The Shias in Iran won't let theirs secede from their country. The Turks won't let the Kurds anywhere form a separate nation. The Syrians will smash any Kurdish separatism within their borders.
And then we have what non-separatist Kurds have to say:
"Clinton, like Bush, is really using the Kurds to justify her own political ends"
Published on Wednesday, April 19, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Hillary Clinton and George Bush: No Friends of the Kurds
by Sureya Sayadi
When Hillary Clinton was at Brown University on April 8 giving a speech on “Women Leaders,” I accepted an invitation from students to join their protest. Why would I, a Kurdish woman, protest Hillary Clinton? Hillary Clinton is a great supporter of the war in Iraq, and like many others in the U.S. government, has used the suffering of the Kurdish people to prove the moral righteousness of the occupation. But Clinton, like Bush, is really using the Kurds to justify her own political ends, and refuses to address our real problems—lack of adequate services, corruption, continued human rights abuses in the region, and the fact that our refugees cannot yet return home. And all of these problems are exacerbated by the violence raging throughout the rest of Iraq that is due, in large part, to the presence of US troops.
<snip>
Many people, including George Bush and Hillary Clinton, have said that the Kurds are the big winners in the war in Iraq, the great success story. And while we are thankful to be free of Saddam and the Kurdish areas are more tranquil than the rest of Iraq, I think the recent unrest in Halabja exemplifies the betrayal many Kurds feel. Halabja was the city in which Saddam Hussein gassed more than 5,000 of my people in 1988. In a protest on March 16, 2006 against the corruption of the current government, demonstrators burned down a museum dedicated to the victims of the gassing. Though this may seem strange at first, the protesters were making the point that the city has never been properly rebuilt, that most of the people living there are still poor. The survivors, many of whom are coping with genetic mutations and psychological trauma, have inadequate access to health care, housing and other basic services.
The Kurdish government, portraying this incident as the work of fundamentalists, is trying to divert attention from the real problems—that the occupation of Iraq and the ensuing violence has left no time or money to concentrate on peoples’ needs. The 17-year-old Kurdish student who was shot in the chest point-blank by Kurdish guards was not a fundamentalist but a young man who cared about the well-being of his people. His name, by the way, was Kurdistan, and we should honor his death.
Kurds are also upset by one of the fundamental contradictions in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East: the U.S. propensity to condemn one country's human rights abuses while turning a blind eye to others. While the U.S. government supposedly supports Kurdish rights by deposing Saddam, it still gives millions of dollars in aid to Turkey, a country actively repressing its own Kurdish population.
No one embodies this paradox more than Hillary Clinton. I remember watching Clinton on Kurdish TV as she visited my hometown of Kirkuk in February 2005. She arrived surrounded by Kurdish guards and helicopters, and she sounded very concerned about the fate of my people. Yet, she also visited Turkey and expressed her admiration for Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, for his great contribution to humanity and praised Turkey for preserving cultures. That is like praising the American founding fathers for exterminating the Native Americans. Ataturk was the first person who banned the Kurdish language in Turkey, cutting out the tongues of those who spoke it in public.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0419-20.htm
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