The Treaty of Lausanne still casts a long shadow
In November 1922, representatives of the World War I victors met with their Turkish counterparts in the Swiss lakeside city of Lausanne. They were tasked with negotiating a diplomatic settlement to replace the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), which had never been ratified. Australia, which had no independent foreign policy at the time, was party to the Treaty by virtue of its status as a member of the British Empire.
On July 24, 1923, the two sides signed the Treaty of Peace with Turkey, commonly known as the Treaty of Lausanne. This ratified the new boundaries of the Turkish state, granted amnesty for all crimes against humanity committed by the Ottoman state since 1914, and agreed to “mutual ethnic cleansing” between Greece and Turkey.
Significantly, it dropped Kurdish self-determination, as promised in the earlier Treaty of Sèvres. Although Turkey agreed to “assure full and complete protection of life and liberty to all inhabitants of Turkey without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion,” the promise proved hollow. Immediately after the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey, President Ataturk banned the Kurdish language and afterwards continued the Young Turk policies of forced assimilation, even to the point of genocide. The leaders of the West, Australia included, have been like the Three Wise Monkeys; seeing, hearing, and speaking no evil about the crimes of the Turkish state; indeed even branding legitimate Kurdish resistance as “terrorism”.
So, what were the origins of the brutal ideology of the new state and why did the Allies renege of their promises? To understand the first point, we must step back in time to developments in the declining years of the Ottoman Empire. The empire had once been powerful and dynamic. Following the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, it expanded enormously, spreading through what is present day Iraq and Syria, down the Red Sea Coast to include Mecca, across Egypt and the North African littoral, and engulfing the Balkan Peninsula in southeastern Europe, including today’s Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Between 1541 and 1686, the Ottomans ruled Hungary and their further expansion was only halted by the lifting of the siege of Vienna in 1683.
Although the empire was a byword for barbarism in Christian Europe, we have to be careful of “orientalist” stereotypes. The Christian kingdoms of the time were no exemplars of what we call human rights today. Muslim Turks were dominant but the empire practised what, at risk of anachronism, we might call a rough form of multiculturalism. The empire was home to a bewildering patchwork of peoples, often living cheek-by-jowl, speaking many languages, and practising religions. Non-Turks, Jews, and Christians could and did rise to important administrative, business and military positions. In 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Spanish Jews from Iberia, they found a safe haven in the Ottoman city of Salonika, where they thrived until they were deported to the Nazi death camps in 1944.
It is a truism that empires rise, decline and fall. Thus it was with the Ottoman Empire, which in the 19th century was widely known as “the sick man of Europe.” In 1832, Greece won its independence and nationalist revolts followed throughout the Balkans, creating waves of Muslim refugees. In 1830, France annexed Algeria and in 1882 Egypt was lost to Britain. Naturally, educated Ottoman citizens resented the empire’s decay and wondered how it might be arrested. They turned to Western Europe for ideas of how the system might be reformed.
By the late years of the 19th century, Ottoman patriots came to see the autocratic rule of the Sultan as a barrier to progress and looked towards British-style constitutional monarchy as a check on absolutism. They were also drawn to European ideas of science, civic reform and political liberalism. One secretive group emerged as the Committee for Union and Progress. Although they became more widely known as the Young Turks, they were initially reflective of the empire’s ethnic diversity. Their ideas brought them into conflict with traditionalist supporters of the autocratic status quo.
In 1908, the Young Turks seized power under the battle cry of LIBERTY! They aimed to create a powerful, rationally organised state protected by a modern military, with guarantees of democratic rights. They soon forgot their promises and succumbed to the European idea of the “ethnically pure” nation state. Their Ottoman patriotism had degenerated into a narrow Turkish nationalism, accompanied by dictatorial intolerance and brutality. The heartlands of the empire in Anatolia and European Turkey would be “purified” of non-Turkish languages and cultures. Young Turk paranoia was increased by further loss of territory in the Balkan Wars of 1912.
Before the Young Turks went to war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914, they began an ambitious programme of “ethnic social engineering”. Non-Turks would be permitted to make up no more than 5–10% of any “Turkish” town or district. This would be achieved by population transfers: Kurds, Armenians, Greeks and others would be forced out and Turks would be moved in. Or Kurds would be forcibly assimilated. The Young Turks were also planning mass murder: “disloyal” elements would be exterminated.
The day after the Allied landings in Gallipoli, the Young Turks began the Armenian genocide. It was premeditated. Armenian units in the Ottoman army had been disarmed and dispersed. Armenian civilians who were not immediately killed were sent on death marches into the Syrian desert. It is likely that as many as 1.4 million Armenians and 500,000 Greeks, together with tens of thousands of Assyrians, were murdered in what was the first genocide of the 20th century. At the same time, the deportations and forced assimilation of Kurds proceeded apace.
Unfortunately for the Young Turks, they had chosen the losing side in World War I. They were forced to agree to Allied occupation of Istanbul and the Bosphorus, and their leaders either fled or were put on trial for their crimes. The Empire lost further vast territories. Under the terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, much of the Ottoman’s Arab majority vilayets were handed over to Britain and France, and the Muslim holy cities of Medina and Mecca were lost forever.
The question remained of what would become of Anatolia and the rump European portions of the empire adjacent to Istanbul. The US President, Woodrow Wilson, proposed that,
The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured of a secure sovereignty but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development… (Point 14 of Wilson’s Fourteen Point proposal for the post-war peace treaties.)
The other Allied powers had different ideas. Under the Treaty of London in 1915, Italy had been promised a share of the Turkish islands and the Anatolian mainland. They had no reasonable claim, but Greece could point to the large Greek majorities in significant areas of western Anatolia as justification for their claims in that region. For their own reasons, the Allies were also sympathetic at the time to Kurdish aspirations for their own state in eastern Anatolia, and for the expansion of an independent Armenia.
On August 10, 1920, the powerless Turkish government signed the Treaty of Sèvres. The Treaty triggered widespread anger in Turkey and across the colonial and Muslim world. It did not embody the Wilsonian principles of self-determination, except in the case of the Kurds. Kurdish representatives at Sèvres successfully argued for a separate Kurdish state. Article 64 spelled this out:
If within one year from the coming into force of the present Treaty the Kurdish peoples within the areas defined in Article 62 shall address themselves to the Council of the League of Nations in such a manner as to show that a majority of the population of these areas desires independence from Turkey, and if the Council then considers that these peoples are capable of such independence and recommends that it should be granted to them, Turkey hereby agrees to execute such a recommendation, and to renounce all rights and title over these areas.
The Treaty was never ratified. Turkish nationalists, led by Mustapha Kemal — later known as Ataturk, the Father of Turks — were determined to resist and carve out a Turkish ethno-state. War broke out between the Turks and the Greeks and their Allied supporters. The conflict, known to the Turks as the War of Independence, was fought with horrific brutality. For instance, the Aegean city of Smyrna, today’s Izmir, was burned to the ground and the Greek population put to the sword. Both sides committed appalling atrocities. Some Kurds fought alongside the Turks, but others stood aside or pushed for their own interests.
The Western Allies recognised the Turkish victory and Turkish claims by signing the Treaty of Lausanne. Three months later, the Ottoman parliament dissolved itself and proclaimed the Republic of Turkey. The Treaty gave Turkey most of what it wanted. The current boundaries of the new state were ratified. The Allies gave a blanket amnesty for all crimes committed by the Turkish state right back to 1914, including the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides.
Moreover, the Treaty approved the forced population transfers between Turkey and Greece, and Turkey and Bulgaria. In what we may fairly call mutual ethnic cleansing, some 1.5 million Greeks and 500,000 Turks were forced out of their homelands. Ironically, many expelled “Greeks” spoke Turkish, and many deported “Turks” spoke Greek. Indeed, cinemas in the Greek city of Thessaloniki — the former Ottoman Salonika — regularly showed Turkish films right up to the 1960s as a result of the deportations. (See Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey.)
Ataturk was determined that the new Republic would be a state ruled by and for ethnic Turks. Non-Turkish populations would be assimilated to the Turkish nation, forcibly if necessary, for despite the forced transfers and earlier exterminations, hundreds of thousands of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians remained within the Republic’s boundaries. Kurds made up as much as 20% of the population, but the new state denied their existence: they were “Mountain Turks,” and their language and customs were banned from the outset.
Incredibly, the Kurds have resisted Turkification to this day, often rising up to resist their oppressors. The state has responded with great brutality, as in the genocide at Dersim in 1937-38. Military operations and mass deportations have left much of eastern Anatolia depopulated and economically underdeveloped. The policy of cultural genocide even flouts the provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne, which explicitly bound Turkey to respect other languages and cultures.
Sadly, the world has ignored the history of criminal abuse that followed Lausanne.
Back at the time of the signing of the Treaty, Turkey was something of a pariah. It had fought on the side of the defeated Central Powers and there was some awareness that it had committed horrendous crimes against humanity. The Allies worried that the Republic might seek an alliance with the Soviet Union and were prepared to ignore the obvious flouting of the terms of Lausanne if it kept Turkey within the Western fold. Britain and France also wanted a secure boundary between Turkey and their new oil-rich possessions in Iraq and Syria. When Turkey joined NATO in 1952, the Allies were even more prepared to ignore the abuses.
Turkey has enjoyed a strangely sympathetic press here in Australia, and this is bound up with the myth that Australia “became a nation” in 1915 when the ANZACs landed at Gallipoli. In fact, they were part of a British invasion force and Australia was not consulted when Britain went to war.
Australian attitudes to its foes in the many wars it has fought have seldom been cordial or respectful. The Germans were bloodthirsty “Huns.” The Japanese were scarcely human “Nips” or worse, part of a dreaded “yellow peril.”
In contrast, the Turks are seen as “the gallant enemy” — “Johnny Turk” who fought the ANZACs so valiantly at Gallipoli. Thousands of Australians regularly make a pilgrimage to Gallipoli to mark the anniversary of the Allied landings 110 years ago, including Defence Minister Richard Marles, who went last year as a guest of the Turkish government. Ataturk, despite his crimes against humanity, is venerated as a super-hero worthy of the title of Father of Turks. Thus, many accept without evidence that Ataturk wrote the following words for his Interior Minister, Sukru Kaya, to use in a speech at Canakkale in 1934:
Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives ... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.
In primary school and regularly thereafter, Australian kids are drilled in the national myth, with Ataturk’s alleged words seen as holy writ. We were never told that the Armenian genocide began the day after the landing at Suvla Bay. Even less is said about Kaya’s involvement in the genocide and the subsequent crimes against the Kurds. It is worth remembering that John Howard, whose government first listed the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as a terrorist organisation, has been a key promoter of the ANZAC myth as part of the sanitisation of Australian colonial history. The two matters are closely intertwined and the Treaty of Lausanne continues to cast a long shadow.
This is an edited transcript of a speech given by John Tuly to the conference, “Treaty of Lausanne - Partition, Denial, Massacre, Kurdish Struggle & the Future of Kurdistan” on July 24. John Tully is honorary professor at the College of Arts and Education at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia.
Imperialism, repression and resistance: The long war against Kurds in Iran
For most of the media, the United States and Israel’s war on Iran has become last month’s story, but this story is far from over, and has many prequels. Like other conflicts and wars in the region, Iran’s troubled relations with the US and Israel — and also with the Iranian Kurds — have their roots in the poisonous soil of European imperialism.
The border between Rojehlat (eastern or Iranian Kurdistan) and the other parts of Kurdistan has hardly changed since the 17th century, but the division of the rest of Kurdistan by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, and the treaty’s failure to recognise a Kurdish state, weakened the position of Kurds everywhere. While Lausanne followed the imperial conflict of World War I, World War II — in many ways a continuation of the first — was followed by the creation of Israel and international recognition of the Zionists’ settler-colonial project.
World War I helped catalyse the Russian Revolution and subsequent global competition between the forces of Communism and capitalist imperialism. World War II allowed this to transform into the Cold War between East and West. In both periods, as still today, an overriding mission of Western governments has been the crushing of any emergence of communism, or even socialism.
Their geographical separation from World War II, and relatively late entry into the conflict, gave the US economic, political and military dominance, and enabled the growth of the US’s military-industrial complex, whose power President Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address in 1961. This power has been used to intervene in other countries to prevent the emergence of left forces and unseat governments out of line with US capitalist interests.
During the 19th century, Iran fell under increasing economic dominance by European imperial powers. Iran’s leaders gave away economic concessions in exchange for short-term gains, and early last century, the British Anglo Persian Oil Company took control of oil fields in southwest Iran.
In 1953, it was Iran’s turn to undergo a CIA regime change — a joint operation organised by the US and the old imperial power, Britain. Iran’s parliament had voted to nationalise the oil industry — a challenge to Western commercial interests that was deemed intolerable. Prime Minister Mohamad Mosaddegh was removed in a coup, and power was consolidated under the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had first been put in control by Britain and Russia during the war, when his father had refused to let the Allies use the trans-Iranian railway.
Pahlavi maintained his rule through his notorious secret police, the Savak, but, by the 1970s, economic hardship and inequality were becoming increasingly unbearable. In 1978–79, a mass movement strengthened by workers — especially oil workers — crippled the country and forced Pahlavi to flee.
The rise of the Islamic Republic
Support for the left was surging, and workers’ strike committees were creating kernels of alternative organisation when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France. Khomeini was able to appeal to the more conservative elements, especially small business owners and the rural or recently rural poor, while neutralising potential opposition through superficially progressive rhetoric.
One by one, Khomeini crushed those opposing him — secular leftists, Islamic leftists, women, groups seeking national autonomy. He had no hesitation in carrying out mass assassinations to impose his version of Islamic rule and himself as supreme leader. He was able to do this because he initially had the West’s backing — as a safe anti-left alternative — and because many left party leaders failed to understand the threat he posed, casting him as a “progressive bourgeois” who they should work with rather than oppose.
In November 1979, Iranian student activists took over the US embassy in Tehran, taking 66 US citizens hostage and demanding the extradition of Pahlavi, who had gone to the US for cancer treatment. Fifty-two of the hostages were not released until January 1981. Khomeini supported the hostage-taking, calling the US “the Great Satan”.
In 1980, the US cut diplomatic relations with Iran and implemented sanctions in response to the hostage taking, which were subsequently increased several times, with drastic impacts on people’s living standards. During the 1980s, the US gave support to Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War, and, in 1984, President Ronald Reagan designated Iran a “state sponsor of terror” following attacks on the US military in Lebanon by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
With the US’s “war on terror” following 9/11, President George Bush declared Iran to be part of an “axis of evil”, alongside Iraq and North Korea. Meanwhile, fears that Iran was developing nuclear weapons led to more sanctions by the US, EU and United Nations. In 2015, Iran agreed to a deal whereby they would limit nuclear development and submit to regular inspections in exchange for the lifting of these sanctions. However, in 2018, US President Donald Trump pulled out of the agreement and reinstated sanctions.
In the early summer of 2019, explosions blamed on Iran hit oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, and Iran shot down a US drone. The next year, the US assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s elite Quds Force.
Under Pahlavi, relations between Iran and Israel had been good, reflecting shared alignment with the US and against pan-Arabism. Israel helped develop Iran’s military and secret service. Relations changed with the revolution, when Khomeini declared Israel an enemy of Islam and handed the Israeli embassy to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) — though the Iran-Iraq war forced Iran to continue to rely on buying Israeli weapons for some years.
Iran’s support for Palestinians was both ideological — as fellow Muslims — and strategic. It wanted to win support as defenders of Islam, and to distract attention from continued economic hardship. After Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 — a time when 11 members of the Kurdistan Workers Party died fighting alongside the PLO — Iran helped organise Lebanese Shia and create Hezbollah.
The end of the Cold War, and the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War, left Iran and Israel competing for regional dominance under the US, the one remaining superpower.
Kurdish resistance
Kurds — who make up 12–15% of Iran’s population — suffered under the ethnic nationalism of Pahlavi and were active in the revolution. They fought for autonomy, not to replace one autocratic centralised regime with another. The Kurdish provinces held out the longest against Khomeini’s Islamic Republic.
Kurdish resistance was largely led by the leftist Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) and Komola, the Society of the Revolutionary Toilers of Iranian Kurdistan. In August 1980, Khomeini declared a jihad against the “infidel” Kurds, licensing extreme brutality by the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. By the end of 1981, Kurdish resistance was largely defeated, with small-scale fighting continuing into 1983.
Kurdish struggles for rights and freedom have become entangled in rivalries between regional powers, exploiting these divisions and being exploited by them. In the Iran-Iraq war, support given to Iran by Kurds persecuted by the Iraqi government helped bring the full wrath of Saddam Hussein down on Iraqi Kurdish towns and villages, including Halabja, where Hussein’s military massacred 5000 people in a chemical attack. (Palestinian reverence for Hussein as a supporter of their cause has undoubtedly complicated relations with the Kurds.)
The Islamic Republic proved to be every bit as racist towards non-Persians as Pahlavi had been, as well as prejudiced against Sunnis, which most Kurds are. Rather than attempt to win Kurdish support, the government has kept control over the Kurdish regions through economic deprivation and pervasive securitisation.
Overt political opposition of any kind is impossible in Iran, where even campaigning on ecological issues can land you in prison, and the remnants of the KDPI and Komola moved across the border with their families to refugee camps in Iraq.
The Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK) was founded in 2004 to propagate the ideas of Abdullah Öcalan in Rojhelat, but Öcalan’s influence there was already strong, as demonstrated by the mass protests at the time of his capture in 1999. PJAK guerrillas are based in the border mountains.
Anti-regime protests
Iran under the mullahs [religious clerics] has seen several waves of mass protest — against lack of freedoms, poor economic conditions and lack of vital services — each put down with extreme violence.
In 2019, anti-government uprisings were taking place in over two-thirds of Iranian provinces when the government unleashed its security forces, leaving 1500 people dead. Between then and the 2022 protests triggered by the government killing of Jina Amini for a misarranged headscarf, there were mass strikes by groups struggling to survive on starvation wages and pensions, and protests by farmers unable to get the water needed for their crops, as well as protests for women’s rights. More recently, there have been more protests about the lack of clean water.
The Iranian regime demands the total subservience of women, and also takes every opportunity to oppress its Kurdish minority. Of the many communities that make up the population of Iran, Kurds have been left with the least to lose, and, despite strongly patriarchal tribal traditions, many Iranian Kurds have also been exposed to the Kurdish freedom movement and its focus on women’s freedom.
The protests — which developed into an uprising — were especially strong in Kurdish areas and among the Baluch minority at the other end of the country. The Kurdish movement’s slogan of Jin Jiyan Azadi — Women Life Freedom — became the call of the resistance, alongside anti-regime slogans such as “Death to the Dictator”.
People rose up in resistance in every province, and there was tremendous support among students. But outside the Kurdish regions, the uprising failed to achieve the mass mobilisation of workers needed to stop the functioning of the economy and bring down the government. The tight grip of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps on every aspect of life has made this much harder to achieve than it was in 1979, and reports of brave and inspiring resistance began to be overtaken by accounts of brutal and sadistic state violence.
Last September, two years on from the uprising, Amnesty International reported that “people in Iran continue to endure the devastating consequences of the authorities’ brutal crackdown” and that “authorities have also further escalated their assault on human rights, waging a war on women and girls”. Hengaw Organisation for Human Rights reported that 143 Kurds lost their lives in the uprising.
Although the Iranian Kurdish parties outlawed in Iraq did not intervene practically, they were attacked by Iranian missiles and drones, and, under Iranian pressure, Iraq has forced them to disarm and relocate away from the border. This has not impacted PJAK, whose bases are hidden in the mountains.
Shifting balance of forces in the Middle East
This last year has seen seismic changes in the political balance in the Middle East, with Israel, armed and backed by the US and their Western friends, gaining hegemonic power over an increasing area at the expense of Iran — and Russia. Besides their genocidal attack on Gaza and Iran-backed Hamas, Israel crippled Hezbollah. This seriously weakened the Iranian presence in Syria. With Russia — President Assad’s other backer — distracted by war in Ukraine, Ahmed al-Sharaa and his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham were able to take control in Damascus.
There is evidence that Britain and the US supported this takeover, and they have been quick to rebrand al-Sharaa from “terrorist” to welcomed head of state. Israel took advantage of the change of regime in Syria to bomb the country’s military bases and ensure that it will never be able to challenge Israeli dominance.
For many years, Israel has carried out limited attacks against Iran, including assassinations and sabotage, often targeting its nuclear program. With Iran’s regional allies, Hamas, Hezbollah and Assad, weakened or vanquished, the Zionist state is determined to consolidate its dominance.
On June 13, it launched a well-prepared attack, which included the assassination of 30 generals and nine nuclear scientists, as well as attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and military resources. This was framed as preventing the imminent development of an Iranian nuclear bomb, but Israel has been making the same claim that Iran is on the threshold of achieving a bomb for over a decade.
At the time the attack took place, the US was attempting to negotiate a new deal that would restrict and monitor Iran’s nuclear developments in exchange for lifting sanctions. As Israel had planned, the US stopped their negotiations and followed Israel with an attack of their own, employing weapons that could penetrate Iran’s underground facilities, which Israel did not have the means to do themselves. It is thought that Israel hoped to draw the US into a full regime change war, but the US made clear that their intervention was a one off — at least for the time being.
For Iranian Kurds, this 12-day war brought brief hopes that they might be able to use the chaos to build democratic autonomy — as in Syria — alongside fears that, like other attempts at regime change from outside, this would end in years of violence and instability. PJAK explained that what was happening was “a war of power and conflicting interests, not a war of liberation for peoples and nations”. More immediate concerns that the Iranian regime would take out their anger on their own minorities and political opponents proved well founded.
Post-war repression
A month after the ceasefire, Hengaw reported that since the beginning of the war at least 1800 people had been arrested, 500 of them Kurds, and that most had been accused of espionage for Israel. While Israel clearly has many spies in Iran, there is no reason to believe that these are the people being arrested, as this is used as a convenient charge for destroying government opponents. Six people (including three Kurds) have already been executed for espionage.
At least 29 civilians were killed by government forces during checkpoint raids, and there has been increased pressure on political prisoners, heavy sentences — including death — for political activists and increasing use of the death penalty.
Israel’s attack was the result of years of planning and demonstrated how deeply Mossad had infiltrated into Iran. However, it is unclear how much damage has been done to Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon, and it can be argued that it now has a much stronger incentive to do so.
Israel was shocked by the extent of the Iranian response and the damage it inflicted in Tel Aviv. But even after agreeing to a ceasefire, Israel made clear that, as in Lebanon, it has no intention of abiding by it and will cut Iran down to size whenever it wants. Its defence minister stated, “I have instructed the [Israel Defence Forces] to prepare an enforcement plan against Iran, which includes maintaining Israel’s air superiority, preventing the advancement of nuclear capabilities and missile production, and responding to Iran’s support for terrorist activities against the State of Israel.”
Trump stated just this week that if Iran rebuilds their nuclear facilities, “we’ll wipe it out faster than you can wave your finger at it”.
Meanwhile, plans for a “Zangezur Corridor” could prove a trigger for new conflict in the region. This corridor would link (pro-Israel) Azerbaijan to Azerbaijan’s Nakhichevan exclave — and hence Turkey — through a slice of Armenian territory along the border with Iran. Washington has proposed that the US should build and manage it. But what is seen as an east-west link by Azerbaijan and Turkey is regarded as a barrier to north-south trade by Iran and Russia, and Iran has moved its forces to the border.
There is no end in sight for further fighting, both across Iran’s borders and internally. On July 19, an Iranian drone killed a PJAK fighter in Iraq. PJAK retaliated by killing three members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Meanwhile, alongside the continuing crackdown, Kurds in Iran have been mourning the deaths of three environmental activists who died fighting wildfires because the Iranian government has no interest in stopping fires destroying Kurdish lands.
This is an edited transcript of a speech given by Sarah Glynn to a Green Left forum, “The Kurds and the Israeli-US war on Iran” on August 1. Sarah Glynn is Strasbourg-based writer for Green Left, a socialist activist and co-author of several books including Climate Change is a Class Issue.
