A major Kurdish demonstration was organized in Lausanne, on Saturday, in which about six thousand people participated, according to police and media sources, on the occasion of the first centenary of the treaty concluded in this Swiss city and delineating the borders of modern Turkey, denouncing its repercussions on the Kurds.
The Kurdish community gathers regularly on the anniversary of the treaty, in demonstrations in which hundreds of them participate, but this time the number was much larger than usual, according to the same sources.
The demonstrators set out from the vicinity of the “Chateau Duchy” hotel, located on the shores of Lake Leman, which hosted the talks that led to the treaty.
They marched with flags bearing pictures of the Kurdish leader, imprisoned since 1999, Abdullah Ocalan, to Romen Palace in the city center where the treaty was signed.
Khairuddin Oztekin, a member of the Kurdistan Cultural Center, said in a statement to the Swiss News Agency: “We want to benefit from this centenary in order to show the whole world that the Kurdish issue is still unresolved,” denouncing the “repercussions of the Treaty of Lausanne” and its “tragic” consequences that the Kurds are still suffering from.
The treaty, according to the Kurdistan Cultural Center, “approved the distribution of the Kurdish people to four countries, which are Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, which are democratically failed countries to a large extent.”
In Turkey, the major powers abandoned the Kurds “for a nationalist and racist Turkish state, which led to a century of massacres, forced displacement, and policies of repression and assimilation,” according to the Kurdistan Cultural Center.
“The Kurdish people, like all peoples of the world, demand the right to live with their identity on their land,” said Berivan Furat, a spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Council in France. “This treaty opened the door to all harassment and all massacres against the Kurdish people,” he told AFP.
“Our critics are the worst dictators in the Middle East and it is time to decriminalize the Kurdish movement and above all to review the Treaty of Lausanne, which has no value for us. It is null and void.”
The Lausanne Conference was held in November 1922 to renegotiate the Treaty of Sevres concluded in 1920 between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire, which was rejected by the Turkish independence leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who later became the founder of modern Turkey.
British diplomacy coordinated the conference, which included Britain, France, Italy and Turkey.
One of the consequences of the treaty was a forced exchange of populations between Türkiye and Greece. Eastern Anatolia was attached to present-day Turkey, in exchange for the Turks abandoning their claim to areas in Syria and Iraq that were within the lands of the Ottoman Empire.
The Armenians and the Kurds were left on the sidelines and their aspirations to establish their own entity were ignored.
“We know that there is no country that can help us (…) in taking the right decision to solve the Kurdish problem,” Kardo Lucas Larsen, 41, who lives in Denmark, told AFP. “Such a demonstration brings together the Kurdish people and gives us a sense of belonging to a homeland.”
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2023-07-23 01:33:19
