The Kurdish movement: issues, organization, mobilization

Abstract

The IISH did not hold any materials on the Kurds in those days, nor could one find much in any other library or archive in Western Europe. There existed a small solidarity committee in Amsterdam, the International Society Kurdistan (ISK), that maintained a newspaper clipping archive and library and published a newsletter. There were even smaller (in fact, one-person) similar committees in Paris and Berlin, and there existed a Kurdish student union with a few dozen members spread over various countries in Eastern and Western Europe. None of these individuals and groups was part of the ‘progressive’ solidarity movements. When they had political contacts at all, these tended to be with conservative circles. The Kurds of Iraq made alliances that did not endear them with European progressives either. The most prominent leader of the Iraqi Kurds, Mulla Mustafa Barzani, had come to depend heavily on The Kurds in movement the support of the Iranian Shah regime and was from 1972 on to receive covert CIA support in his struggle against the Arab ‘socialist’ Ba`th regime.