Kurds and the forbidden fruit
By Dr Rashid Karadaghi
02 March 2007 (KurdishMedia)
Of all the responses to the feature story on the Kurds by the CBS 60 Minutes weekly program on Sunday, Feb.18th, that I have heard, the most poignant was what an American friend of mine told me that his wife had said after watching correspondent Bob Simon walking down a crowded street in Hawler (Erbil), the capital of Kurdistan, without any body armor or body guards, "Why aren't they [the Kurds] independent?"
but in Kurdistan! Would the world community have dared to push it under the rug as they have done in this case? Ironically, just as in the past, the Kurds still don't have the right to speak for themselves, and even when they occasionally do, as they did in the 2005 referendum, their voice is completely ignored by the world.
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Echoing the sentiments of all the occupiers of Kurdistan, be it in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, or Syria, the Turkish foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, is reported to have said a few days ago that the creation of an independent Kurdish state was a " pipe dream" and that "The gates of hell will open if such a state is declared." Well, the Kurdish response is, "Let them open, for this time the victimizer will burn with his victim, too!" The gates of hell have always been gaping for the Kurds, so there would be nothing new if Gul's dire prediction comes true. But
"I am tired of reading history; I want to make it," the student leader of the Free Speech Movement in America was quoted as saying in 1964. It is about time the Kurds stopped reading history and started making it! It is about time they stopped dreaming of independence and started living it! It is about time they stopped whispering about independence and started shouting it so loud to deafen anybody who would stand between them and their freedom.
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