Kurdistan: a difficult road to independence

Abstract

The article attempts to answer the question about the chances of sovereignty being obtained by the Kurdish community, one of the oldest communities in the world. The article is part of a monograph entitled Independent Kurdistan.  Challenges for the stabilisation of the region and the world, in which the same authors present a much broader approach to the problem, which has so far been omitted in reference literature and treated by political scientists and analysts of international relations superficially and without due attention. The basic question posed by the authors is: how is it possible that the Kurds, the second largest stateless nation in the globe after the Tamils, constituting a community of almost fifty million spread throughout the world and involved for decades in the work of self-determination, do not have their own state? The answer is much more difficult and requires analysis of the complicated situation in the Middle East and North Africa. This is the least stable region in the world, which suffered the painful effects of European colonialism after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. This period is the basic time cessation for the analysis of the Kurdish nation’s history as new national borders were determined at that time, often across cultures, traditions, religions and customs. The authors present prospects for the establishment of an independent Kurdish state and the framework for its functioning on the political map of the globe, primarily against the background of internal and international situation in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. These four countries, each inhabited by the Kurdish community, have been sharing one goal for decades, i.e. to effectively block the Kurds’ independence aspirations.