The Kurds and Kurdistan: A Selective and Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in World History)

THE KURDS AND KURDISTAN

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THE KURDS AND KURDISTAN A Selective and Annotated Bibliography Compiled by

LOKMAN I. MEHO

Bibliographies and Indexes in World History, Number 46

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congess Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meho, Lokman I., 1968The Kurds and Kurdistan : a selective and annotated bibliography / compiled by Lokman I. Meho. p. cm.—(Bibliographies and indexes in world history, ISSN 0742-6852 ; no. 46) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-313-30397-5 (alk. paper) 1. Kurds—Bibliography. 2. Kurdistan—Bibliography. I. Title. II. Series. Z3014.K85M44 1997 [DS59.K86] 016.9566'7—dc21 97-9008 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 1997 by Lokman I. Meho All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-9008 ISBN: 0-313-30397-5 ISSN: 0742-6852 First published in 1997 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Printed in the United States of America

er The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). P

To My parents, Hariri Foundation, and the American University of Beirut

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CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS PREFACE INTRODUCTION: GENERAL INFORMATION ON THE KURDS AND KURDISTAN Geography and Population Kurdish National Identity Tribalism vs. Nationalism Language Religion Other Cultural Aspects of Kurdish National Identity Education Economy History The Kurds in Turkey Since 1918 The Kurds in Iran Since 1918 The Kurds in Iraq Since 1918 The Kurds in Syria Since 1918 The Kurds in the Former Soviet Union Since 1918 Conclusion

xi xiii

1 1 2 2 3 5 5 6 6 7 9 12 14 15 16 18

1.

GENERAL WORKS

25

2.

DESCRIPTION AND TRAVEL

37

3.

HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY

43

THE KURDS AND KURDISTAN

VH1

Ancient, Classical, and Medieval: Prehistory-1496 AD Early Modern. 1497-1918 Modern and Contemporary: 1919-Present General Turkey Iran Iraq The Kurdish War in Iraq, 1961-1975 The Kurds and Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988 The Kurdish War in Turkey, 1984The Kurds and the Gulf War, 19914. POLITICS Nation-States and Kurdish Nationalism General Turkey Iran Iraq Great Britain United States Former Soviet Union Israel Human Rights and Repression General Turkey Iraq Syria Genocide Refugees 5. MINORITIES AND RELIGION Miscellaneous Jews 6. SOCIETY National Identity Social Structure and Organization Women 7. ECONOMY

43 52 58 58 73 77 83 88 96 98 103 109 109 109 133 150 156 176 180 191 197 198 198 200 210 214 214 222 231 231 243 255 255 260 268 271

CONTENTS

ix

8.

LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION

275

9.

LITERATURE AND FOLKLORE

293

10. CULTURE AND ARTS Miscellaneous Rugs, Kilims, Textile Fabrics, etc.

299 299 305

AUTHOR INDEX

311

TITLE INDEX

319

SUBJECT INDEX

343

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AI HA IJKS IPSA MEJ PSA SA

Abstracta Iranica Historical Abstracts International Journal of Kurdish Studies International Political Science Abstracts Middle East Journal Political Science Abstracts Sociological Abstracts

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PREFACE After nearly two years' labor, in collecting, reading, arranging, and classifying the material included in this work, I am at last able to publish the following bibliographical study. This work has been driven by two main considerations: First, the need to fill one of the major gaps in the world of bibliographies, namely, a general annotated bibliography on the Kurds and Kurdistan. Second, to assist researchers to locate their needed information on the Kurds in a more efficient way. In the last few years, the Kurdish question has taken on more prominence in Middle Eastern politics, and attracted the interest of media, the academic community as well as governmental and non-governmental organizations. The years 1991 and 1992 are (and will be) remembered by all students of Kurdish topics as the ones during which they were swamped by the press and academic departments to supply answers to everything that needed to be known about the Kurds--and quickly. Lacking comprehensive bibliographical studies, the Kurdologists have had little choice but to go to the Internet or DIALOG to search for material to complete their work, spending hundreds of hours and dollars in the process. They had to go over many databases, containing plenty of repetitious and misleading records. They have needed to survey all of the outputs for the needed material and yet with no definite positive end result. Soon also, they would discover that almost none of the databases cover materials published before the mid-1960s which certainly include many valuable works. Therefore, a manual search through a well-classified, annotated bibliography seemed to be more fruitful and presented a more economic and rapid method of communication research and retrieval of information. Had there been an up-to-date, multidisciplinary, annotated bibliography of the Kurds and Kurdistan, the researcher's task would have been much easier, less expensive and more rewarding. In short, no matter how much the Information Science field develops, we

XIV

THE KURDS AND KURDISTAN

will always need to rely on printed bibliographies. This is due to their accuracy, their savings in time and money, and their multi-disciplinary character. Books, articles, chapters in edited works, doctoral dissertations, and reports on the Kurds and Kurdistan are many, but scattered and often untraceable when needed. It was this situation which motivated me to consider compiling an annotated bibliography on the subject and make it available to the public, students, academicians, researchers, policy-makers, and the press. The fact that very few works of this kind are now available in English was another important reason. The first real bibliography on the Kurds and Kurdistan was published in 1968 by the International Society for Kurdistan (ISK's Kurdish Bibliography). This impressive work came out in two volumes and was edited by Silvio van Rooy and Kees Tamboer (Amsterdam: International Society for Kurdistan, 1968). The work is exhaustive and includes 9,350 entries in more than twenty languages and on all subjects that had been published before June 30, 1966. The second bibliography on the Kurds in English was by Wolfgang Behn (The Kurds in Iran: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography. [2nd ed.] London: Mansell, 1977. The first edition was published in 1969 under the title The Kurds, a Minority in Iran). This bibliography, compiled chiefly from holdings of the Islamic Union Catalogue in Germany, lists 275 entries in more than four languages, some of which are specialized studies of Iran. It was intended to supplement the ISK's bibliography for the years 1966-1975, yet, as the title reflects, the work is almost exclusively limited to the Iranian sector of Kurdistan. Finally, in anticipation of the rising importance of the Kurdish question in the Middle East, Elizabeth E. Lytle produced a small work entitled A Bibliography of the Kurds, Kurdistan, and the Kurdish Question (Monticello, 111.: Council of Planning Librarians, 1977, 16 p. Exchange bibliography-Council of Planning Librarians; 1301). She says in the introduction that her bibliography cites works that were published between 1837 and 1975, divided into two sections: One is concerned with the Kurds and Kurdistan in general, while the other is limited to the historical and political aspects of the Kurdish question. This small work, however, is merely a list of records (216) written in nine different languages with no subject headings or annotations. As a researcher and reference librarian in Jafet Library of the American University of Beirut (AUB), and now a graduate student in the MLS program of the School of Library and Information Sciences (SLIS) at North Carolina Central University, I had the opportunity to examine a considerable portion of the material I came in contact with. Of those which did not fall within my reach, I have been compelled to content myself with various sources of abstracts of articles1 and reviews of books in scholarly journals, all of which are cited following their respective annotations. Many abstracts were surveyed, and the finest ones were chosen for the records. As for the reviews of books, after careful analysis and comparison, those that were chosen were cited almost entirely in

PREFACE

xv

abridged form. A wide range of sources have been used in the preparation of the bibliography, including Jafet Library (AUB), SLIS (NCCU), the U.S. Library of Congress through online catalogue, Pferkins Library (Duke University, NC), and Davis Library (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). The bibliography represents mostly English-language material. French sources are included only when there has been no English-language equivalent, or when the French item is superior (French diacritics are not used in the text). Materials in Arabic and other languages are not included in the bibliography since they will be neither readily available nor accessible to the majority of readers. The majority of the items (more than 90%) in the bibliography are annotated (50 to 250 words per item) to provide the reader with a summary of their scope and contents. Users should not assume that a long annotation is an indication of a work's high quality, instead, the need to fully describe it. The work lists 814 entries, most for scholarly items published after World War IIwith an emphasis on recent ones (including 1996>-to cover the important works on the Kurds and Kurdistan. Two main problems were encountered in compiling this bibliography. First, certain sections, such as those on culture and arts, economy, education, and society, are relatively poorly represented. Second, given the general nature of many works on the subject, their classification was not an easy task. The eflFects of these two problems, however, have been minimized by the use of comprehensive cross-references and thorough author, title, and subject indices. Finally, this comprehensive bibliography includes a brief introduction that might be helpful to provide users with a general background of the Kurds and Kurdistan. My deep gratitude goes to my family to whom I dedicate this work. Their assistance and encouragement made it possible. I also wish to thank the Hariri Foundation and AUB whose financial contributions to my undergraduate and graduate studies, respectively, allowed me to pursue education and to become that unusual individual, a well-educated Lebanese Kurd. I also am indebted to other people who have aided me through their personal encouragement and through their scholarship. Among this group, I especially want to thank professors Mehrdad Izady and Seymour Sargent, Benjamin F. Speller, Jr., Dean of the School of Library and Information Sciences at North Carolina Central University, and Nizar Agri.

Notes 1

Sources include: From online databases: Historical Abstracts, Political Science Abstracts, and Sociological Abstracts. From printed materials: Abstracta Iranica and International Political Science Abstracts.

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INTRODUCTION: GENERAL INFORMATION ON THE KURDS AND KURDISTAN GEOGRAPHY AND POPULATION Kurdistan, or the land of the Kurds, is a strategic area located in the geographic heart of the Middle East. Today it comprises important parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Azerbaijan. Since it was, and still is, denied independence, most scholars describe Kurdistan as the area in which Kurds constitute an ethnic majority. Kurdistan was first divided in 1514 between the Ottoman and Persian empires. Four centuries later, Britain and France further altered the political contours of Kurdistan by dividing the Ottoman Kurdistan into three main parts. Iranian Kurdistan stayed where it was. The area thus partitioned consisted of about 190,000 square miles divided as follows: Turkey (43 percent), Iran (31 percent), Iraq (18 percent), Syria (6 percent), and the former Soviet Union (2 percent).2 As in the case with most Middle Eastern stateless nations and ethnic groups, estimates of the total number of Kurds vary widely. The subsequent governments of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the former Soviet Union did not (and still do not) carry out any real official census for the Kurdish populations in their respective countries. Turkey and Azerbaijan have even denied, until very recently, the very existence of Kurds in their countries.3 However, most agree today that there are about 30 million Kurds. According to the most recent and reliable figures estimated by The Kurdish Library in New York, there are about 30.3 million Kurds living in the region today distributed as follows: Turkey 16.5m (52 percent of the total Kurdish population), Iran 7.3m (25.5 percent), Iraq 4.7m (16 percent), Syria 1.4m (5 percent), and Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union) 0.41m (1.5 percent).4 Kurds living in Europe (particularly in Germany, Sweden, France, England, and Denmark), Israel, Lebanon, the United States and other parts of the world comprises around a million.

2

THE KURDS AND KURDISTAN

KURDISH NATIONAL IDENTITY Tribalism vs. Nationalism The Kurds, the people who are identified as one of the largest stateless nations in the world and whose issue 'forever falls off the bottom of the Western liberal agenda,"5 have a long and complicated history. They have failed to gain statehood partly because their fate has become intertwined with the interests of regional and international powers as will be seen later on, and also because their path to national identity has been impeded by their own social structure. Apart from the population on the plain and in the foothills, Kurdish society is still basically tribal. Accordingly, the loyalty of these mountain Kurds is primarily directed toward the immediate family clan~the cornerstone of the social system--and thence to the tribe-the largest grouping within traditional Kurdish society. The cohesion of the Kurdish tribe, in turn, is based on a mixture of blood ties and territorial allegiances associated with strong religious loyalties, especially to the sheikhs, the local leaders of religious brotherhoods. Beyond the tribe, mountain Kurds (and even some of those living nearby) only occasionally show loyalty to nation, state, or any other entity. Yet, despite the fact that tribalism has not yet withered amongst the majority of Kurds, it is, nevertheless, steadily retreating. The socio-economic and political changes that the rural Kurds witnessed as of the 1950s~the mechanization of agriculture, industrialization, consequent revolts, rural-urban migration, emigration, political mobilization in party politics, the expansion of public education and mass communications—weakened the tribal structure of the Kurdish society and provided an impetus for developing larger Kurdish nationalism. Taking the Kurds in Turkey as an example, more than 35 percent of the total Kurdish population in Turkey lives today in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and other major Turkish cities, let alone the Kurds who moved into major Kurdish cities like Diyarbakir, Antep, Malatya, and Urfa. Many of these migrants left Kurdistan either voluntarily (social and economic purposes) or forcibly (political difficulties and state terror which took the forms of mass evacuations, villagerazing, etc.). There are also about 400,000 Kurdish immigrant workers in Germany alone,6 not to mention other European countries. Becoming aware of the great disparity between their impoverished life in Kurdistan and their new lives in Turkish cities, Kurdish emigrants in Turkey become more socially and politically conscious, and their awareness of their Kurdish identity and ethnic solidarity is strengthened.7 As for the Kurdish immigrants in Europe and elsewhere, many were able to form their own associations, without harassment from the state. The children of these Kurds attend schools and achieve greater political awareness and self-confidence.8 Such improvements in the social, economic, and political status of the Kurds has become a vital source for the development of Kurdish nationalism in Turkey.

INTRODUCTION

3

The experience of Kurds in other parts of Kurdistan is not very much different from those of the Turkish sector. In summary, the social and economic negligence of Kurdistan by the local governments and the protracted cultural and political repression exercised against their Kurdish populations were decisive factors in fostering Kurdish nationalism.

Language The Kurds continue to speak many dialects of Kurdish that can be divided into two main groups. The Kurmanji group, which is spoken by about 75 percent of the Kurds today and composed of two major branches: Bahdinani (or North Kurmanji>-the most widely spoken dialect among the Kurds9~and Sorani (or South Kurmanji). The Pahlawani group, spoken by the rest of the Kurds and also composed of two major branches: Dimili (or Zaza) and Gurani.10 All these dialects are members of the north-western division of the Iranic branch of the Indo-European family of languages and are, therefore, unrelated to Turkish or Arabic. In their attempts to suppress Kurdish identity and revivalism, Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq have used many forms of repression against the Kurds with varying degrees of success. More effective than either political oppression or economic exploitation, cultural oppression has proven itself a weapon by which Kurds may be prevented from asserting their identity. The forms in which cultural oppression are implemented are diverse, among which is the Kurdish language which often serves as a cementing force of Kurdish nationalism and its survival. In early 1923, Ataturk decided to substitute the alphabet used in Turkish from Arabic for the Latin-based alphabet. Consequently, the Kurds of Turkey were forced to adapt the Latin characters for their language (that incidently fitted Kurdish more) that inhibited the exchange of literature between the Kurds of Turkey, on the one hand, and those of Iran, Iraq, and Syria on the other since the latter still use the Arabic alphabet. On March 3, 1924, strict measures were implemented in Turkey with the aim of suppressing the language of their Kurds. This took the form of banning both the spoken and written use of the Kurdish language, as well as ensuring that education and information are only provided to those who speak the dominant language-Turkish. Possession of written material in Kurdish also became a serious crime punishable by a longterm prison sentence. Turkish repressive measures against the Kurdish language continued since then, with varying degree of severity: easing during civilian rule and strengthening during military's. The following excerpt extracted from Ofuken, a Turkish journal sums up the attitude of the Turkish government towards the Kurdish population and their language:

4

THE KURDS AND KURDISTAN If they [the Kurds] want to carry on speaking a primitive language with vocabularies of only four or five thousand words; if they want to create their own state and publish what they like, let them go and do it somewhere else. We Turks have shed rivers of blood to take possession of these lands; we had to uproot Georgians, Armenians, and Byzantine Greeks ... . Let them go off wherever they want, to Iran, to Pakistan, to India, or to join Barzani. Let them ask the United Nations to find them a homeland in Africa. The Turkish race is very patient, but when it is really angered it is like a roaring lion and nothing can stop it. Let them ask the Armenians who we are, and let them draw the appropriate conclusions.11

Only with the beginning of the 1990s, Kurds in Turkey began to widely use their language, but, still much remain to be done. In Iran, many cultural activities (which include speaking and writing in Kurdish) were forbidden, especially in the period between the fall of the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad in 1946 and the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The fact remains, however, that Kurds in Iran were (and still are) enjoying greater cultural freedom than their fellow Kurds in Turkey. No language except Persian, Arabic, and European could be taught in Iran. Otherwise, Kurds, like others, were free to publish nonpolitical material in Kurdish, radio broadcast, TV programs, and foster their customs and traditions. In Iraq, the Kurdish language, literature, and some other forms of cultural expression were guaranteed by the 1932 Constitution upon the recommendation of the British Mandatory Power then. This situation further progressed after 1958 when the Kurdish language was officially recognized as the second language of the country. Kreyenbroek, however, argues that what the Kurds have achieved in Iraq is indeed a result of a long struggle against official animosity rather than granted by a noble government;12 the cultural freedom the Kurds of Iraq are enjoying is always under the mercy of the regime's mood. In Syria, although 90 percent of the Kurds use Kurdish only in their everyday life, the use of the Kurdish language in any form is still against the law since the late 1950s. Despite the greater tolerance the Syrian government is showing these days towards its Kurdish minority, it still prohibits the use of Kurdish in schools, and forbids broadcasting and publishing in the language.13 In the former Soviet Union, the situation was excellent before World War II when Kurdish was in steady promotion. After the War, the assimilation processes (carried out by resettlement campaigns of Stalin), the discontinuation of the use of Kurdish as a medium of instruction in schools, the cultural isolation of the Soviet Kurds from their brethren across the borders (e.g., changing the alphabet into Cyrillic), and the recent plight of many of Armenia's Kurds all denied the Kurds an effective development of their language.

INTRODUCTION

5

Religion At least two thirds of the Kurds are Sunni Muslims of the Shafi'i legal school, in contrast to their Arab and Turkish Sunni neighbors who adhere mostly to the Hanafi school, and from their Azeri and Persian neighbors who are Shi'ites.14 There are, however, many Shi'i Kurds who constitute 10 to 15 percent of the total Kurdish population, i.e., 3 to 4 million concentrated in southern Kurdistan (Iran) and in the districts of Khanaqin and Mandali in Iraq.13 Most of the remaining Kurds are adherents of heterodox, syncretistic sects