THE KURDISH MAP

One of my favorite lecture topics is “The Map of the Future.”  In a talk I’ve given to business groups in a number of countries and all over the US, I put a big map of the world up and start describing the map’s illusions.

I point to Russia, the largest country in the world at 17 million square kilometers (msk, 6.5 million square miles or msms); Canada, the second largest at 10msk, 3.8msm; and Greenland, the world’s largest island at 2.2msk, 0.85msm – all totaling 29.2 million square kilometers or 11.3 million square miles.  Spread out across the top of the map, they look like they take up half the world.

Africa, squat and compact athwart the Equator, looks dwarfed in comparison.  Yet in reality, you could fit all of Russia, Canada, and Greenland combined into Africa with room to spare – for Africa exceeds 30 million square kilometers or 11.7 million square miles.

The flat world map is a lie.  Gigantic Greenland is actually the same size as Saudi Arabia.  If you wanted to go directly in a straight line from Gibraltar to the Bering Straits, you wouldn’t go across Russia, you’d go across the North Pole.

“Now let’s talk about another set of lies and illusions on this map,” I continue.  “These lines drawn all over, which governments of countries call their ‘borders,’ and claim they actually exist.  They are desperate to keep the illusion that they exercise ‘sovereignty’ within their ‘borders’ and will do anything to preserve the illusion.”

The Kurds, at 40 million the largest ethnic group in the world without their own country, are in the geopolitical business of exposing such illusions.  To see how, let’s take a look at two maps, one from the past, another from a proposed future.

This is how the Middle East and South Asia looked in 1912, on the eve of World War One:

It’s a map of empires, the Russian and Chinese above British India’s with small buffer states of Nepal and Bhutan between it and China, Afghanistan as a buffer state from Russia, the Ottoman in green, and the Persian.  “Arabia” designates a geographical area, not a country, inhabited by a welter of tribes, sheikhdoms, and emirates.

Focus on the green of the Ottoman Turks.  Note that it encompasses all of present-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, the entire west coast of what is now Saudi Arabia (a region known as the Hejaz) to the British protectorate of Yemen at the bottom, and the entire Saudi east coast (known as Hasa and Qatif) to the British protectorate of the Qatar peninsula.

It was the breakup of the defeated Ottoman Empire by the victorious British and French after WWI, plus the armed seizure of the Hejaz, Hasa and Qatif by Saudi Sheikh Abdul Aziz, that created the map of the Middle East we know today.

It’s a map in which the Kurds have no place. 25 million in Turkey are called “Mountain Turks,” their very existence as a people denied.  8 million denied freedom in Iran, 3 million denied freedom in Syria.  Only in Iraq have the 5 million Kurds who live there achieved a semblance of freedom, however tenuous and dependent upon American protection.

So it was with intense interest that I studied this map displayed on the wall of the office of the governor of the province of Soran in Iraqi Kurdistan:

I never got a clear answer from the governor as to who drew the map, but there was no doubt he was proud to display it.  Its creator has a good understanding of the historical and ethnic map of the entire area.  The two keys are that countries to be created or expanded are labeled in black, while countries to be contracted (losing territory to the former) are labeled in red.

Pakistan is shrunk at the expense of Afghanistan and the creation of an independent Baluchistan.  Yet Afghanistan also loses its western province of Herat to Iran.

Iran suffers a net loss, however, with its southeast corner (which is in fact inhabited by Baluchis) taken by Baluchistan, much of its Persian Gulf coast (inhabited by Shia Arabs called Ahwazis) taken by a new Arab Shia state, plus its far northwest (inhabited by Azeris) which goes to an expanded Azerbaijan.

Iraq has broken apart into Sunni Iraq and Shia Iraq with Baghdad as a city-state.  The new Arab Shia state not only encompasses Ahwazi lands now in Iran but Hasa and Qatif provinces of Saudi Arabia – for they are inhabited by Shias, who are despised by their Saudi Wahhabi-Sunni rulers.

What happens to Saudi Arabia is remarkably similar to what I proposed back in January 2004 in The Soviet Saudi Union, which provides a concise history of how the Saudi colonial empire was created.

The Kurdish Map is similar because its based on that history – and thus Yemen is depicted as gaining back its provinces of Asir, Najran, and Jizan that Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud stole in 1926.  The Hejaz is liberated, for Abdul Aziz stole it in 1925.

For the Kurds, the main event of the Kurdish Map is of course the creation of an independent Kurdistan.  It’s composed of all of northern Iraq including Kirkuk, the Kurdish lands of western Iran, and all Turkish Kurdistan – fully one-quarter of present-day Turkey all the way to the border with Georgia.

The Kurdish Map is A Map of the Future, not The Map of the Future, for there is no such thing as the future, only a large number of possible futures, and only a small number of which have a real chance of becoming reality.

But whether the Kurdish Map will become reality or not, or to what extent, is not the most important issue.  The real issue is how this map can force people to see the unreality of the map of this part of the world as it exists today.

The borders of the present-day map of the Middle East are illusory.  They are not fixed in time, they did not exist 100 years ago and they certainly will not exist 100 years from now.  They most probably will undergo very significant alteration 10 or 20 years from now – or sooner.

No matter how much governments may try to desperately halt the turning of the page in The Historical Atlas, the page turns, new countries emerge, others vanish into history’s dust.

Already the current map is obsolete, because there is a de facto Free Kurdistan in northern Iraq right now today.  It is due to the Kurds never giving up their struggle for freedom.  Never.

Just a few miles from the Turkish border, there is a Kurdish town called Amedi.  Built on a mesa above towering cliffs, it is 4,000 years old:

In an arch thousands of years old, the symbol of an ancient Kurdish deity, the Peacock King, is carved in stone:

To the south of Amedi is the holy city of Lalish, and the great temple of the Peacock King, worshipped to this day by the Yezidis and Zoroastrians, practitioners of the original Kurdish religion;

At the entrance to the Sacred Spring, there is a carved black snake, revered by Yezidis because it was a black snake that stuck itself into a hole in Noah’s Ark and saved humanity:

Although the Kurds adhere to their ancient ways, they also practice religious tolerance.  All around Amedi there are Yezidi villages, Moslem villages, and Christian villages.  Listening to the congregation singing Christian hymns in this church was a moving experience:

And right in the middle of Amedi is a glaring intrusive reminder of how tentative Kurdish freedom is – two small Turkish tanks and a small contingent of Turkish soldiers:

The captain of the Turkish soldiers spoke some English and admitted they were from Turkey.  “Why are you here?” I asked.  “Why are you where you are not welcome, where you do not belong, where it is not your country?”

He gave no answer, and when I pulled out my camera to take their picture, they all hid their heads like women under a burqah.

The Turks, as we most recently discussed last February in Turkey’s Phony Invasion of Iraq, use the PKK Turkish Kurd guerrillas as an excuse to intimidate Iraqi Kurdistan.  (Note, by the way, how close Amedi – spelled in the Arabic version of Al Amadiyah on the map in the “Phony” article – is to Turkey.)

Every Kurd you meet in Iraq, from a guy on the street to provincial governors, despises the PKK.  The President of the Kurdish Parliament, Adnan Mufti, confirmed to me that certain Turkish generals were in business with the PKK running heroin – as part of the drug conduit from the Taliban in Afghanistan to the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guard) in Iran to the PKK/Turkish Army units in Turkey to Europe.

Mr. Mufti also told me about a friend of his, a Kurdish businessman who lives in Istanbul.  “There are over three million Kurds in Istanbul,” he said.  “My friend  wants to live in Istanbul where he has a good business.  He has no desire to move to Diyarbakir (the main city of Turkish Kurdistan).”  Meaning:  If Kurds are allowed to lead normal lives and are not persecuted, they will be part of Turkey and not break it apart.

But if they aren’t?  Most Turks hate the Kurds because they see them as a threat, a hatred fomented by the Turkish government as a way to generate a frenzied Turkish nationalism.

Which is why there is so little or no effort to make Turkish Kurds welcome and be a part of Turkey.  Which is why Turkey is someday likely to be the remnant it is shown to be on the Kurdish Map.

The same can be said for how Iran treats its minorities, for the war Pakistan is waging against Afghanistan through the Taliban, for the structure of the Saudi Colonial Empire.  Take another look at the two maps above, both very different from the map of today.  Who could have predicted in 1912 that the map of then would look like that of the present?

No one can predict what the future map of the Middle East will look like.  It would be foolish to say that the Kurdish Map is even a semi-accurate depiction of that future map.

But it can be confidently predicted that the future map will look as different from the present one as the present one does from that of 1912.  The geopolitical tectonic plates are shifting, the political earthquakes that result will be vast and dramatic.  The Kurdish Map may turn out to be more accurate than we dare imagine.