Pity the plight of the Kurds. The Kurds often quip that they are the largest people without a nation. That’s true. And they also say they have “no friends but the mountains.” That, too, is true. No one can deny the history of foreign betrayal the Kurds have suffered.
While Kurds can lament a colonial legacy for their division and can blame everyone from Woodrow Wilson to Henry Kissinger to Barack Obama for lack of U.S. support in crucial times, the reason why Kurds have not fulfilled their dream of independence and recognition has as much to do with the Kurds themselves as with cynical outside powers. Simply put, the Kurdish lack of leaders who can cast tribal interests aside and rise to the occasion hurts their cause, perhaps fatally.
The reason why Kurds have not fulfilled their dream of independence and recognition has as much to do with the Kurds themselves as with cynical outside powers.
Iraqi Kurdistan is the epicenter of tragedy. Many Kurds consider Mullah Mustafa Barzani to have been a great leader; perhaps he was for his time. After Ottoman authorities executed his father and grandfather, Mullah Mustafa took the mantle of leadership and helped germinate the seeds of Kurdish rebellion. In 1945, Kurds sought to fill the vacuum left by the end of World War II in Iran to establish their own state, the Mahabad Republic. Mullah Mustafa became its defense minister. The Kurds’ gamble on the Soviet Union failed, but unlike other Kurdish figures, he managed to flee ahead of the Iranian reconquest and so survived to fight another day after the shah ordered the execution of other Mahabad luminaries. Their deaths also cleared a path to Barzani’s own leadership over the broader Kurdish movement, though first Barzani had to free himself of the Soviet Union’s suffocating embrace.
That opportunity came in 1958, after Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew Iraq’s monarchy. Barzani returned to Iraq. Initially, his fight was internecine as he tried to eliminate potential rivals to Iraqi Kurdish leadership, including many more nationalist than himself. He also began the fateful pivot to prioritize tribe over nationalism or ideology. He would eliminate potential leaders that might arise and his paranoia in later years grew so that he even assassinated loyalists fearing betrayal.
The legacy of Mullah Mustafa’s mistakes are the divisions that blight Kurds today. Mulla Mustafa pushed Ibrahim Ahmad, the head of the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) in Iraq aside and assumed the position itself. After Kissinger withdrew U.S. support for Iraqi Kurds in 1975 and the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq collapsed, Ibrahim Ahmed’s son-in-law Jalal Talabani split from the KDP to former the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).
The rivalry between the Barzanis and Talabanis spanned generations and blighted the Kurdish cause. Just eight years after Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Kurds in Halabja and massacred hundreds if not thousands of members of the Barzan tribe, Mullah Mustafa’s son Masoud openly aligned with Saddam to deny Jalal Talabani power. For Masoud, the calculation was simple: family fortune trumps Kurdish nationalism. Lost in the tribal mindset was recognition that the financial pie was not finite: expanding opportunity for all Kurds could increase wealth for everyone.
After Mullah Mustafa’s death, his son Masoud assumed leadership as the KDP transformed into a monarchy in all but name. Masoud openly grooms eldest son Masrour for power and his son, Areen Barzani, is already consolidating power. Likewise, Jalal’s sons Bafil and Qubad ultimately took the reins of the PUK after Jalal’s death as party leaders dispensed with the notion that the PUK was more than a family business. Whereas Kurds genuinely admired Mullah Mustafa Barzani and Jalal Talabani, every subsequent generation within each family grows more distant and aloof.
Whereas Kurds genuinely admired Mullah Mustafa Barzani and Jalal Talabani, every subsequent generation within each family grows more distant and aloof.
The problem was not just between families but also within them. Masrour hates cousin Nechirvan and constantly seeks to undermine or marginalize him. Bafil and Qubad Talabani feel likewise about cousin Lahur. Qubad’s effort to take the title vice president of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region ally and partner with Nechirvan as president to counter Masrour is too little, too late as the Barzanis have already moved on to solidify Areen’s grip on power.
There is broad recognition among American officials that the Iraqi Kurds are hopeless and Kurdish politicians basically spoiled, bickering children. The only figures who sing the Kurdish leaders’ praises are those American officials who seek to leverage their former positions in the Energy Department, the National Security Council, or the U.S. Army into a business relationship with the Kurdistan Regional Government. These former officials simply embarrass themselves and soil their reputations.
Masrour, Bafil, and Qubad understand this. When they come to Washington, they no longer seek to build a serious relationship, but rather just seek photo opportunities or letters from Executive or Legislative Branch officials who indulge the Kurdish leaders out of naivete, or a misguided sense of politeness. They do not realize their names are mere baubles that the Kurdish leaders use to try to one up each other. Indulging the Kurds is not cost-free, as ordinary Kurds resent the implied American endorsement of their spoiled, incompetent leaders.
If Iraqi Kurdistan has failed to produce greater leaders, what about other regions? Of all of Iran’s ethnic and sectarian groups, Iranian Kurds have consistently been the most resistant to the Islamic Republic and accordingly have disproportionately suffered for their resistance. Still, the Iranian Kurds have produced no great leaders. A few legacy opposition groups like the Kurdistan Democratic Party-Iran and Komala dominate the Iranian Kurdish political sphere, but these groups too often simply seek to trade longevity for legitimacy. A noxious mix of arrogance and laziness hobbles the groups as they seek to have power bestowed from outside rather than scramble for it. Young Iranian Kurds are frustrated but cannot overcome the ossification of the established Kurdish political order. The exception to this is the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK) that affiliates more with imprisoned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan.
Crises define leaders. Here, the Syrian Civil War has enabled a generation to arise while exposing others as frauds. General Mazloum Abdi is singlehandedly responsible for the defeat of the Islamic State. While the Barzani’s forces fled as cowards and exposed the Yezidis and Kurds to the Islamic State’s rape, enslavement, and abuse, the Syrian Kurds under Mazloum’s command rallied and fought back against all odds. Perhaps the closes analogy to the miracle Mazloum achieved is to Israel’s ability to survive the Arab onslaught upon its 1948 independence. Mazloum has also outperformed his Iraqi Kurdish brethren in another way: Both Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani fumbled the transition between guerrilla warfare and governance. The qualities that made a great peshmerga did not necessarily make a great manager. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria has shown the ability both to differentiate between military and political functions and to demonstrate the flexibility to implement a broad philosophy without getting trapped by the theories of years past.
Most Kurds, of course, live in Turkey itself. Whether Turks like it or not, Öcalan is their undisputed leader. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan may bluster against the Kurds and openly threaten ethnic reprisals based on alleged fealty to Öcalan but his own actions affirm Öcalan’s leadership: Whenever Erdoğan launches a peace initiative, he seeks Öcalan’s buy-in. If a quarter century of imprisonment has not diminished Öcalan’s relevance, then perhaps he is a figure that no one can avoid.
This does not mean all Öcalan’s adulation is deserved. The violence the PKK leader encouraged in the early years of the PKK insurrection often went too far. Like Mulla Mustafa Barzani, Öcalan targeted Kurdish competition in order to make himself the indispensable man. Öcalan’s writings are also analogous to Edward Said: Many more people pretend to have read him than those who have actually slogged through to realize how flawed his theories are.
They may not have had their great leader yet, but one may be waiting in the wings who can help Kurds break themselves out of their self-imposed prison of mediocre leadership.
No matter. People evolve, and Öcalan is no exception. What began as a Marxist if not Maoist movement is now firmly rooted in mainstream reality: capitalism with a European progressive flair. His embrace of feminism, environmentalism, and efforts for democratic representation have been groundbreaking not only for Kurds but also for others in the region. He has eschewed terrorism and the separatism that so polarized Turks. Today rather than seeking to carve out a separate state, he proposes confederation, a creative solution in which existing states continue sovereignty, but autonomous regions establish overlapping relations with each other.
In short, Öcalan has become like Nelson Mandela, an intolerant terrorist in his youth who evolved politically and matured philosophically with time. As Kurdish writer and intellectual Kamal Chomani has pointed out, if the U.S. State Department can so readily embrace Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani), a man who once lionized and imitated Al Qaeda, why should the turn their back on someone who has promoted democracy?
It is not clear that Öcalan will fit the bill. It is one thing to say the right things from prison, but his real test will be what he does when free. That said, Öcalan has followers beyond his own borders. He also has the right adversaries, from the terror-sponsoring and racist Erdoğan who hates the idea of Kurdish autonomy to the tribal and corrupt Iraqi Kurdish leaders who fear a society driven more by philosophy and merit than by nepotism.
Kurds deserve more friends than the mountains. They may not have had their great leader yet, but one may be waiting in the wings who can help Kurds break themselves out of their self-imposed prison of mediocre leadership.
