May 11, 2004

Kurds. I posted this link at Living in Europe once upon a time, but it's worth revisiting. It "traces the history of the Kurds by presenting photographs and accounts by colonial administrators, anthropologists, missionaries, journalists, and others who have traveled to Kurdistan over the last century." Do go and see.

I haven't searched plep or metafilter, mainly because I can't imagine something this good has gone unposted.

posted by PF 20 years ago
  • Also, I enjoyed a whole lot of the other links I included in that post, too, so if you feel like looking those up, I'd feel flattered.
  • Which reminds me, I left the gas on...
  • Nice collection of links at Living in Europe -- why didn't I know you posted there? Must add it to bookmarks. But I was confused by your statement "Most Kurds are not bilingual in Turkish." If you meant within Turkey, surely that's not true, and if you meant overall, why would anyone think Iranian or Syrian Kurds would be bilingual in Turkish? The most important thing you omitted from your conspectus, as far as I'm concerned, is what I learned from reading A Modern History of the Kurds by David McDowall (the book to read if you want to know about the subject): the Kurds are responsible for most of their own problems. By this I don't mean they're bad, bad people, or that they deserve the awful things that have happened to them over the last century or so; I mean that they're congenitally unable to get their act together. They could very likely have gotten their own country after WWI if they'd agreed on a course of action and unified representation; instead they were riven by squabbles and let everybody else claim the spoils of war while they were fighting each other. That's the way it's always been -- the Barzani/Talabani thing is just the latest manifestation. If one guy looks like he's on the point of actually achieving something for the Kurds as a whole, a rival will sell out to the Brits or the Turks or Saddam or whoever's available in order to stop him. It's a sad and pathetic story, but fascinating in its way.
  • I actually don't post anymore at Living in Europe. I lost the address of the login page (do mt-users know what a standard suffix for a login page might be?), and also kind of lost interest in the site, not to mention I lost my European residency. The "most Kurds are not bilingual in Turkish" I put in because I found it in one of the links I posted, one about the Turkish Kurds. It surprised me enough that I thought it worth mentioning. Maybe it's wrong, but it was in print, I tell you! Thanks for the book recommendation, I'll have to find it. And that's an interesting perspective, I'd like to learn more. When I get back to Turkey, I have a few arms I'm going to twist to get me a job in Kurdistan somehow.
  • Fantastic links, keep 'em coming, Ho Munclie!
  • Plep at MeFi does Yezidis. See comments also.