The Kurdish Spring

by David L. Phillips, Bernard Kouchner (Foreword)

Kurds are the largest stateless people in the world. An estimated thirty-two million Kurds live in "Kurdistan," which includes parts of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran―today's "hot spots" in the Middle East. The Kurdish Spring explores the subjugation of Kurds by Arab, Ottoman, and Persian powers for almost a century, and explains why Kurds are now evolving from a victimized people to a coherent political community. David L. Phillips describes Kurdish rebellions and arbitrary divisions in the last century, chronicling the nadir of Kurdish experience in the 1980s. He discusses draconian measures implemented by Iraq, including use of chemical weapons, Turkey's restrictions on political and cultural rights, denial of citizenship and punishment for expressing Kurdish identity in Syria, and repressive rule in Iran. Phillips forecasts the collapse and fragmentation of Iraq. He argues that US strategic and security interests are advanced through cooperation with Kurds, as a bulwark against ISIS and Islamic extremism. This work will encourage the public to look critically at the post-colonial period, recognizing the injustice and impracticality of states that were created by Great Powers, and offering a new perspective on sovereignty and statehood.

Genres: History

268 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 2015

About the author

David Phillips has 25 years of experience working on peace-building for the U.S. Department of State, the United Nations, academia, think-tanks, and as a foundation executive.

Phillips is currently Director of the Program on Peace-Building and Rights at Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights.

Phillips has served as Foreign Affairs Expert and as Senior Adviser to the Bureau of South and Central Asian (2011-2013), Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs (2002-2003), and the Bureau for European and Canadian Affairs (1999-2002) at the U.S. Department of State. He was also Senior Adviser to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Phillips has worked at academic institutions as Executive Director of Columbia University's International Conflict Resolution Program, Director of American University's Program on Conflict Prevention and Peace-building, Senior Fellow at Harvard University's Future of Diplomacy and Visiting Scholar at Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies, Phillips has also been a foundation executive, serving as President of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, Executive Director of the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, and as Director of the European Centre for Common Ground. Phillips held positions at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Atlantic Council, and the International Peace Research Institute of Oslo.

He has authored dozens of policy reports, and hundreds of articles in leading publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, and Foreign Affairs.

Reviews

[Grace · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book contains a pretty solid depiction of historical events in Kurdistan, but the analysis is absolute garbage. This book solidly presents a pro-US, pro-liberal democracy, anti-communist analysis. While there's not a single good word for Abdullah Öcalan in this book, Phillips is completely uncritical in his praise of the corrupt, plutocratic, collaborationist KRG government. There is also a complete whitewashing of the Rojava project; Phillips completely ignores the commune system, the cooperative economy, the revolutionary feminism, and the social ecology that make Rojava so unique and inspiring, and instead presents it as yet another liberal democratic project in Kurdistan. Another more minor quibble with the book is that it is full of typos and refuses to use diacritical marks necessary to correctly convey the Kurdish language. For example, Serê Kaniyê is rendered as "Sere Kainye" -- gibberish. If you're looking for an introduction to Kurdistan, look at all the revolutionary analysis that has flowered over the past decade, not this bourgeois clap-trap.

[The Nomadic Book Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

**** 1/4

Though largely from a US and state perspective, the book does a good job of reiterating the history of Kurds the past 100 years in a timeline that is concise while acknowledging aspects of the impact of the colonial past. I would have liked certain things to have been expounded upon, the purpose of the book wasn’t to give a complete kurdish history. For 240 pages, it’s a job well done and even having worked in Kurdistan the past year found this largely informative.

[علي دانشيان · Rating 3 out of 5]

فصل های مربوط به ایران تو ترجمه حذف شده ن!

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 3 out of 5]

review of
David L. Phillips's The Kurdish Spring
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - May 9, 2023

For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticK...

I can't claim to be particularly aware of world affairs in any thorough way. I didn't learn about Rojava & its potential interest to me as a fledgling autonomous zone until I read a review titled "The Rojava Revolution is a Women's Story" by Paul Buhle of Janet Biehl's Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War and the War on Isis in the fall 2022 issue of Fifth Estate. Almost immediately after reading that I read mention of Rojava again in Peter Lamborn Wilson's bk Conversazione. Those 2 reads led me to think I shd learn more. I'd been hearing for decades that the Kurds are a supressed people, particularly in Iraq. SO, I looked online for bks about the Kurds & Rojava & found a top 5 list provided by Janet Biehl. It might've been this list here: https://shepherd.com/best-books/rojav... . I bought 5 bks & decided to read them in chronological order from oldest to newest. They're all fairly contemporary. I started w/ The Kurdish Spring (copyright 2015, the Author's Note is dated October 1, 2014).

Let's start w/ the publisher, Transaction Publisher: Who are they?

"Transaction began on July 1, 1962, as part of a multiplex grant sponsored by the Ford Foundation at Washington University in St. Louis. From beginnings as a social science magazine, Transaction: Social Science and Modern Society (later Society), Transaction Publishers evolved into a full-fledged publisher of books (Transaction Books), journals (Transaction Periodicals Consortium), and eBooks.

"In 1969, Transaction relocated to the newly formed Livingston College, on the Livingston campus of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Many editors, authors, and advisors are drawn from the faculty. Close to 200 faculty members have been authors and editors of Transaction books.

"AldineTransaction was an imprint of Transaction Publishers. Formerly a division of Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Aldine Publishing Co. was acquired by Transaction in July 2004, and the books were then published under the imprint AldineTransaction. AldineTransaction published classic books in the fields of sociology, anthropology, economics, sociobiology, physical anthropology, and public policy. It acquired book lists from Precedent Publishers in 2009 and the Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research (CUPR) in 2011.

"Transaction published more than 6,000 titles." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transac...

In "Studies in Intelligence" vol 48, No 4, 2004, "The Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf Intelligence in Recent Public Literature Compiled and Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake This section contains brief reviews of recent books of interest to the intelligence professional and the student of intelligence." a review of "Cees Wiebes. Intelligence and The War In Bosnia 1992-1995 . New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 463 pages, index." ( https://www.cia.gov/static/c4224ff351... ) is provided. I find it interesting that there's an online source for learning about what publicly available bks might be of interest to intelligence officers. I never expected such a thing. I made a cursory search for "Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf Kurdish Spring" & didn't find anything. It wd've been very interesting to read a review of this bk from an "intelligence professional"'s POV.

My 1st impression was that the work is scholarly.. almost tooooo scholarly in the sense that its seeming objectivity seems suspect as a little bit tooooo pat. That + reading about the author made me wonder whether he's CIA. In Bernard Kouchner's Foreword it's written:

"David L. Phillips deciphers all the figures of contemporary threats and crisis. He also believes in the resources of our democracies, however threatened they may be. He knows how to turn international law into an instrument for peace. His capacity for analysis acts as a detector of conflicts to come.

"Rather than retreat to the quiet of his reading rooms, predicting the past and lamenting about done deeds, Phillips likes to travel to the most forlorn places on the planet, an active witness of current turmoil." - p ix

The above writer refers to Phillips as "The Activist Professor" & I reckon I've known at least one professor who fits that description - but to be "an active witness of current turmoil" involves more than being an activist, it means going into war zones, places not necessarily even easily entered w/o some sort of way of getting there. There are people who know how to get across borders surreptitiously & there are people who are able to get across them w/ official assistance. Phillips strikes me more as the latter.

From the Author's Note:

"President George H. W. Bush encouraged the Kurds to rebel against Saddam Hussein, but the Iraqi regime did not collapse. Bush turned a blind eye when Saddam launched a counterattack, driving more than 1.5 million Kurds across the borders of Iran and Turkey. Kurdist militia—peshmerga—tried to defend Kurds against Saddam's superior forces. The term perhmerga means "those who face death."" - p xi

& in my late 1990s days of activism against the sanctions against Iraq I heard an Iraqi speaker talk about this. The speaker sd that the US promised support for an insurrection so they went ahead w/ the rebellion only to find no US support forthcoming, leaving the rebels in a dramatically vulnerable position.

"In February 1992, Jalal Talabani convened a meeting of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Sulaimani. Karim and I made the long drive from Diyarbakir in Southeast Turkey across the Habur Gate into Iraqi Kurdistan. The road was covered with a long slick of black crude. Oil drums were strapped underneath the carriages of trucks, smuggling crude in exchange for food needed in Iraqi Kurdistan.

"The mood was celebratory. Saddam's forces had been expelled; Kurds enjoyed self-rule. They erupted in wild cheers when I called for freedom, democracy, and human rights (Azadi, Demokrasi, and Buji). At Masoud Barzani's meeting of the Kurdistan Deomcratic Party (KDP) in August 1993, I proposed that the United States establish a consulate general in Erbil. Kurds enthusiastically welcomed an "American flag in Kurdistan." The US Department of State set up a consulate in Erbil after Saddam was overthrown." - p xii

Now a mere "activist professor" wdn't have the power to make such a suggestion. But Phillips is described on the back-cover bio thusly:

"David L. Phillips is director of the Program on Peace-building and Rights at Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights. Phillips served as foreign affairs expert and senior adviser to the US Department of State during the administrations of presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama."

The above-mentioned Institute has a website that offers this self-description:

"The Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR) was established in 1978 at Columbia University. ISHR is committed to its three core goals of providing interdisciplinary human rights education to Columbia students, fostering innovative academic research, and offering its expertise in capacity building to human rights leaders, organizations, and universities around the world.

"ISHR was the first academic center in the world to be founded on an interdisciplinary commitment to the study of human rights. This remains one of ISHR's most distinctive features. We recognize that on a fundamental level, human rights research must transcend traditional academic boundaries, departments, and disciplines, reaching out to the practitioners’ world in the process, to address the ever-increasing complexities of human rights in a globalized world. ISHR’s emphases on interdisciplinarity, engagement, and globalism draw from and complement the strengths that have long characterized intellectual life at Columbia." - https://humanrightscolumbia.org/about...

This webpage shows a picture of a wall on wch is engraved:

"FREEDOM OF SPEECH
FREEDOM OF WORSHIP
FREEDOM FROM WANT
FREEDOM FROM FEAR"

Well, it's hard to find fault w/ that, eh? But talk is cheap, including talk about "freedom, democracy, and human rights" & the US government's PR supporting the same. But let's not forget that this same US government has endorsed torture (so much for "freedom, democracy, and human rights") during the same Bush that Phillips worked for & is not above more than a little deception to get control of oil-rich areas such as Kurdistan. & then what about some FREEDOM FROM WORSHIP? That might help things (although it didn't seem to help the USSR much).

& then there's "ISHR’s emphases on interdisciplinarity, engagement, and globalism" - "interdisciplinarity" is all well & good as far as I'm concerned - but "engagement" can mean many things, including war - and "globalism" is a huge problem as far as I'm concerned - b/c despite the heavenly promises of 'global visionaries' like Klaus Schwab (Chairperson of the World Economic Forum) globalism strikes me as just-another oligarchical power-play. Today's version of 'globalism' has certainly curtailed freedom of speech & freedom from fear, the past few yrs during wch most countries have been expected to unite into a global entity to fight a very dubiously real health crisis has resulted in more excuses than ever to stop freedom of speech, all justified w/ an insanely high level of fear-mongering. I'm reminded of Visconti's great film "The Damned" in wch wealthy Germans were browbeaten into supporting Nazism only to find themselves trapped in a nightmare that most certainly didn't serve their best interests. I wonder if any of the early supporters of today's 'globalism' are beginning to similarly realize that the promised paradise of peace-on-Earth comes at a price of death-of-the-mind w/o even delivering the peace?

Then there's the Introduction:

"Kurds are the largest stateless people in the world. An estimated 32 million Kurds live in what is called Kurdistan, a geographic area consisting of Turkey (North Kurdistan), Iraq (South Kurdistan), Syria (West Kurdistan), and Iran (East Kurdistan). The Kurds were divided by Western poers in the twentieth century and subjugated by Arabs, Ottomans, and Persians. According to a Kurdish proverb, "Kurds have no friend but the mountains." Today, however, Kurds are evolving from a victimized people to a coherent political community with viable national aspirations.

"The Kurdish Spring is a contemporary political history, describing the struggle of Kurds for rights and statehood. It chronicles their betrayal and abuse in the twentieth century. The 1980s was a low point. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons to kill up to 182,000 Iraqi Kurds, including 5,000 in a single day at Halabja; 4,500 Kurdist villages were destroyed during the Anfal Campaign between 1986 and 1988. [1]"

[..]

"Kurds rebounded. After the Gulf War, the US-led Operation Northern Watch successfully protected Iraqi Kurds and created conditions for their return and self-rule." - p xvii

Note that here we have the 1st of many endnotes. Endnote 1 is fairly typical:

"KRG Representation in the United Kingdom." KRG Representation in the United Kingdom. N.p.,n.d. Web 16 Feb 2014. ." - p xxiii

Note that "N.p.,n.d." means "No publisher, no date" & applies to online sources. I decided to check out the provided link. This led to "Not found". I double-checked my copying of the URL & found it to be correct. The reason why I went to this trouble was b/c this was one of the 1st of many assertions that Phillips makes that Hussein used chemical weapons. Readers might remember that the the main reason why the US invaded Iraq was b/c it was purported that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that included chemical weapons. As I recall, no such weapons were found. In other words, the story that Iraq was using chemical weapons has been heavily questioned since that time but Phillips's story sticks to it. & why is his only endnote source for this genocide a no-author-listed, no publisher, no date online article that apparently at the very least doesn't exist at the same URL anymore? There IS a "KRG Representation in the United Kingdom" website: https://gov.krd/dfr-en/krg-representa... - & perhaps the info about the genocide can be found somewhere there. But what I wonder is: weren't there any other sources that cd be used as references? A source not directly a Kurdish one? Surely, someone wd've noticed & reported on such atrocities other than the Kurds themselves?!

"Iraqi Kurdistan used to be thickly forested before Saddam Hussein denuded the region as part of Iraq's scorched-earth policy toward the Kurds." - p xxi

I decided to look into this a bit more. I'd already heard about the draining of swamps as a means of repression but I hadn't heard of deforestation. This led to a long article online entitled "Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds", listing the publisher as "Human Rights Watch" & giving the publication date as "July 1993". Authors are listed (Geroge Black being the primary writer) & there's a disclaimer: "This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States." All in all, this mode of presentation seems trustworthy to me.

"In the March 1991 popular uprising in northern Iraq, Kurdish civilians and members of the Kurdish political parties stormed and took control of offices of the Iraqi government and its agencies, including the various intelligence agencies. Several of these buildings were heavily damaged, or even burned to the ground, but others survived unscathed. The Kurds thus came into possession of the inventories of many of these facilities. Matters taken include large quantities of documents, logs and registers, as well as audiotapes, videotapes, films and photographs.

"In the days before the uprising was crushed by advancing Iraqi troops, the Kurdish parties succeeded in removing the majority of the documents they had captured from the towns to strongholds in the mountains. In the spring of 1992, one of the two largest parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), agreed to a tripartite arrangement in which Middle East Watch and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee were the other two partners. Under this arrangement, the PUK agreed to send the documents in its possession to the United States for research and analysis; the Senate Foreign Relations Committee agreed to turn the documents into official records of the U.S. Congress and store them in the facilities of the U.S. National Archives; and Middle East Watch agreed to conduct research on the documents for human rights purposes, including the pursuit of a genocide case before the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

"The PUK cache consists of fourteen tons of documents contained in 847 boxes. The total number of pages has been estimated at over four million. In May 1992, the PUK placed these documents in the temporary custody of Middle East Watch and they were then flown, in the presence of the director of Middle East Watch, to the United States. In Washington, D.C., the documents were then handed over to the U.S. National Archives and placed in its storage facilities, while remaining under the joint custody of the PUK and Middle East Watch." - https://www.refworld.org/docid/47fdfb...

This article doesn't explicitly mention deforestation but it includes the destruction of trees in the general havoc:

"After hiding out in the mountains for weeks, several people from Garawan crept back into their village in search of food. Some homes had been destroyed by shelling, but most were still standing at this point and official records suggest that the destruction was carried out sporadically over the next several months. But leveled they were: When inhabitants were at last able to return to Garawan in 1991, after the post-war uprising, they found that "everything had been destroyed, exploded by dynamite; even the pipes were taken that brought the water from the spring." All signs of life had vanished, even the beehives. The poplar trees used for roofing material had been cut down. Even this was not enough, it seems. "They also destroyed a martyrs' cemetery [for peshmerga who had fallen] that had been built in the area of Zenia," said a fighter from Garawan, who was hiding nearby and had relatives interred there. The man watched from the mountainside through binoculars as a group of jahsh and soldiers dynamited and desecrated the graves." - ibid

There's also this mention of scorched-earth policy:

"Yet Qala Dizeh may best be seen, perhaps, as a postscript to Anfal--a return to the same logic of anti-Kurdish activities that had gone on for years. The best answer to our question may be that the logic of Anfal ended when the behavior of the Iraqi bureaucracy shifted into a perceptibly different gear. This is not the same as saying "when the killing stopped," or "when the deportations ended," or "when the last village had been burned and bulldozed." For killings and deportations and scorched earth policies have been a feature of life under the Ba'ath Party for many years, and they continue to this day. But, by the spring of 1989, it is safe to say that the Iraqi regime felt that all the goals of Anfal had been met, and on April 23, the Revolutionary Command Council issued its decree No.271, in which the special powers conferred upon Ali Hassan al-Majid were revoked. The sense that the Kurdish problem was now fully under control is further reinforced by Saddam Hussein's December 1989 decision to abolish even the Northern Affairs Committee of the RCC, which had been in existence for more than ten years." - ibid

For the complete review go here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticK...

[Chase Metcalf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Provides historical perspective of Kurdish people in Middle East. Educational and timely read given current events.

[Navidkord · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good for erey one kord