The march in tribute to the victims of the racist attack in Paris testified, this Monday, to a pain that goes beyond the bloody news item: the demonstrators chanted in Kurdish “The martyrs do not die”. And in French “Women, life, freedom” – the slogan of Iranian women. They also demanded “truth and justice”, many referring to the assassination in Paris in 2013 of three activists from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a sworn enemy of Turkey considered “terrorist” by Ankara as by the European Union.
While William M., the French pensioner who admitted to having killed three Kurds, said he was moved by a “pathological hatred” of foreigners, 20 minutes comes back to the 25 to 35 million Kurds, people without a state scattered between Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey and at the heart of geopolitical issues.
Is there a Kurdish state?
Mainly Sunni Muslims, with non-Muslim minorities and often secular political groups, the Kurds live on almost half a million square kilometres. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War paved the way for the creation of a Kurdish state. But after Mustafa Kemal’s victory in Turkey, the Allies reversed their decision.
In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne established the domination of Turkey, Iran, Great Britain (for Iraq) and France (for Syria) over the Kurdish populations. Demanding the creation of a unified Kurdistan, the Kurds have since remained, according to the upheavals of international events, perceived as a threat to the territorial integrity of the countries where they are settled. But also sometimes as temporary allies of certain powers. The Kurds, who have never lived under centralized power, are further divided into a myriad of parties and factions. Sometimes cross-border, these movements are often antagonistic, depending in particular on the games of alliances concluded with neighboring regimes.
What role against Daesh and with Turkey?
In Syria, the Kurds adopted a position of neutrality at the start of the civil war in 2011, before benefiting from the chaos and installing an autonomous administration in northern regions. Kurdish fighters then dominate the alliance of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) against the jihadist group Islamic State (IS), with the support of the international coalition led by the United States.
The FDS now control an area in which tens of thousands of jihadists and their families are detained, for whom they are demanding, without much success, the repatriation to their countries of origin. But while they believe they fought IS in the Levant for the rest of the world, they are being hunted down by Turkey. Ankara launched a series of air raids on Kurdish fighter positions in northern Syria on November 20. And Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is threatening to launch a military land operation there.
Why are they at the origin of tensions between Paris and Ankara?
The Kurdish issue is one of the many areas of tension in bilateral relations between Paris and Ankara. Elements of the investigation into the three PKK militants killed in 2013 in Paris suggest that the suspect could have acted on behalf of the Turkish intelligence services (MIT). He has since died but anti-terrorism judges have taken over the investigation. Four men of Kurdish origin were also attacked in April 2021 with iron bars in an association building in Lyon, in central-eastern France, during an attack that the victims attributed to the ultranationalist group. Turkish Gray Wolves, recently disbanded.
Logically, Friday’s tragedy aroused the fears of some 150,000 Kurds in France. “There are direct threats, the political, cultural and diplomatic representations of the Kurds in France are right to be afraid”, noted for the Sunday newspaper Adel Bakawan, director of the French Center for Research on Iraq, fearing however that the outbursts on the sidelines of the demonstrations “tarnish the great solidarity of French public opinion”.
The community refuses the thesis of the racist crime by an isolated man. “Erdogan’s fascist regime has struck again,” hammered Agit Polat on Monday, the young president of the Kurdish Democratic Council in France (CDK-F). Ankara, for its part, summoned the French ambassador to Turkey to express its “dissatisfaction with the propaganda launched by PKK circles”, indicated a Turkish diplomatic source.