It's High Time for Statehood for Kurdish Nation-in Waiting!

I vividly recall the diatribes of the Baathists and Arab nationalists, during the course of which they even denied that the Kurds have  an ethnic identity of their own, instead asserting that they are actually Arabs! And if they did not know who they were, then we needed to "educate" them! But the important issue remains that the "rejectionists of today/pan-Arabists" rarely, if ever, support the establishment of a Kurdish state, and instead find themselves in the same bed with Mr. Sykes and Mr. Picot, who left both the Kurds and the Palestinians stateless after WW I.  One need not go so far back in history, however, to find examples of this penchant for collaboration: those same rejectionists remained silent about the recent gassing of Syrians, nor were they terribly concerned before that about the rapes and murders the Janjaweeds visited upon the men and women of Darfur. Nor for that matter, did these pan-Arabists utter any complaints about Saddam’s gassing of the Halabja Kurds during his war with Iran, or how he drove them into the mountains after his invasion of Kuwait in 1990-1991.

Some will say that this is the past, but the images of these atrocities remain alive and haunt the memories of many honest Arabs and Kurds. Watching the most recent Kurdish tragedies, including the latest 130,000 Syrian Kurds driven to flee their homeland in Syria for Turkey, little reassurance of even the possibility of a resolution appears to be forthcoming. With the non-Muslim Kurdish Yazidis subjected to genocidal war, horror continues to compound horror, making it past time to call for the establishment of a Kurdish state. As for those who still parrot the notions of Iraqi or Arab national unity, we invite them to listen to the eye witnesses, victims and non-victims, who point fingers not only at ISIS, but also at those who once loyally soldiered in the Iraqi Saddamist Baathist-pan-Arabist army. The images of fleeing Kurdish refugees from Iraq and Syria speak volumes about the devastation that has been visited upon the Kurdish nation-in-waiting.

--Elie Chalala 

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