Although Kurds, as a stateless nation, do not have access to war instruments as a state actor, the occupiers’ behavior regarding the Kurdistan question clearly demonstrates the visible dimensions of war against Kurdistan. In this analytical article, we present and discuss the theses that indicate and prove the existence of war between Kurdistan and the occupiers:
First, Violation of Kurdistan’s Territorial Integrity: Throughout ancient and modern history, occupiers have seized Kurdistan’s territory through military force and extensive warfare, annexing this country to their own territories. Their military forces remain on Kurdistan’s soil with maximum power and capability as occupiers, continuously using it against any Kurdish movement. The presence of occupying military forces and the prevention of establishing a Kurdistan National Army to defend Kurdistan’s territorial integrity are practical indicators of Kurdistan’s occupation.
Second, Usurpation of State Apparatus: Supported by their military forces stationed on Kurdistan’s territory, they have imposed their apparatus and institutions over Kurdistan and maintain them. Similarly, they prevent the Kurdish nation from establishing its independent state on its homeland to manage its society. Meanwhile, the occupiers’ institutions, as foreign entities, after imposing themselves, have dedicated substantial power and resources to transform the forms, structures, and norms of Kurdish society.
Third, Violation of National Security: Supported by their military forces, they have established apparatuses of suppression, intimidation, and control over Kurdistan’s people, employing all instruments of soft and psychological warfare for mass formation, preventing the empowerment of Kurdish people to deprive them of their ability to resist and fight back. The occupiers’ intelligence and suppression apparatus prevents Kurdistan from establishing its own national security apparatus in its homeland.
Fourth, Violation of Kurdish Citizenship: The occupiers, relying on their security and military capabilities in Kurdistan, have imposed their laws and regulations over Kurdish society. According to these regulations, they have imposed artificial “Iranian, Iraqi, Turkish, and Syrian” citizenship on Kurdish people and have usurped Kurdish citizenry. The occupiers only provide opportunities for social development and access to resources through imposed artificial and false citizenship, where the occupiers’ citizenship for Kurdish people means reproducing occupation, erasing their capabilities, and molding Kurdish individuals in abnormal and unfree conditions.
Fifth, Violation of Kurdish Legal Framework: Through their security and military forces, occupiers impose their laws and regulations, which deeply contradict Kurdish society’s social, cultural, and traditional values, stripping human status from Kurdistan’s women, genders, and identities, particularly usurping Kurdish values from women. Relying on this force, they violate the authentic role and identity of Kurdistan’s people, designing identities for them according to their desired laws, culture, and politics that contradict both national interests and even their own interests.
Sixth, Usurpation of Judicial Apparatus: The occupiers’ apparatus of punishment, injustice, and crime, relying on their military, security, and armed forces in Kurdistan, has been established under foreign and occupying law in Kurdistan, punishing Kurdish people under any pretext, stripping Kurdish identity from Kurdish people, imposing their social norms on Kurdish society, and conducting genocide against Kurds in the name of non-Kurdish law and courts. Based on this force, they prevent the existence of a judicial system based on international human rights conventions in Kurdistan.
Seventh, Usurpation of Education System: The occupiers’ educational institutions, to maintain their ability to manipulate Kurdish children and students’ minds and usurp agency from Kurdish people, implanting Iranian, Turkish, or Arab ideology into their minds and re-engineering their personalities, need to rely on their occupying military force and prevent the establishment of a Kurdish educational system.
Eighth, Usurpation of Media and Communication Apparatus: Occupiers, pushing with both their hard and soft powers from military and soldiers to media institutions and propaganda machines, have established themselves in Kurdistan and produce media content and propaganda mechanisms based on their own ideology.
Ninth, Violation of Economic Sovereignty: Occupiers, supported by their military forces and institutions in Kurdistan, bring both the infrastructure and superstructure of Kurdistan’s economy under their control, establishing an occupier-dependent economy, controlling trade networks, and preventing economic development. They plunder natural resources based on colonial relationships and promote de-development policies, causing the collapse of Kurdistan’s economic sovereignty.
Tenth, Usurpation of Cultural Apparatus: The policy of cultural assimilation and destruction of cultural heritage and ancient sites in Kurdistan by occupiers relies on the presence of brutal force and military and security uniformity of occupiers, preventing the formation of Kurdish institutions related to cultural development and heritage protection apparatus, leading to the fading of cultural foundations, deliberate destruction and looting of sites, and weakening of national sentiment and territorial cohesion.
Eleventh, Usurpation of Political Freedom: Occupiers, supported by their forces and capabilities, using their institutions and apparatus, eliminate or control political freedom and civil liberty, preventing the establishment of Kurdish institutions that would advance political freedom and instruments of politics such as Kurdish state and political parties and civil organizations as social capital. Through this imposition, occupiers respond to any national effort for Kurdish politics with suppression, arrest, and political mass killing.
Twelfth, Violation of Intellectual Independence: In occupied Kurdistan, the occupier, supported by state institutions and using psychological warfare, corrupts the historical antagonism of Kurds and, by creating shared memory contexts, shared pleasure, and shared emotion for the occupying nation and state, attracts them. Thus, Kurdish society is widely affected by antagonism-mania. As a result, with the increasing loss of self in Kurdish mind and intellect, Kurdish people voluntarily embrace self-enslavement and surrender, consequently constructing their discourse, politics, and strategies based on self-identification with the occupier and internal other-ization.
The distillation of these twelve theses indicates that occupiers, using war as a method and force and military as instruments, usurp two fundamental essences from the Kurdish nation that are unchangeable and non-negotiable indicators: country and national sovereignty, which consequently means, first, Kurdistan as the land of the Kurdish nation and the country of Kurdistan as the homeland of Kurds is a unified territory that occupiers have divided and occupied. Second, they usurp national sovereignty over Kurdistan’s country, which is solely the right of an independent Kurdish state.
The usurpation of these two essences paves the way for all other characteristics of national existence and statehood to be taken from Kurds and Kurdistan, preventing Kurdish people’s life from being free by relying on an independent and free country and national and territorial sovereignty that would take control of its country’s administration and create independent life.
Based on the results of these theses, it is confirmed that occupation in Kurdistan is a war that has continued from the beginning until now, but Kurdistan’s response to occupiers since “Smko Shikak” has not been in the form of war or combat in both its classical and modern meanings, but rather Kurds, for survival, have only used resistance as a method and militia force as an instrument. In the resistance method, force is not an instrument of victory but pressure. For this reason, accessing sources and instruments of force as an unchangeable and non-negotiable strategy is not seen in the resistance method.
Entering the form of war requires instruments of war, which are instruments related to Kurds’ self-organization in the form of force-centered institutional form.
Since the “Republic of Kurdistan,” Kurds have conducted all their movements in the form of revolutionary-armed parties inspired by global revolutionary left affiliated with the Soviet Union and China, distancing themselves from forms that are nation-building and homeland-building force-centered, which has led to the emergence of armed parties that continues until now.
The real liberating form for an occupied country, Kurdistan clearly, is the liberation army and provisional government that would gather all Kurdish forces within itself, and the provisional government as the sole instrument of politics in Kurdistan would conduct politics toward both internal and external affairs for the purpose of building an independent Kurdish state.
Just as the state is the real instrument for practicing politics and demonstrating political action, political party is the instrument for having political ideas and projects within the framework of the state that can only practice or advance and maintain its political ideas in a degraded manner by entering the state framework in the form of authority or opposition and escape from that de facto politics that the revolutionary party demonstrates in itself.
In this regard, the real face of occupation and disempowerment of Kurds as a nation appears in these twelve theses that can be clarity for understanding the framework of a roadmap that clarifies a direction for instrumentalization for national and territorial politics in Kurdistan, which is of course conditional on resolving the discourse crisis in Kurdistan.
The existence of non-national and non-territorial or often anti-national and anti-territorial discourse that finds all of their de facto politics in Kurdistan within the paradigm of rights-seeking and providing political projects for occupying countries, manifesting in the form of democratizing the state or finding alternatives for state apparatus and their political system.
As a result, occupiers use Kurdistan’s political agora for the purpose of their political project, which is foreign politics, preventing instrumentalization for Kurdish nation-building and homeland-building politics. Based on these theses, personalities and parties whose political project does not encompass national sovereignty of Kurdistan’s country, it is not logical for them to have a share in national politics and Kurdistan’s political agora. Without creating a discursive turn within themselves toward Kurdish national discourse and reformulating their politics based on both indicators of country and independent state as the only state apparatus with national sovereignty in Kurdistan, they cannot be part of Kurdish politics.
The condition for conducting politics in Kurdistan in a rigid and non-negotiable manner must be having independence discourse in the political foundation of all parties. Politics in Kurdistan is legitimate when political parties are committed to territorial integrity, national sovereignty, national security, and national interests and the wellbeing of Kurdistan’s society.
As a result, it is hypothesized that these theses are clarifying for defining the non-productive condition of the resistance paradigm as a survival mechanism that needs a complete and thorough change from the current paradigm. Simultaneously, these theses can be context for seizing opportunities and overcoming solution-seeking transitions for paradigm-making into the condition of national war and constructive mind and escape from current stagnation and salvation from the fate of dissolution and extinction.