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Cartography of the Kurdish Diaspora

Khalid Khayati

The Kurds are primarily divided between the neighboring countries of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, but there are additional Kurdish populations scattered throughout central Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Western Europe, Australia, North America and many metropolitan areas such as Istanbul, Baghdad, Tehran, Izmir and Ankara (van Bruinessen 1995; 1999; 2000). However, the outcome of this dispersion is the emergence of a considerable Kurdish global diaspora that today marks its presence beyond and within the borders of many states both quantitatively and qualitatively. Diasporan Kurds maintain imaginary, symbolic and above all practical ties with their homeland of origin not only through the transnational political, social, economic and cultural practices that they maintain across the borders of many nation-states but also through the diasporic accounts that they produce in different forms. The meta-narrative of exiled Kurds, which is based mainly on the experience of repression, forced displacement, genocide, exile, and so on, constitutes in one way or another the collective memory of the Kurdish diaspora, which in turn generates political mobilization and the practice of long-distance nationalism (Anderson 1998) among the Kurds. The formation of the Kurdish diaspora has both a pre-modern and a modern history (Hassanpour & Mojab 2004).

First, it is important to underline that the presence of the Kurds outside the geographical area of the Middle East is not a new phenomenon. During the last 500 years the Kurdish tribes who lived under the aegis of both the Persian and the Ottoman empires have often been the subject of manipulative displacement or forced deportation, principally because of their specific position in the conflicts between these two classic rivals. Habitually, the old empires used to resolve their differences with the Kurdish tribes through various forms of tacit agreement. The attribution of autonomous spaces to them was an effective method of preventing major conflict. But, in spite of these regulatory mechanisms, a number of Kurdish clans that were considered by the central empires to be “troublemakers” were deported to Central Anatolia and the region of Khorasan in the north-eastern part of current Iran during the 18th and 19th centuries, where they were given land, cattle and other forms of recompense. These resettled Kurds have, in spite of all odds, been more or less successful in preserving their language and unity (Bozarslan 1997).

By the beginning of the 20th century “entire tribes had been relocated outside Kurdistan in Iranian provinces or regions including Baluchistan, Fars, Guilan, Kashan, Khorasan, Mazandaran and Qazvin” (Bahtuyi 1998, quoted in Hassanpour & Mojab 2004: 215). During the genocide of the Armenian population that was perpetrated by Ottoman Turkey between 1915 and 1923, about 700,000 Kurds were forced to move to western Turkey. Due to deportation, labor migration and flight from the war, large numbers of Kurds have migrated to other parts of the states of which they were citizens (Hassanpour & Mojab 2004: 217).

During the period of 1991–94, more than 3,000 Kurdish villages were razed to the ground by the Turkish military forces in an effort to, as the official language put it, “root out PKK sympathizers”. This destructive act created more than three million internal refugees, who resettled in major Kurdish and Turkish cities all over the country (Wahlbeck 1999; Berruti et al. 2002). Today millions of Kurds live in such cities as Istanbul, Izmir, Mersin, Adana, Ankara, Konya, Antalya (Turkey), Baghdad, Basra, Kut, Baquba (Iraq), Tehran, Ahwaz, Hamadan, Tabriz, Qazvin (Iran), and Damascus and Aleppo (Syria) (van Bruinessen 2000). The number of the exiled Kurds in Istanbul was considerably increased, and by the end of the 20th amounted to the largest urban concentration of this population (Andrews 1989; Bozarslan 1997; Hassanpour & Mojab 2004).

Moreover, displacement of Kurds occurred within Kurdish territory and across the borders of the states in which they resided. The repression that followed the rebellions of the 1920s and 1930s caused the displacement of a large number of Kurds, who resettled in north-eastern Syria. Between the years 1974 and 1975 and during Iraq’s genocidal campaigns of 1987–88, thousands of Iraqi Kurds fled to other parts of Kurdistan in Iran and Turkey. This cross-border movement among the Kurds is consistent with the specific geographic location of the Kurdish land and the trans-state character of the Kurdish political movement (van Bruinessen 2000).

In the former Soviet Union, Kurds were considered as a separate ethnic group, although no particular territory was attributed to them. During the 19th century, thousands of Yezidi Kurds migrated to Russian-controlled Transcaucasia. Under Stalin a large number of them were deported to central Asia and Siberia (van Bruinessen 2000: 3). Nevertheless, the Soviet census of 1979 recorded 150,000 Kurds in the USSR, but Kurdish nationalists give somewhat inflated estimates and much higher numbers (van Bruinessen 1995). For instance, according to Ismet Chérif Vanly, the number of Kurds in the former Soviet Union in 1990 was about 450,000, of which 270,000 lived in the three Transcaucasian Republics (Vanly 1992). Areas of the Caucasus and Turkmenistan have been traditional places of Kurd settlement for centuries. In a period 1923–929, there was an autonomous region called Kurdistana Sor (Red Kurdistan) in Azerbaijan. It consisted of about 25 villages in an area of 5,200 square kilometers situated between Armenia and the previously autonomous region of Nagorno Karabakh, with Lachin as the main town. This autonomous region was dissolved, and later many Kurds from Azerbaijan were deported to Krasnodar (Russia) (Müller 2000).

In 1989 20,000 (out of 40,000) returned to Azerbaijan. The old Kurdistana Sor area was disputed in the Armenian–Azeri war for Nagorno Karabakh, and it is now mainly under Armenian control. According to Kurdish estimates, there were more than 250,000 Kurds in Azerbaijan in 1988 (cf. Vanly 1992; van Bruinessen 1995; Müller 2000; Hassanpour & Mojab 2004).

Moreover, there are several pockets of Kurdish population throughout Armenia, mostly in the north-west part of the country. Their number has been estimated to be around 50,000. In Georgia are about 34,000 Kurds in the capital Tbilisi, where there is a Kurdish quarter as well. In both Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan there are several villages with significant numbers of Kurds. In Kazakhstan the Kurds have already obtained the right to use their languages in schools.

According to van Bruinessen, the Soviet Kurds have, through their printed media and radio broadcasts (Kurdish radio from the Armenian capital Yerevan), played a major role in the development of modern Kurdish culture and the national awareness of the Kurds in Kurdistan (van Bruinessen 2000: 3-4).

The collapse of the Soviet Union, which was followed by substantial political and social crises, generated significant population movements among the Kurds. As a result, thousands of Kurds from Georgia, Armenia and Russia left their homes and moved to west European countries.

The second important phase of the diaspora formation is the arrival of the Kurds in western Europe, North America and Australia. This phase, which is characterized by the arrival of thousands of Kurdish immigrants, refugees and their families in Western societies, can be explained not only by modern immigration processes, which follow essentially the classical North–South pattern, but also the inauspicious political and social conditions that prevail in Kurdistan. In other words, the uprooting and the resettlement of Kurds in the new diaspora were generated by two main events. First, the economic boom of Western Europe in the 1960s recruited a large number of Kurds as “guest workers” to work mainly in Germany and other western European countries. Second, the ongoing coercive assimilationist project that led to increasing Kurdish resistance, including armed conflict in Iraq (intermittently from 1961 to 2003), Iran (1967 to 1968 and 1979 to the present), and Turkey (1984 to the present), the involvement of Western powers in these conflicts and finally interstate conflicts (Iran–Iraq from 1980 to 1988, and Iraq–Kuwait from 1990 to 1991) which turned the area into an active and enduring war zone, are among other events that produced huge refugee and migratory movements among the Kurds (Hassanpour & Mojab 2004; Emanuelsson 2005).

Prior to the Second World War, a small group of individuals, limited primarily to male members of the Kurdish aristocracy, came to Europe to conduct sporadic political and cultural activities. A few intellectuals and students traveled to Western Europe just after the First World War – for example, the famous Kurdish intellectual and dissident, Kamuran Bedr-Khan, who worked at the Sorbonne in Paris. There he published the Bulletin du Centre d’Études, which was ran from 1948 to 1951. The Bedr-Khan family contributed largely to ethno-national awareness among Kurds in Turkey. Thanks to their efforts, the first Kurdish newspaper, Kurdistan, was published in Cairo in 1898. Later, as a result of Ottoman government pressure, the paper had to move to Geneva and then to Folkestone, Britain. After the Second World War, the first group of students, mainly from Iraqi Kurdistan, arrived in different eastern and western European universities. Subsequently, a Kurdish Student Organization was founded in Europe in the 1950s. This type of migratory movement among the Kurds took place in moderate numbers after the end of the war until 1965 (Hassanpour & Mojab 2004: 217–218, see also van Bruinessen 1999; 2000; Sheikhmous 2000).

Larger groups of Kurdish immigrants started to arrive in Europe after 1965. This period was characterized by substantial movement of Kurds abroad as workers, students and candidates of family reunification, from all parts of Kurdistan but also from other areas such as Lebanon and the Caucasus. As a result of the economic boom of Western Europe in the 1960s, a large number of Kurds were recruited as “guest workers” in Germany and, on a smaller scale, in Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, the United Kingdom, France and Sweden. By the end of the 1990s Germany hosted Europe’s largest Kurdish population. Their number is estimated at about 500,000. Furthermore, there are today significant Kurdish immigrant and refugee populations in North America, Australia, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Norway, Finland, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and United Arab Emirates (van Bruinessen 2000; Berruti et al. 2002).