Kurds’ fight for a nation long, futile

          
          Kurds' fight for a nation long, fntile
          The Sun ( 1837-1 985); Aug 26, 1979; PruQuest Histuricut Newspupers: Baltimere Sue, The (1t37-198e
          pg. A2
          Kurds' light
          for a nation
          long, futile
          From their mountain strongnotos.
          Kurdish tribesmen have been fighting In-
          truders for more than 2,000 years.
          Their warrior qualities were recorded
          by Xenophon, - whose army of Greeks
          (ought Its way through Kurdlstan in 400
          B.C. Yet their fight for a country of their
          own came close to rea lization only once,
          and briefly, after World War!.
          An ethnically distinct páople with their
          own language and culture, the Kurds have
          fought the Persians, the Mongols, the
          Turks, the Crusaders, the Arabs and the
          British. Against the Crusaders, one of the
          most famous Kurds, Saladin, left his mark
          on history. -
          Like the Persians, the Kurt are an
          Indo-European people rather than Arabic,
          They are related to the Persians, but the
          Kurt are distinct, with aquiline features.
          They are often tall, fairsklnned and blue-
          eyed.
          The misfortune of the Kurt was that
          as their stronger neighbors caned out
          territories with political boundaries, Kur
          distan, the land of the Kurds, was cut up
          too. Large pieces with sizable populations
          fell to 1raq ; and Turkey, and there
          are Kurdish SritiS in Syria and Soviet
          Armenia as well. 8a éd on a 1965 census,
          the total number of Kinds was put at
          seven million, but current estimates n an
          as high as twice that.
          For centuries, political divisions re-
          mained unimportant as the Kurds, a
          largely nomadic people, moved about
          freely with their herds, raised crops In ir-
          rigated valleys and fended off intruders.
          But with the closing of frontiers in recent
          decades, the Kurt rebelled, notably
          against the Iraqis and Iranians ,
          Having struggled for autonomy first
          agalust the SSk Turks and then the (it-
          toman Empire, the Kurds were•proinlsed
          their freedom in World War I , They rent-
          finned their demands at the Paris peace
          conference in 1919.
          The Treaty of Sevres in 1921 finally
          provided for the creation of an autono-
          inous Kurdlsb state But two years later,
          that accord was superseded by the Treaty
          of Lausanne. And by then the world once
          again chose to forget the question of the
          Kurt and their nationalism.
          Alter that, the Kurt rose against the
          Turks in 1920 and again, in 1930. Both
          times they were militarily suppressed, as
          they were later In and Iraq.
          Fighting against e troops of
          began in 1941, when the Kurds took a
          tage of the no-man's land between the
          Soviet and British forces then occupying
          and proclaimed a . “Free Kurdish
          State” in the mountains of northwest l
          That uprishig, however, was no match for
          artillery and motorized infantry and was
          short-lived. The Iraqi Army put down
          Kurdish uprisings in the 1960's and again
          in 1975.
          New York Times News $ervive
          Reproduced with permission of the uupydght owner. Further repruductius prohibited wdhout perwissice.