11-19-2015, 12:10 AM -
(11-18-2015, 04:26 PM)Donald Dank Wrote: Add in the fact that Kurdistan makes up something like 1/5th of Turkey's territory, there are a lot of reasons why Kurdistan's neighbours/constituant nations don't want it to be a country.
To follow on from what Scott said, the middle East was carved up and the mainly mountainous Kurdish regions were viewed as buffer territory. Under the Ottomans there was no need for the kurds to view themselves in a nationalistic sense, the territory and its people were recognised if not respected, at least they werent divided, possibly with the exception of the strip on Iranian territory, i dont know where that was at that point in history.
Yet buffer territories can also become buffer states, to everyone's benefit.
In Uruguay, I was delighted to discover streets named after George Canning (subject of my PhD), and Lord John Ponsonby. As British envoy in first Buenos Aires, then Brazil, Ponsonby played an enormous, pivotal role in establishing Uruguay as a buffer state between Brazil and Argentina, to the benefit of British commerce. His legacy, above all, is why Britain is generally very popular in Uruguay even now.
And before folk laugh - "fuck sake Lawson, do you have to bring Uruguay into everything?" - nineteenth century Latin America was just constant war. Kill or be killed. Google The War of the Triple Alliance - especially its impact on defeated Paraguay - for more on that. Yet in the twentieth century, once the period of nationalist expansionism (especially from Argentina) ended, the continent became one of the most peaceful in the world. Why is that? Because it doesn't have unnatural countries full of wildly differing ethnicities forced together against their will.
Is it really so impossible for Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria to realise that if the Kurds are granted a state, they'll no longer be some Fifth Column in their countries? Events in recent years in the Middle East have to tell them that: not because of the Kurds, but because of Sunni and Shia fighting each other for territory which only remained intact for a century thanks to a whole series of brutal dictators who did sweet fuck all for their people.
This post was last modified: 11-19-2015, 12:12 AM by shaun.lawson.