middle east

Reviewed by
Robert A. Lincoln
"Once again, just business as usual in the wild and woolly world of Kurdish politics."
So writes Christiane Bird two-thirds of the way through A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts as she describes an event in the relationship among Iranians, Iraqis, and Kurds in the early 1970s. In a sense she was denying what she announced at the start: "This is a not a book about Kurdish politics. This is a book about the Kurdish people."
Like any good travel book, however, A Thousand Sighs is also a political study, which is especially important today when the Kurds are suddenly in the forefront of the news. Ms. Bird is a reactor, not an analyst. As she states early on, the Kurds are the world's largest ethnic group without a state of their own, despite their longstanding claim of a country called Kurdistan. Several times, they have almost but not quite made it and at least once held the senior position in someone else's empire (the Seljuk, for Saladin was a Kurd), but have never been truly absorbed into or taken control of another political culture.
Today, the Kurds are a sizeable percentage of the populations of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. On unofficial maps, Kurdistan extends from the middle of the Anatolian plain to the mountains of Iran. The Kurds probably number between 25 and 30 million.
Ms. Bird found them today extremely sympathetic, perhaps dangerously so in the long run, toward the United States. They hope at least to hold a federated piece of real estate, rich in oil, in Iraq. Centuries ago the Kurds converted to Islam, and she does not mention much about the conventional saying in the Middle East that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Kurds Ms. Bird contacted rate Turks as their most fearsome enemy. Her personal interactions were mainly in English. It was Ataturk after World War I, when the French, British, and Greeks threatened to take over Turkey from Izmir in the west across Lake Van in the east, who held off the threatening troops and somehow kept Turkey together; the Kurds considered Diyarbakir in the east the traditional capital of Kurdistan and continue to resist integration. Here, again, politics strongly enters in. Turkey, the only Muslim member of NATO, hopes for European Union membership and EU powers rate her treatment of the Kurds as an important issue.
At one point toward the end of A Thousand Sighs, Ms. Bird likens mainstream Turkish attitudes toward Kurds to white mainstream attitudes toward black Americans, but it is impossible to agree. Kurds have an entirely different cultural and political tradition. The Kurdish question, colorful as the Kurds may be, demands a healthy dose of but more than the cultural-personal study A Thousand Sighs is able to provide.

Robert Lincoln, a retired Foreign Service officer who lives in northern Virginia, spent a dozen years in or directly connected with programs in the Middle East.