The following article by Dr. Rashid Kardaghi contains truth which should also pertains to the Kurds. While everyone speaks of fairness, equal rights for all, and fair justice, in practice the mighty and the powerful claim them as theirs exclusively and deny them to those who have not been willing to kill, plunder and force others into submission. History of the Kurds is replete with instances when they have massacred and plundered the Assyrians driving them out of their homeland. They have been exclusively responsible for the scattering of the Assyrians in dozens of countries so that Kurds can claim their historic homeland as Kurdistan. Despite their sweat talk Kurds have been unwilling to allow the Assyrians (including Chaldeans and Syriacs) the right to have their own administrative center in in the plain of Nineveh where they can have some protection from oppression. Instead they use their military to terrorize the none Kurds into submission whenever possible, to deprive them of their rights.

While in the past Kurds massacred the Assyrians for the slightest of excuses they have learned in recent years to do it by shrewd tactics. It was primarily due to the Kurds efforts that members of the Chaldean Church were recognized as ethnically different than Assyrian in the new Iraqi constitution. Their divide and conquer tactics are intended to undermine the Assyrian rights in the region and eventually to force them out of their homeland. Dr. Rashid Kardaghi should preach to his own people about how they should stop oppressing others and not turn Iraq into a dog eat dog country.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

KurdishMedia.com - By Dr Rashid Karadaghi

One of the most hotly contested issues during and after the writing of the Iraqi Constitution in the last few months has been the "identity" of Iraq. The issue of Iraq's "identity" and the lack of any kind of consensus about it symbolizes, in a large sense, what is fundamentally wrong with the country itself. A person's "identity" is, perhaps, the most important thing about him and this is no less true of a country. Yet, eighty years after its formation as a country, Iraq is still not sure of its identity -- and it will never be any more sure than now as long as this artificial construct is kept together by force, against all logic and reason. What is most shocking is that, instead of choosing the obvious solution to the country's perennial problems, the powers to be, East and West, and short-sighted Iraqis keep falling into the same trap by repeating the same terrible mistakes of the past eighty years by insisting on keeping this identity-less country intact even though it has been at continuous war with itself from the very beginning and a source of pain and suffering for all its inhabitants.

The heated debate over this British-made, failure-from-the- start, country's identity within and beyond Iraq's borders is yet another proof ­ if we needed any -- that Arab imperialism is alive and well. Iraqi Arabs and their brethren everywhere want to call Iraq an "Arab" country in the Constitution, thereby denying the Kurds, the Turkmans, the Assyrians, the Chaldeans and others the right to be known by their true identity. The Arabs want to force the Arab identity on the non-Arabs, as they have been doing for hundreds and hundreds of years first with the sword and now with more effective weapons, and can't understand why these "ungrateful" non-Arabs don't react with pride and gratitude for being assimilated in Arab identity.

The proposed Iraqi Constitution, as approved by the Iraqi parliament, states that "The Arab people of Iraq are part of the Arab nation," which is a true reflection of the ethnic composition of the country. But this wasn't good enough for, among others, Amr Moussa, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, an organization which is about as effective as the UN, for he declared that this was "a very grave matter" and demanded an explanation from Iraqi lawmakers and politicians as to why this serious violation of the right of the Arabs to impose their identity on everyone else was allowed to pass. Ridiculous as it may seem, some Arabs believe that if you speak Arabic, you are an Arab! Thus, according to this distorted way of thinking, the Kurds, the Turkmans, the Assyrians, and the Chaldeans in Iraq (and other natives of other lands occupied by Arab invaders throughout history) are all part of the Arab world!

And as if it weren't enough for Arabs to plunder our land and use Kurdistan's natural resources to buy the most lethal weapons known to man to commit genocide against our people, they are trying, as they have been for centuries with their Turkish and Persian partners in crime, to deprive us of our very essence, of what makes us who we are, of our identity as Kurds. To deprive someone of his name and his identity and force him to be who he is not, is a serious crime by any standard. One wonders how many (Iraqi) Arabs would accept being forced to change their identity. Yet, Arabs all over are angry at the Kurds because they want to maintain their identity and reject the erroneous notion that they are part of the Arab world. I was flabbergasted to hear even a liberal Arab friend, who always says that he is for the right of the Kurds to self-determination, saying the other day that the Kurds should not object to the Arab demand of calling Iraq an "Arab" country because this is a "sensitive" issue for the Arabs! So, we must all be very careful not to offend the baseless sensitivities of this chosen people even if it means trampling on the most fundamental rights of others! When push comes to shove, we know where these people's loyalties lie ­ even the presumably most open-minded of them.

The Kurdish people's predicament has always been that those who have been occupying their homeland for centuries, in one degree or another, are of a special breed. It goes without saying that there are no benign occupiers, but the occupiers of Kurdistan exceed all others in their viciousness, their cruelty, and the degree of their denial of "the other." I have yet to meet, read about or hear a single Arab, Turk, or Persian who believes even half-way that the Kurds are entitled to as much rights as their own people. If anyone thinks that this is an unfair characterization of these three nations, let him produce one name that does not fit this mold.

So-what is in a name? Very simply --- EVERYTHING! Forty-five years ago, the late Ibrahim Ahmed wrote in a seminal article," The Arab people of Iraq are part of the Arab nation and the Arab areas of Iraq are part of the Arab homeland. By the same token, the Kurdish people of Iraq are part of the Kurdish nation and the Kurdish areas are part of the Kurdish homeland." He was prosecuted by Iraqi authorities for daring to express this opinion even though it is an expression of the reality and the truth of the ethnic and geographic composition of Iraq.

The situation hasn't changed much almost half a century after that article was written, for if it were up to Amr Moussa and millions of his brethren, those who wrote in the draft Constitution that " The Arab people of Iraq are part of the Arab nation" would be prosecuted today, too. But since this is not an option today, thank God, the forces of darkness, whose one goal in life is Arab domination and strangulation of others, have been trying desperately and deviously to expunge from the draft Constitution the sentence which expresses no more than only half the truth about Iraq's ethnic composition, for what the draft Constitution neglected to say was that "The Kurdish people in Iraq are part of the Kurdish nation."

What the Kurds must learn from all of this is what they should have learnt from millions of other similar situations, which is, that they cannot depend on the good will of others, least of all those who are occupying their homeland and have committed genocide against them, to do what is right and what is fair. Kurdish identity must be decided by Kurds themselves, by the millions of Kurds ­ 98% of the voters in Kurdistan to be exact ­ who voted in last January's Referendum for an independent Kurdistan, not by those whose sole mission in life seems to be denying the Kurds everything, including their name.