Good Kurds, Bad Kurds: No Friends But the Mountains

The worst atrocity in American public schools (at least in my experience) has been that history is that American history is unjustly glorified and anything after 1945 is rarely discussed. As a result, atrocities such as the Turkish oppression of Kurds is not only ignored but unheard of. Everyone knows how horribly the Nazis treated the Jews and they just assume that everyone learned their lesson. So few Americans actually have any idea of the depth of culture and history in the Middle East (or really anywhere else in the world outside of maybe Europe) that allows such events to go unnoticed. The Turkish government outlawed the Kurdish language and no one knows about it! The US government's reaction is typical; they believe oppression of the Kurds is tragic, but Turkey is a key political ally. Anyone who thinks the US has gone to war with Iraq (or any war) just to stop the oppression of a people is hopelessly naive.

As for the video itself, while I think the information presented was fascinating, I think the creator is much better as a reporter than a narrator or a director. The directing seemed kind of silly, and the narrating sounded very amateurish. But in the end, it's a documentary, not a drama.

I recently had the opportunity to see Kani Xulam, who spoke to my political science class on Iraqi politics and found him to be an interesting person with an abundance of information on the topic. I saw him smile a few times, but I think his sadness for the suffering of the Kurds couldn't help but show through.

No matter what the Turkish people or the officials will say, I think everything in this documentary was a fact, and even I think, as a Kurd who has lived in that region I believe there is more to it.

The Kurdish people have suffered throughout the history. They have suffered from massacres, from assimilations, from being subject to sacrifices in the name of the Global politics, while all along, all they have wanted is being recognized as an identity, and having some social and cultural rights in the very basic humanitarian sense. They wanted these through politics, their parties were closed, their parliament members were imprisoned. Military action didn't bring any good either because of the outnumbering of militia pouring on them. They are divided among four countries. The people from the same ethnicity, the same language are separated by four borders. So their fate is all a matter of political preferences of these countries and in most cases they are just ignored and sometimes treated harshly.

The documentary reflected nearly a decade of McKiernan's loyal work. It gives the main facts about the position of Kurds in Turkey and the major events of the last decade. It gives a very good insight to the matter, and we Kurds are very grateful to him for this laborious effort. I think everybody should watch this documentary, at least everybody that wants to know how life is like in some other parts of the world. As a result, I think it is ten out of ten.