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Kurdish emigration is the historic process whereby people of Kurdish ethnicity have migrated from their homeland, the Kurdistan region, which lies in northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, northern Syria and north-western Iran. Numbering over 30 million, the Kurdish people have been referred to as the large ethnic grouping anywhere in the world to have been consistently denied their own state. Their large numbers and distinct culture have led to sustained persecution in the countries they live in, particularly Turkey and Iraq. In turn this has led to significant Kurdish emigration. In the aftermath of the First World War many Kurds relocated to what became known as ‘Red Kurdistan’ in the territory of the Soviet Union in the Caucasus, while significant migration to Lebanon, a religiously plural French colony at the time, also occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. Further afield, the Kurdish diaspora community in Germany and France is very sizeable.[1]
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Kurdish emigration chronology of events
The Kurds are an Iranian ethnic group, one with their own distinct language, culture, history and traditions. They are generally surrounded in the Middle East by groups that have been more dominant in the region over the centuries, specifically the Turks and Arabs. This has resulted in the Kurds being politically dominated within various states over the centuries, notably the Arab Caliphate and then the Ottoman Empire. Modern persecution of the Kurdish people can generally be traced to the 1920s when the newly created Republic of Turkey refused to allow a referendum on the issue of self-determination for the Kurdish minority in the east of the country. This led to the first waves of Kurdish emigration in the twentieth century, a process that was compounded by massacres of Kurds by the Turkish government such as that which was perpetrated at Zilan in 1930.[2]
In more recent times the Kurds faced major persecution by the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. This came about in part owing to the decision of the Kurdish separatist leadership to ally with Iran against the Iraqi government during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). The most notorious incident in this campaign of persecution were the Anfal attacks of 1988, which saw Hussein’s regime use poisonous gas against the Kurds and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 50,000 Kurds in northern Iraq. The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to a decline in state persecution of the Kurds within Iraq and some granting of powers of self-determination through the new federal system of government adopted in Iraq. Still, the Kurds remain without a state and emigration abroad has continued throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.[3]
Extent of Kurdish emigration
There has been a steady flow of Kurdish emigration since the 1920s when the Kurds’ hopes for a state of their own were thwarted by both the new Republic of Turkey and the manner in which the British Mandate of Iraq was granted its independence in 1932. This was compounded by major atrocities such as the Zilan massacre, in which anywhere between 5,000 and 15,000 Kurds were killed by the Turkish Armed Forces on the 12th and 13th of July 1930. Many headed north at this time to what is now Azerbaijan, where a particular territory was designated as Red Kurdistan within the Soviet Union’s territory there. In 1926 it was recorded as having a Kurdish population of just over 50,000.[4] Thousands of Kurds also moved westwards to Lebanon in the 1920s and 1930s, a country which has been historically rare in the Middle East in having a Christian majority, combined with a Muslim minority and a Druze ethno-religious minority, meaning that it has been historically tolerant of religious and ethnic minorities.[5]
In more recent decades Germany became the center of Kurdish migration. This was owing to the Gastarbeiter (‘guest worker’) system that the government of West Germany operated between 1955 and 1973. This led to the migration of hundreds of Turkish workers to Germany to make up the deficit in its badly damaged post-war labor environment. A very substantial proportion of these Turkish ‘guest workers’ were Kurds. France operated a similar system for many years. Other countries like the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Sweden have also taken in tens of thousands of Kurds since the 1980s in the face of persecution by the regime of Saddam Hussein, while Kurdistan was also badly impacted on by the rise of ISIS in the mid-2010s and the establishment of their short-lived Caliphate.[6]
Demographic impact of Kurdish emigration
The demographic impact of this century of Kurdish emigration has been considerable. There are at least 30 million Kurds worldwide, with some studies placing the number at 40 million or more, depending on the parameters being used. Several million of these live outside historic Kurdistan in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. For instance, there are an estimated 70,000 Kurds in Azerbaijan today. A similar number of Kurds live in Lebanon. More substantial still is the Kurdish diaspora community in Germany. This is believed to be around one million strong, making it the largest Kurdish community outside of historic Kurdistan. There are a quarter of a million people of Kurdish heritage in France, while tens of thousands of Kurds live in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and several other European countries such as the Netherlands.[7]
Explore more about Kurdish emigration
- Kurdish History at The Kurdish Project
- Who are the Kurds? at BBC News
- The Kurds’ Long Struggle with Statelessness, 1920–2022 at Council on Foreign Relations
References
- ↑ https://www.cfr.org/timeline/kurds-long-struggle-statelessness
- ↑ https://ilkha.com/english/analysis/zilan-massacre-93-years-later-muslim-kurdish-people-still-demand-justice-339131
- ↑ https://www.cfr.org/timeline/kurds-long-struggle-statelessness
- ↑ Harun Yilmaz, ‘The Rise of Red Kurdistan’, in Iranian Studies, Vol. 45, No. 5 (September, 2014), pp. 799–822.
- ↑ Lokman I. Meho, 'The Kurds in Lebanon: A social and historical overview', in International Journal of Kurdish Studies, Vol. 16 (January, 2002).
- ↑ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13621025.2024.2384369?src
- ↑ B. Ammann, ‘Kurds in Germany’, in M. Ember, C. R. Ember and I. Skoggard (eds), Encyclopedia of Diasporas (Boston, 2005), pp. 1011–1019.