And not to mention what to do with the Greece.
There are a ton of maps online for a historical potential Kurdistan, but I found this that just talks about the Kurdish people. It does have a map that shows concentrations of Kurds. Much of what happened predates the video and discussion here, but it’s possible that had the region not been divided as it was that the Kurds could have been able to carve out their own homeland in those areas where they are concentrated.
Once in a while you have to slip a little fun into a discussion…
Okay, I found two maps which say they’re showing the areas in Turkey which have a majority Kurdish population. But these two maps are showing substantially different pictures.
They look pretty similar to me. Basically it’s the south eastern part of Turkey. And extending that into Iraq, Iran and Syria it shows a pretty contiguous region, though obviously there were discontinuities, as the region has a great deal of mixing, but you can see that there are certain geographical regions that are dominated by this tribe or that sect all through the region…and to me, those would be much more natural borders than the arbitrary borders created by some guys back in Europe just wanting to do a land grab.
According to one map, about half of the area in Turkey has a Kurdish majority population. According to the other map, it’s about an eighth of the area in Turkey. I call that a substantial difference.
That said, it does appear there were areas with Kurdish majorities (I’ll assume the current maps can be backdated a hundred years) so the Kurds had a good case for having their own country.
But that brings us back to the central topic of the thread; should Europeans have stepped in and carved off a slice of existing countries to create an independent Kurdistan in 1919? How would that have been different than carving off slices of the Ottoman Empire to create countries like Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria? (We won’t even get in to Palestine.)
I think we can take it as a given that if Kurdistan had become a country in 1919, it would not have had a century of peaceful history to follow. We would just be adding the creation of Kurdistan to the list of things that Britain and France did to ruin the Middle East.
Yeah, I think this would be a better explanation.
I think one was just more nuanced than the other, but if you really look the main concentration (in Turkey) is still in the south eastern part of the country. But the Kurds are all through the south central and even central part of Turkey as well, and of course into Syria, Iraq and Iran too.
Definitely not. I don’t think the Europeans should have stepped in at all, which was my initial point. Had the British honored their original agreement most of the region would have been given to the Arabs to figure out for themselves how things would be. My WAG would be that Hussein bin Ali and his faction wouldn’t have been able to control it all, so you’d have had regions and tribe either being granted some level of autonomy or just breaking away to form their own countries. How it would be different is that the boundaries wouldn’t be arbitrary, but instead basically coalesce naturally based on the population distribution. Or maybe not, but whatever happened the people in the region would have been responsible, not some people looking at a map in Europe.
As for Palestine, I’m pretty sure that there probably wouldn’t be a Jewish state today had this alternative history happened. That was, again, the British meddling in the region after yet another world war. I do think that there would be a lot of Jews in the region, but I don’t think they would or could have created their own state had the French and Brits not initially monkeyed in the region by drawing arbitrary lines to demark the areas they wanted to snatch.
Hard to say how peaceful or not it would be. It’s hard to wrap your head around how different things would be without those artificial boundaries and groups of people forced to become nation states and then controlled by colonial empires for several decades before finally breaking free but still in the same lines on a map. Even if it wasn’t more peaceful, though, I still think it would be better if the people in the region were able to figure it out on their own after WWI.
I doubt the British would have left the areas west of the Jordan River, even if they had given up the rest of the Mideast. Not because of the Balfour Declaration or anything like that, but because of Jerusalem. No-one leaves Jerusalem willingly, especially not the English. The mystique is too great.