A panel discussion entitled “100 years of the Lausanne Treaty and Kurds” took place in Zurich on Friday. At the joint event of the Democratic Kurdish Council of Switzerland (CDK-S), Kurdish Women’s Association YJK-S, Rojava Committee Zurich, Bridging Amed- Zurich and the university group KriPo, numerous interested parties took part.The discussion was moderated by Franziska Stier, Secretary General of BastA!
In her lecture on the historical process of signing the Treaty of Lausanne and the subsequent developments, Nilüfer Koç said that the Kurdish question arose a hundred years ago with this agreement and the division of Kurdistan into four parts: “After this treaty, the Kurds became to a problem in the Middle East. Lausanne denotes an agreement in which the Kurds were deliberately made a problem by imperialist states like Britain.”
„Bleeding Wound in the Heart of the Middle East”
Nilüfer Koç stated that Lausanne was the result of a process and that the Paris Conference of 1919 and the Treaty of Sèvres signed in 1920 determined the process that eventually led to the Treaty of Lausanne. The Kurds were ignored. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the recognition of the Turks under the hegemony of the Kemalists was taken as the primary basis by the imperialist states, which welcomed Kurds, Arabs, Armenians, Persians and other peoples whose independence with the At the end of the Ottoman protectorate in the region, a second phase was left in question: “When it became clear that a Turkish nation-state would emerge, these peoples, with the exception of the Kurds, founded their own nation-states in good time, even if a lot of blood was shed in the process would. The Kurds, who were unable to achieve anything in this development process, remained in the power of the Turkish, Arab and Persian national states after Kurdistan was divided into four parts by the Treaty of Lausanne. In an effort to establish their own existence and hegemony, the nation-states tried at every opportunity to use the cudgel of nationalism to commit genocide against the Kurdish people. In this process, the Kurds were intentionally left without identity and state within these four nation-states. Knowing that the disenfranchised and massacred Kurds would resist, the imperialist countries of the time deliberately left a bleeding wound in the heart of the Middle East. In this context, there is an important statement by Abdullah Öcalan as a representative of the Kurdish people. He said it is evident that the Kurds are being punished by capitalist modernity today because they are a people who played an important role in the development of civilization in Mesopotamia.”
“Borders have no meaning for the Kurds”
The borders that divide Kurdistan into four parts have become meaningless and invalid in the eyes of the Kurds with the struggle of the Kurdish freedom movement, said Nilüfer Koç. The best example of this is the thousands of Kurds and people in solidarity who crossed the borders during the IS attack in 2014 to defend Kobanê against the Islamists.
The event ended with questions from the participants about the presentation and a discussion. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne, numerous events of the KNK and the Kurdish community centers are taking place in Switzerland this year in the form of discussion rounds, seminars and conferences.
