Many people who follow the Middle East know that the Kurds are the largest nation in the world without a state. Few ever ask the obvious next question: why? As a Kurd, I owe the world an honest answer. There are three.
The first is that Kurds were not allowed one. Look at a true map of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement. At the time, Russian troops already held eastern provinces of Kurdistan in today's Iran: Urmia and Mahabad, and as far south as Kermanshah. On the Ottoman side, it was to take the provinces of Erzurum, Van, and Bitlis, the heart of northern Kurdistan.
France was to take the west. Britain took the south, the Kurdistan region of Iraq today. They knew whose land they were partitioning in Sykes-Picot, and later in Lausanne, in 1924, when they were handing it over to Turks, Persians, and Arabs. Our land was partitioned at a time when others were being given nationhood.
The second answer is harder for a Kurd to say aloud: my people never truly grasped the idea of being a nation. We tend to use nation and ethnicity interchangeably, but they are two different concepts. A nation is formed around a state; a shared language, religion, or ethnic background will not by itself produce one.
For Kurds, life remains something "that happens to them", usually tragedy. Kurds appeal to the world for something to happen for them. It won't. It does not happen this way.
The third answer is that we have been misguided by the very parties that claim to lead us. Nations are represented by their institutions, in their capitals. Parties do not represent a nation, and neither do families or prominent individuals. The tragic reality is that today's Kurdish organizations are largely agencies for themselves. They use national rhetoric to appeal to the masses, but none acts for the nation:
• The KDP, which governs from Erbil, functions as a principality of patronage.
• The PUK operates as a localized city-state out of Sulaymaniyah.
• The PKK is a Hassan-i Sabbah-style movement, with Abdullah Ocalan and his inner circle resembling Sabbatai Zevi and his messianic followers.
• The KDPI and Komala, in Iran, represent a diluted Kurdish identity trapped within a fractured Iranian opposition.
A strong majority of the individuals inside these groups are truly national, but the organizations themselves are structurally hollow. When a world leader addresses "the Kurds," none of these groups can answer, because none of them is tied to the nation as a whole. My people lack representation as a people.
This is also why we have never built a representative body. We keep following leaders whose decisions bring destruction, and we treat them as divinities. A nation owns its institutions; it does not belong to its leaders. When leaders fail to show the right leadership, a nation treats them as equals and demands that they step down and develop political mechanisms that ensure that they do.
Kurds need political unity
What, then, would it take? First, rejecting the myth that a nation-state simply "emerges." A state is not an accident of nature. It is deliberate engineering, by founding figures around formulated principles. If those founders get the architecture right, it becomes a state.
For Kurds, it means agreeing first that we own our land and will rule over it, by law and by constitution. History gives that claim legitimacy, but not reality. The Kurdish people themselves have to be won over, and that is active work. It begins with founding documents that give leaders roles limited in time and in scope, because, as Lord Acton warned, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
A blueprint alone is not enough, though. No state has been founded without outside recognition and outside help. The United States beat the British, but not without the money and the fleet that came from France. Israel was born with the Balfour Declaration behind it, and was recognized by Washington and Moscow within days.
International relations is full of allies who would find it in their own interest to support a Kurdish blueprint. History is on the side of those who know who needs what, what they can offer them, and what they can get in exchange.
It is always said that Kurds are fierce fighters. That is exactly our problem. Fierce fighters win on the battlefield and lose at the table. When the winners of World War I partitioned our land, my grandfathers were not even aware of it, and perhaps that is why they were given no place at the table: they lacked unity and cohesion among themselves.
Today, redrawing the maps of the Middle East is once again on the agenda. Bismarck famously said that the statesman's task is to hear the footsteps of God marching through history, and to catch hold of His coattails as He passes.
If we do not want to miss the train once more, the time is now: to come together, own the land and the people, legitimize self-rule, delegitimize Ankara, Baghdad, Damascus, and Tehran's rule on Kurdish lands, and take a place at the table as the representative of the land and its people.
If this means facing our own, in addition to non-Kurdish rule on our land, let it be. Nature favors the bold, and so does politics.
Mem Husedin, based in Vancouver, is a commentator on Kurdish affairs, Kurdistan, and international politics.