Declaration
of Conscience
July 24, 2003
Whereas a native population of
thirty to forty million Kurds still lives in their ancestral homeland known as
Kurdistan, approximating the size of Texas or France, situated in the heart of
the Middle East, as attested by impartial historians and geographers of the
world;
Whereas the Kurds and Kurdistan,
once partitioned and administered by the comparatively benign rulers of the
Ottoman and Persian Empires under policies respecting Kurdish linguistic and
cultural rights, became the spoils of war in the course of the World War I and
were partitioned again by the British, French, and Russian colonialists,
placing them at the mercy of these powers and of the predatory modern
nationalisms of the Turks and the Persians;
Whereas the forces of predatory
nationalism, imperial domination, and racism plunged the world into two deadly
world wars in the last century, prompting former President Woodrow Wilson to
declare his support, in the course of the first one, in the Twelfth of his
famous Fourteen Points for the rights of subject peoples, including the Kurds,
to ‘‘an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous
development’’;
Whereas at the peace conference in
Paris after World War I, the Kurds and Kurdistan enjoyed, on paper at least, a
brief acceptance and recognition based on the principle of self-determination
in the Treaty of Sevres, but subsequently were partitioned again, this time in
a conference at Lausanne, Switzerland, on July 24, 1923, without protection for
their basic human and cultural rights, a partitioning that has for the last 80
years exerted its poisonous influence as one of the gravest political crimes
haunting the history of modern Europe;
Whereas in the then created
countries of the modern Middle East—Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and also
recently formed Soviet Union—the Kurds were subjected to a policy of
ethnic repression and ‘‘social engineering’’ schemes,
sometimes inspired by European fascism, for their forced assimilation or
displacement, resulting in involuntary mass migrations or
‘‘transfers’’ which would now be called humanitarian
catastrophes, and creating tyrant masters and rebel subjects throughout
Kurdistan;
Whereas it continues to be unjust
that the inter-national community recognizes countries of the modern Middle
East such as Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, but not Kurdistan, divided between
these others without the consent of its sons and daughters, thus effecting the
dismemberment of a nation like the hacking of a human being limb from limb, and
bringing about under the ruthless sway of modern nationalisms the withering of
a Kurdish civilization as old as the dawning of history;
Whereas the present denial of
national and cultural rights to the Kurds has also been compared to the forced
marriage or involuntary servitude of a people to many different masters or
regimes, a servitude often imposed by handcuffs or even by an outright reign of
terror which, in a world guided by President Thomas Jefferson's principles of
representative democracy and freedom of expression, must outrage what he might
today call "a decent respect to the opinions of humankind";
Whereas the present predicament of
the Kurds and Kurdistan has been compared likewise to a people with one
principle of vitality and sensation divided not by one artificial border but by
several, imposing barriers of separation which stretch into hundreds of miles
and resemble the infamous Berlin Wall, with Kurds on different sides of these
borders subjected to alien systems of government and even to ethnic cleansing
or cultural genocide, the crime of ‘‘barbarity’’
decried by the renowned jurist Raphael Lemkin and later made by him and others
a basis for the modern concept of genocide;
Whereas the Kurds are willing to
accept their neighbors as equals and to honor the lessons of their own
oppression by respecting the full minority and nationality rights of other
peoples living within their homeland of Kurdistan, but regard continued
submission to this oppression as destructive of the very fabric of mercy and
justice which knits diverse peoples together in peace;
Whereas the Kurds hope for the day
when their loved ones will not be tortured, their linguistic and cultural
rights will not be brutally suppressed, and the riches of their land will be enjoyed
by all the inhabitants and varied national groups of Kurdistan;
Whereas this generation of
Americans vividly experienced the tyranny of catastrophic and unpredictable
mass violence on September 11, 2001, when its advent assaulted and terrorized
the citizens of these shores, visiting indiscriminate death upon thousands of
innocent civilians; and
Whereas for successive Kurdish
generations, every day has seemed like either a September 11, or the eve or
after-math of such a catastrophe, including a repeated reign of terror from the
air inflicted by more than one government to whose offices the Kurds have been
en-trusted, and in at least one notorious campaign in Iraq even the use, along
with mass disappearances and murders, of chemical weapons causing not only
immediate death and destruction, but also genetic mutations in the very
‘‘DNA’’ of survivors giving rise to the birth of babies
with alarmingly increased numbers of congenital mal-formations:
Now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the House of Representatives
(the Senate concurring),
That Congress urges the President
to support the proposition that the United States respects and accepts the
right of the Kurdish people to self-determination and urges the United States
Government to conduct its foreign policy so as to reflect and achieve this aim.
Dear Friend,
We hope you will consider signing
our declaration. We would
appreciate it even more if you took the trouble of sending a copy of it to your
representative in the House of Representatives and another two to your senators
in the United States Senate.
Please urge them to use the declaration as a basis for a resolution in
the United States Congress. Send
us copies of your correspondence with them. Together, we can bring light to eighty years of darkness in
the Middle East, welcome back a people to the sunshine of freedom, and serve
truth by calling a land with its proper name.
If you are a citizen of another
country, feel free to duplicate our effort. We would, of course, love to hear from you.
First and last name
Address
City, State, and Zip code
Email
Telephone
The
American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN)
2722
Connecticut Avenue NW # 42
Washington,
DC 20008-5316
Yes, I would like to sign the petition, my information is on its
way to:akin@kurdistan.org