The Kurds in movement: migrations, mobilisations, communications and the globalisation of the Kurdish question

The Kurdish question today is a very different matter from what it was twenty-five years ago. Today's Kurdish movement is a very different movement from that of the 1970s — or rather, it consists of a number of movements each of which is very different from its predecessors. Kurdish society itself is perhaps even more drastically transformed than the terms in which we see the movement. In large areas of the region known as Kurdistan, especially in the Iraqi and Turkish parts, traditional Kurdish society has been destroyed in the course of war, rebellion and counter-insurgency

De Koerdische kwestie in Turkije en in de diaspora

Bij de opdeling van het Osmaanse Rijk na de Eerste Wereldoorlog kwam ongeveer de helft van Koerdistan bij Turkije, waarvan het de zuidoostelijke en oostelijke regio's vormt. Al sinds eeuwen leven er ook in centraal en westelijk Turkije groepen Koerden — het gevolg van vroege deportaties. Arbeidsmigratie, studie en, de laatste 15 jaar, oorlogshandelingen hebben een gestage toename van het aantal Koerden in westelijk Turkije ten gevolg gehad

Clashes between or within civilizations? Meeting of cultures in Anatolia and Western Europe

Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations, formulated in the early 1990s, has gained renewed popularity in the wake of September 11 and America’s declaration of war on terror. This thesis came out of a research project that aimed to search for the likely sources of major conflict after the end of the Cold War and to identify America’s future enemies. Huntington argued that the major fault lines of the future, across which there are likely to be conflicts, are the boundaries between different civilizations. Civilizations — such as Western Christendom, Eastern Christendom, Islam, the Indic and ‘Confucian’ civilizations of Asia — have, in this view, a more lasting permanence and stability than individual states and political alliances. The great heterogeneity within each of these civilizations is ignored. The greatest threat is Islam, which, Huntington claims, ‘has bleeding borders;’ the worst nightmare is an alliance of Confucianism with Islam against the West. Years before Bush’ ‘axis of evil’ speech, Huntington hinted at North Korean arms deliveries to Iran as the beginning of this most threatening scenario

The violent fringes of Indonesia's radical Islam

The October 12 bombing in Bali that killed more than 180 people seemed to vindicate the claims of those who had been accusing the Indonesian authorities of deliberately ignoring the presence on Indonesian soil of Islamic terrorists, connected with the al-Qa’ida network. Self-styled terrorism experts at once claimed to recognize the signature of al-Qa’ida’s alleged regional mastermind Hambali, who was believed to have planned a similar bombing of the US Embassy in Singapore. More sober voices commented that domestic power struggles rather than international terrorism might be responsible for this outrage. It was the largest, but by no means the first major bomb explosion in Indonesia; the country had seen many of those since the fall of Suharto in May 1998, and in many cases military personnel — ‘rogue’ elements, ‘deserters’, retired or indeed active officers — appeared to be involved. There are also, however, a number of relatively small but conspicuously violent radical Islamic movements, that engage in jihad in such places as the Moluccas and Central Sulawesi or act as vigilante squads raiding nightclubs, discotheques and other dens of inequity. Surprisingly perhaps, several of these militias maintain close relations with factions in the military or political elite

Duit, jodoh, dukun: Remarks on cultural change among poor migrants to Bandung

If one would wish to single out, among the many interrelated processes of social, economic and cultural transformation in the Third World, one factor as the most central, the migration of increasing numbers of people from villages and towns to large urban centres would be a likely candidate. Almost all other important processes of change are directly related to this rural-to-urban migration, some of them primarily as causes or contributing factors (population growth, modernization of agriculture and the accompanying economic polarization), others mainly as effects (the growth of urban slums, the rapid expansion of an “informal sector” in the economy, mass political participation and the emergence of new types of political movements)

The Kurdish question: whose question, whose answers? The Kurdish movement seen by the Kurds and their neighbours

That the contemporary relevance of Jwaideh’s work had not diminished by the turn of the century is shown by the fact that the recent Turkish translation was banned almost upon appearance.[2] In a situation where many other books on the Kurds, including some more overtly political ones, were and remained freely available, this can only be considered as a mark of distinction, based on the recognition of some dangerous quality. It was no the subject matter as such that caused the ban but rather, I imagine, the way in which Jwaideh framed what was usually called the Kurdish ‘issue’ or ‘question’. Reflection on the ban of Jwaideh’s book in Turkey provided me with the subject for this memorial The Kurdish Question lecture: the various ways in which the Kurds’ neighbors, and especially the scholarly inclined among them, have defined the Kurdish ‘issue’. Jwaideh looked at the Kurds and their history from the perspective of an Iraqi, whose own identity necessitated some engagement with the Kurds

The impact of the dissolution of the Soviet Union on the Kurds

The Kurds are among the direct neighbours of the Transcaucasian republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azarbayjan, each of which has moreover a Kurdish minority among its population. The Central Asian republics of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, though further removed from Kurdistan, also have significant Kurdish minorities. It is understandable that the recent dramatic events affecting these former Soviet republics, the new wave of nationalism and the reorientation towards Islam, also have their impact on the Kurds. The nature of this impact is mostly indirect and has therefore remained underreported, the more so because it coincides with the impact of other changes in the political and economic world order. This paper sketches the outlines of the various interrelations

Indonesian Muslims and their place in the larger world of Islam

With over 220 million Muslims, Indonesia has the largest community of Muslims in the world. Nevertheless, Indonesian Muslims do not play a role in global Muslim thought and action that is commensurate with their numbers. Indonesian Muslims have been eager to learn from Arab as well as Indian, Turkish and Persian thinkers, but do not seem to think they may have something valuable to offer in return. In Indonesian bookshops one finds the translated works of classical and modern Arabic authors, as well as studies of and by major Indian, Pakistani, Iranian and Turkish authors. But Malaysia is the only other country where one can find works by Indonesian Muslim authors, and there are virtually no serious studies of Indonesian Islam by scholars of other Muslim nations. The Arab world has shown a remarkable lack of interest in Asia in general, let alone in the social and cultural forms of Islam in Southeast Asia. Though more outward looking, other Muslim regions of Asia have not taken a serious interest in their Southeast Asian co-religionists either

Constructions of ethnic identity in the late Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey: The Kurds and their Others

The Kurds have suffered much violent oppression in Republican Turkey, but by and large this violence was exercised by the state, in the name of its civilizing mission. Ethnocide, the effort to eliminate Kurdish ethnic identity, was a constant element in Turkey’s policies towards the Kurds from the late 1920s on, and on at least one occasion (Dersim 1937-38) these policies were followed through to the ultimate consequence of genocide. Although the view of world history as a permanent struggle between competing nations enjoys popularity in right-wing nationalist circles in Turkey, this violence cannot be understood as part of such a struggle between the Turkish and Kurdish ethnies; it was part of the modernizing project carried out by Turkey’s self-appointed Kemalist elite