, where the new couple will live until they establish their own home. A Kurdish household thus consists of a man, his wife (or wives), children, and eventually daughters-in-law and grandchildren. In the case of polygyny, each wife may have her own section of the house, which she runs independently.

Inheritance from the father is divided equally between the sons. Daughters do not inherit.

Sociopolitical Organization

Tribal organization based on patrilineal descent is typical of Kurdish nomadic pastoralists. Pasturage is collectively held by the clan within the tribe's territory, and migrations are coordinated at the tribal level. Among the seminomads and in the sedentary villages, clans and lineages come into play only in response to conflict, often in the form of blood feuds; however, not all sedentary agriculturists are organized along kinship lines. A traditional distinction was made between tribal agriculturists, who owned the land they worked, and nontribal peasants, who were subservient to the landowning tribals. These peasants did not own the land—they were bound to it and "belonged" to the tribal leader who controlled it. They owed him their labor and/or a percentage of their crops. Thus, Kurdish society includes both tribal and feudal systems, with clan, lineage, or village leaders serving as feudal lords.

As most Kurds have settled and become agriculturists, and because of the impact of government policies such as land reforms, changes have occured in Kurdish social organization. Through his contacts with government authorities, the agha was able to register communal lands in his own name. Thus, whereas in some areas village membership includes the right to a plot of land, in others entire villages are owned by a single absentee landlord, for whom the villagers work as sharecroppers or wage laborers. The mechanization of agriculture has reduced the need for village labor, and villagers have sought wage employment in urban centers both within and outside Kurdistan. The following recent events have clearly also had a major impact on Kurdish social organization: the Iran-Iraq War, the forced resettlement of tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds, Iraq's gas-bombing of Kurdish towns and villages, the Gulf War and the resultant flight of Kurds to Iran and Turkey, and the establishement of a U.N.-enforced safe haven; however, the long-term consequences of these events remain to be determined.

Because of its rugged terrain, Kurdistan acted as a buffer area between a series of competing empires. Kurdish political organization is therefore best understood as a response to the state. Kurdish tribal leaders were able to increase their power vis-à-vis one another by leading warriors in the service of the various empires. Their loyalty to the state was rewarded with titles and the backing of the central government in local disputes. Other tribal chiefs could submit to this paramount chieftain or establish relations with the competing states. Eventually, confederations of tribes arose that were ruled by a single mir. These emirates encompassed large territories and were granted considerable autonomy. In the 1500s many of the Kurdish emirates were incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. The mirs maintained local autonomy but were under the administration of regional governors who reported directly to the sultan. The emirates were abolished in the 1800s, and local rule reverted to several paramount chieftains.

In the 1900s government control penetrated further into the local level, and administrators dealt directly with the leaders of individual tribes and villages. Thus, Kurdish leaders are now found at the local level, and their influence is derived from personal attributes such as generosity, honor, and the ability to persuade and to deal with government officials. Tribal and lineage leadership is inherited, although there may be several contenders within the family, and other families may challenge and take over the position. Larger tribes generally choose their leader from a royal lineage, but different branches of the lineage may compete for the title. The shaykh (pl. shuyukh ) also plays an important role (see "Religion and Expressive Culture").

The Kurds have been much affected by the different national policies and are now engaged in a long-term effort to gain some form of self-rule. Demands range from local autonomy to the formation of a Kurdish nation-state. Political parties and demands, guerrilla forces, and support from foreign governments are all part of modern Kurdish politics.

Religion and Expressive Culture

The Kurds converted to Islam in the seventh century a.d. Most Kurds are orthodox Sunni Muslims of the Shaft school; however, in southeastern and southern Kurdistan, some tribes are Shiite. Also found in southeastern Kurdistan is the Ahl-e Haqq sect, which, although based on Ismaili Shiism, is considered heretical by other Muslims. The Alawites (Alevis) of northwestern Kurdistan also practice an unorthodox form of Shiism. The majority of Alawites are Turks, but many are Kurds, some of whom speak the Zaza dialect. A syncretistic form of religion found only among the Kurds is the Yezidi sect. It is believed to be derived from Zorastrianism but influenced by Ismaili Shiism. Its practitioners have been referred to as devil worshipers and are subject to severe persecution. In addition to Muslims, groups of Jews and Christians (Armenians, Assyrians, and Syriacs) have lived among the Kurds.

Sharia (Islamic law) was enforced in religious courts throughout the Ottoman Empire. With its fall and the secularization of the Turkish state, the only clerics left are the mullahs. They continue to provide religious instruction and lead religious ceremonies at the village level. Their prestige and influence are no longer guaranteed, however, but is based upon their personal integrity and wisdom.

In addition to the clerics and the shuyukh, there are those who maintain that they are descendants of the Prophet Mohammed. Many of them are poor, living on a claim to financial support on the basis of their descent; some serve as itinerate peddlers of religious amulets and as soothsayers. They are accorded little respect unless they are also wealthy or powerful; in this case, their descent increases the prestige they have obtained through other channels.

The shuyukh obtain prestige and power as holy men and leaders of religious brotherhoods (Sufi or Dervish orders). After receiving instruction in the religious order, a man may be declared a shaykh by an already established shaykh. A shaykh's ability to perform miracles serves as proof that he is indeed a "favorite of God." This ability is believed to continue after death, giving rise to pilgrimages to the tombs of powerful shuyukh. Before the emergence of modern political parties, Dervish orders in Kurdistan—the Qadiri and the Nagshibandi brotherhoods—provided a basis for a level of organization wider than the tribe but independent of the state (van Bruinessen 1992, 210). For this reason, shuyukh performed an important function as mediators after the destruction of the emirates. They have thus been able to gain substantial power as leaders, especially in areas where tribal organization dominated and blood feuds prevailed.

In addition to the observances of the Islamic calendar, Kurds celebrate events of the pastoral seasons, which provide occasions for the strengthening of social bonds and negotiation of marriages. The Kurdish new-year celebration, Newroz, takes place on 21 March and commemorates the people's rebellion against a cruel and unjust king, and the return of light. Fires are lit on mountaintops and in villages, and a feast is held, followed by a ceremony mourning the dead. The Kurds consider Newroz their "national holiday," which they claim to have celebrated for over 2,500 years.

The Kurds are renowned for the rich colors and intricate designs of their wool rugs. These continue to fetch high prices on the international market but are sold by traders in urban centers far from Kurdistan.

The Kurds also have a rich oral tradition. Professional troubadours traveled from place to place recounting legends and singing ballads and epic tales. The art of storytelling was much appreciated until the radio and increased literacy began to compete. Kurds have therefore begun to write down their oral legends and songs in an effort to preserve them. Kurdish written literature consists predominately of classical poetry dating from as far back as a.d. 1200. After the division of the Ottoman Empire, the new nation-states restricted or forbade the publication of Kurdish literature. Only in Iraq could it continue to develop freely. Kurdish exiles in Europe are now attempting to further the analysis and development of their literature.

The Kurds maintain that to be a Kurd is "to look Death in the eye" because expressing and passing on their culture has often entailed breaking laws and engaging in armed resistance. As agonizing as was the plight of Iraqi Kurds in the aftermath of the Gulf War, it was merely another chapter in the ongoing Kurdish struggle for self-rule in the face of the repression and violence employed by the various national governments to assimilate and/or control them. Men speak of having many children to ensure that some Kurds survive the violence to carry on the culture.

Kurdish funerals occur immediately after death. The corpse is washed by a member of the same sex, wrapped in white cotton, and covered with a prayer rug. It is carried to the mosque, where a blessing is given, according to the Shafi rite. It is then buried, facing Mecca, stones marking the head and feet. Following a death, friends and relatives visit the family of the deceased, to pay their respects. While in mourning, a person will not make visits outside the home unless there is a death in the family.

Bibliography

Barth, Fredrik (1953). Principles of Social Organization in Southern Kurdistan. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

Busby, Annette (1994). "Kurds: A Culture Straddling International Borders." In Portraits of Culture: Ethnographic Originals, edited by Melvin Ember, Carol Ember, and David Levinson. The Source One Custom Publishing Program. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Chaliand, Gerard (1980). People Without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan. London: Zed Press.

Entessar, Nader (1992). Kurdish Ethnonationalism. Boulder, Colo., and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Hansen, Henny Harald (1961). The Kurdish Woman's Life. Copenhagen: Nationalmuseets Skrifter.

Leach, Edmund R. (1940). Social and Economic Organization of the Rowanduz Kurds. Monographs in Social Anthropology, no.
3. London: School of Economies and Political Science.

McDowall, David (1992). The Kurds: A Nation Denied. London: Minority Rights Publications.

Olson, Robert (1989). The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism, 1880-1925. Austin: University of Texas Press.

van Bruinessen, Martin M. (1992). Agha, Shaikh, and State: The Political Structures of Kurdistan. London and Atlantic Heights, N.J.: Zed Press.

ANNETTE BUSBY

Kurds

PRONUNCIATION: KURDS

LOCATION: Turkey; Iraq; Syria; Iran; Lebanon; Armenia; Azerbaijan; Germany

POPULATION: 5–22 million

LANGUAGE: Kurdish

RELIGION: Islam

1 • INTRODUCTION

Kurds have almost never had a country of their own. "Kurdistan" is the mountainous area where the borders of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey meet. The average altitude is 6,000 feet (1,950 meters) and much of the land is inaccessible (difficult to reach). For most of their history Kurds have been a part of the Persian and Ottoman empires. (The Persian Empire became modern Iran. The Ottoman Empire became modern Turkey.)

From 1920 to 1923, an independent Kurdistan existed. In 1923, Kurdistan was divided between the two countries that are Iraq and Turkey today. Since then, the Kurds have been divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. They have struggled to build an independent nation. Guerrilla fighters called peshmerga (one who faces death) fight to win territory for Kurdistan. The long years of war and hostility between Iran and Iraq have put the Kurds in a very difficult position. They have large communities in both countries and are constantly caught in the fighting between the two countries. In Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) is a radical group that campaigns for Kurdish independence. The PKK is a terrorist organization. Sometimes they resort to killing of civilians to further their cause. Because of this, many Kurds oppose them.

2 • LOCATION

Population estimates for the Kurds range from 5 million to 22 million. More Kurds live in Turkey than anywhere else. They are the second-largest ethnic group in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. They are the third-largest group (after Azerbaijanis) in Iran. Kurds also live in Lebanon, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Germany, and other places across Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Although they live among them, Kurds are ethnically unrelated to Turks, Arabs, and Iranians.

3 • LANGUAGE

The Kurdish language is related to Persian (or Farsi), the language spoken in Iran. Kurdish, like Persian, has also borrowed many words from the Arabic language. Until 1991, it was illegal to speak Kurdish in Turkey except at home. The skillful use of language is highly valued by Kurds. Cleverness and a command of poetry are considered important skills.

Modern Kurdish names are mostly Arabic or Persian. The mother usually names her child. Kurds did not traditionally use surnames (last names), so most modern surnames are tribal designations or geographic locations.

4 • FOLKLORE

Modern-day Kurds are descendants of ancient Indo-European peoples known as the Medes. They moved into the Middle East 4,000 years ago. The Muslim hero Saladin (Salah Ad-Din Yusuf Ibn Ayyub, ad 1137–93) was a Kurd, as were many of his soldiers. Saladin became the sultan (king) of Egypt and Syria in 1174.

A well-known folktale, "Kawe the Blacksmith and Zohak," explains the origin of Nawruz, the Persian New Year celebration. According to the story, Zohak was an evil king who enslaved the Kurds. One year, on the first day of spring, Kawe the Blacksmith led the Kurds in a revolt against Zohak. They surrounded Zohak's palace, and Kawe charged past the guards. He grabbed Zohak by the neck with a powerful blacksmith's hand, and struck Zohak on the head with his hammer. The Kurds set bonfires on the mountaintops to announce their freedom from Zohak. The event is said to have taken place around 700 bc.

5 • RELIGION

The Kurds at first resisted the Islamic invasion during the seventh century ad. They gave in after the Islamic victory near the modern-day Iraqi city of Sulaimaniya in ad 643. Most Kurds are now Sunni Muslims (a branch of Islam). About one-fifth are Shi'ite Muslims, most of whom live in Iran.

Many Kurds belong to Sufi (Islam mystic) brotherhoods. They meet to chant and dance together to worship Allah. The Sufi brotherhoods are very important in Kurdish village life. There are about 1 million Kurdish 'Alawis (a secretive faith based on and distinct from Islam) in Turkey, and 40,000 to 70,000 Yazidis mostly in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Yazidism is a small religion that combines aspects of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. A very few Kurds are Christian.

6 • MAJOR HOLIDAYS

The most important Kurdish holiday is the Nawruz, or Persian New Year. It is celebrated at the time of the spring equinox, or first day of spring (March 21). There are special foods, fireworks, dancing, singing, and poetry recitations. Spring flowers (such as tulips, hyacinths, and pussy willows) are cut, new clothes are worn, and pottery is smashed for good luck. Families spend the day in the country, enjoying nature and the fresh growth of spring. During the thirteen days after Nawruz, families visit each other and visit the graves of dead relatives. Everyone tries to resolve any conflicts or misunderstandings that may be carried from the year before.

Even though most Kurds are longer nomads, they continue to celebrate important dates associated with that way of life. These include lambing time, celebration before moving the herds to summer pastures, shearing time, and the time of return to the village in the fall. Islamic holidays vary in importance among individual Kurds.

7 • RITES OF PASSAGE

The greatest occasion for celebration in a Kurd's life is marriage. Kurds marry young, at about seventeen or eighteen. The bride is dressed in gold bracelets, earrings and necklaces, and a new dress and shoes. The highlight of the wedding is the public procession from the home of the bride to the home of the groom.

After they reach the groom's home, the veiled bride enters the house and sits quietly in a corner of the room while the guests feast and dance outside. In some areas, there are horse-riding displays.

Parents and relatives hold a feast for the birth of a child, especially the birth of a first son. Most boys are circumcised during the first week after birth. In some more traditional Kurdish communities, boys are circumcised at age ten, followed by a huge party.

8 • RELATIONSHIPS

The Kurds are very family oriented. Family lines are patriarhcal—traced along the father's ancestry. Marriage between first cousins is common. A man often marries the daughter of one of his father's brothers. This practice is common among many cultures.

Tribal leadership among the Kurds is inherited. However, local leaders are chosen for their personal qualities, including integrity, generosity, and skill at dealing with government officials.

9 • LIVING CONDITIONS

Most Kurds live in small villages in remote mountain regions. A typical Kurdish house is made of mud-brick with a wooden roof. In the summer, Kurds sleep on the roof where it is cooler. Some homes have under-ground rooms to use in the winter to escape the cold. There is rarely indoor plumbing. Water is carried into the house in jars and cans from a central village well. There is no central heating.

The few remaining nomadic Kurds live in tents made of blackened hides. Extended family members cluster their tents together in small communities.

There are only a few Kurdish towns: Diyarbakir (a sort of capital for Kurds) and Van in Turkey; Erbil and Kirkuk in Iraq; and Mahabad in Iran.

10 • FAMILY LIFE

Few Kurds marry non-Kurds. Couples may live with one or the other's family after marrying, but they have rooms of their own and separate housekeeping arrangements. Men and women both work in the fields, and boys and girls start helping at an early age.

Kurdish women were traditionally not veiled except during parts of the marriage ceremony. They freely associated with men in most gatherings. If there was no qualified male heir, a woman could become a tribal leader. Even today, living in countries with conservative Islamic governments, many Kurdish women fight alongside the men as peshmerga (guerilla fighters). More than 1,000 peshmerga are women. The radical Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) encourages freedom for women.

11 • CLOTHING

Traditionally, Kurdish women wore colorful skirts and blouses. Men wore baggy, colorful pants with a plain shirt having very full sleeves, which were tied at the elbow. Bright-colored vests and sashes (often red) were worn over the shirt. A man wore a blue silk turban on his head, and often completed his costume with a dagger worn at the waist. Traditionally, nomadic Kurdish men shaved their heads and wore long moustaches. Women wore bright, colorful, heavily embroidered clothing.

Traditional dress is becoming rare. Kurds generally dress like the people of the countries where they live. In Iran, women must wear a cloth covering their hair and clothes. In Turkey, on the other hand, the government has banned women from covering their hair in universities and public jobs. Women there are required to wear more Western-style clothing. In Iraq, men wear woolen coats and vests, checkered head-scarves, and baggy pants. Women wear the Muslim-style dress, often with baggy trousers underneath. The traditional Kurdish shoe, the klash, is a soft crocheted mocassin with a flexible sole.

12 • FOOD

Bulghur (cracked wheat) used to be the staple food for Kurds. Rice is becoming more popular. The Kurdish diet includes a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. Cucumbers are especially common. In the valleys where grapes are grown, raisins and grape jam are common. Meat is only eaten on special occasions. The usual beverage is tea. Kurdish specialties include a type of wafer bread eaten for breakfast, and any kind of grain cooked in whey.

A recipe for a flatbread appears on the next page.

Recipe

Nane Casoki
(Bulghur Bread)

Ingredients

• 2 cups bulghur (cracked wheat)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ½ cup onion, finely chopped
• 2 cups boiling water
• 2 cups unbleached white flour

Directions

1. Combine the bulghur, salt, and onion.
2. Pour the boiling water over the mixture and let stand for 30 minutes.
3. Put in a food processor and process for about 20 seconds.
4. Add 1 cup of flour and process again until it is a smooth texture.
   (You can also work the flour in by hand, if you do not have a food processor.)
5. Turn the mixture out onto a well-floured surface and knead it, adding flour as necessary to keep the dough from sticking, for about 3 to 4 minutes.
6. Cover the dough and let it rest for at least 15 minutes, or up to 3 hours.
7. Place a large baking sheet (or two small ones) on the bottom rack of the oven, leaving an inch of space between the sheet and the walls of the oven. Preheat the oven to 450°f.
8. After the dough has rested, divide it into 8 pieces and flatten each piece on the well-floured surface.
9. With a rolling pin, roll each piece of dough to a very thin round about 8 to 10 inches in diameter.
10. Place the bread on the baking sheet and bake for 1½ to 2 minutes. Turn the bread over and bake for another minute, or until the bread begins to brown around the edges.

Note: For crispier bread, increase baking time until the bread is spotted with brown all over.

Wrap the baked bread in a clean kitchen towel to keep warm while rolling out and baking the rest of the dough. Serve warm or at room temperature. Makes 8 loaves.

Adapted from Alford, Jeffrey, and Naomi Duguid. Flatbreads & Flavors: A Baker's Atlas. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1995, p. 175–76.

13 • EDUCATION

Schools are not widely available. When they are, classes are not taught in Kurdish, and so many children find school too difficult and drop out. The Kurdish literacy (the ability to read and write) rate is very low. Girls often do not attend school at all. Tradition holds that they are needed at home.

14 • CULTURAL HERITAGE

Kurdish culture has a rich oral tradition. Most popular are epic poems called lawj. These often tell of adventure in love or battle.

Kurdish literature first appeared in the seventh century ad. In 1596, Sharaf Khan, Emir of Bitlis, composed a history of the Kurds in Persian called the Sharafnama. Almost one hundred years later, in 1695, a great national epic called the Memozin was written in Kurdish by Ahmed Khani.

Traditional music is played on flute, drums, and the ut-ut (similar to a guitar). The music of Sivan Perwar, a Kurdish pop music performer, was banned in Turkey and Iraq in the 1980s, so he left the region to live and work in Sweden.

15 • EMPLOYMENT

Most Kurds are farmers and sheep-and goat-herders. They sell products from their flocks such as leather, goat cheese, and wool. Women make carpets and cloth to sell at market. Some Kurds grow tobacco. Turkish Kurds grow cotton. A few mountain Kurds are still nomadic herders.

In towns, Kurds work as shopkeepers, plumbers, teachers, bankers, and so on. Kurds work as unskilled laborers in large Turkish cities, as well as in Baghdad and Mosul in Iraq, and Tehran in Iran. Some urban Kurds work as bricklayers, butchers, cattle dealers, and small traders. The oil fields in Turkey and Iraq have attracted many Kurdish workers in recent times. Those Kurds who are able to go abroad find a variety of jobs and send the money back home.

16 • SPORTS

Popular sports include soccer, wrestling, hunting and shooting, and cirit, a traditional sport that involves throwing a javelin while mounted on horseback. Camel-and horse-racing are popular in rural areas.

17 • RECREATION

Only men go out at night. They often sit at tea houses and cafes and play backgammon or dominoes. A favorite pastime is to listen to tapes or live singers at cafes. Singers have only recently been allowed to sing publicly in Kurdish.

18 • CRAFTS AND HOBBIES

Carpet-weaving is by far the most significant Kurdish folk art. Other crafts are embroidery, leather-working, and metal ornamentation. Kurds are especially known for copper-working.

19 • SOCIAL PROBLEMS

The greatest problem for the Kurds is the unwillingness of the nations in which they live to give them cultural independence. Kurds do not currently want an independent state. They only wish to be allowed to maintain their own language and culture.

During the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88), the government of Iraq engaged in genocide to stop the Kurds from fighting for Iran. Thousands of villages were destroyed and tens of thousands of Kurds were murdered and buried in mass graves. The Iraqi government also used nerve gas (purchased from European governments) against Kurdish civilians and Iranian troops. These horrible attacks killed thousands of civilians.

One of the worst massacres occurred in the Iraqi Kurd town of Halabja. The entire population of the town was killed. After the Persian Gulf War (1991), thousands more Kurds were forced into refugee camps. Some of these areas are now protected by the United Nations (UN).

Since 1991, the government of Turkey has attacked Kurdish civilian centers inside the UN-protected areas. Many thousands of Kurds have now fled to Iran. The government there is less hostile, but it has trouble supporting millions of refugees. To make matters worse, there is fighting even among Kurds. Two rival Kurdish groups have fought small wars over who truly represents the Kurdish people. Meanwhile, the Kurdish civilians continue to suffer.

20 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alford, Jeffrey, and Naomi Duguid. Flatbreads & Flavors: A Baker's Atlas. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1995.

Bulloch, John, and Harvey Morris. No Friends But the Mountains: The Tragic History of the Kurds. New York: Viking, 1992.

King, John. Kurds. New York: Thomson Learning, 1994.

Moss, Joyce, and George Wilson. Peoples of the World: The Middle East and North Africa, 1st ed. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.

WEBSITES

Embassy of Turkey, Washington, D.C. [Online] Available http://www.turkey.org/turkey/, 1998.

Human Rights. The Kurds. [Online] Available http://www.humanrights.de/~kurdweb/children, 1998.

Kurds. [Online] Available http://www.itlink.se/lasse/Sol/Library/Struggle/kurds.html, 1998.

World Travel Guide, Turkey. [Online] Available http://www.wtgonline.com/country/tr/gen.html, 1998.