Member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs Elena Panina:
“In anticipation of the visit of Turkish President Erdogan to Sochi, where he will have talks with Putin, I want to talk again about the Kurdish issue.
The Kurdish problem did not arise today and goes far beyond Syria. The drama of the Kurdish people, deprived of their statehood, was the result of the hypocrisy of the victorious powers in the First World War. At the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, England, France and the United States proclaimed the right of nations to self-determination. This right was promised to the Kurds, as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and the Kurds living on its territory had every reason to use the right to self-determination.
However, England and France, occupied by dividing the territory of the former Ottoman Empire, simply dismissed the Kurds and their national-state project. The French territory of the former Ottoman Empire later became Syria, and the English part became Iraq. The Kurds were simply divided “into three”: part went to France, part to England, and part (the largest) remained in Turkey. A significant number of Kurds still live in Iran, but this is natural, since the Kurds are Iranian-speaking people.
Thus, Kurdish separatism was the result of the colonial greed of England and France. And “inherited” this problem went to Turkey and Syria.
It is important to understand that this is not an exotic small ethnic group. There are up to 40 million Kurds in the world, most of them live in four countries: Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. At the same time, 20 million of them are in Turkey. In Russia, by the way, there is also a Kurdish diaspora. Today, the Kurds in Syria have a well-armed US army, which successfully fought with ISIS. Thus, a well-trained and armed Kurdish military group appeared on the border with Turkey.
However, a military solution to the Kurdish problem does not exist. After all, this is not about hundreds or even thousands, but about millions of people. Even if they are pushed from the Turkish border to the alleged security zone, they will not “dissolve in space”, there will remain a huge number of peaceful Kurds who are not participating in the hostilities.
After the start of the Turkish military operation, the Kurdish issue cannot be left out of the brakes of a peaceful settlement in Syria. And, considering that the Kurds are an Iranian-speaking people and millions of their relatives live in Iran, the unresolved Kurdish problem in Syria will be a time bomb, fraught with constant armed conflicts. Therefore, the Kurdish issue may become one of the subjects of discussion during the preparation of the new Constitution of the Syrian Arab Republic. It is clear that the creation of an independent Kurdish state in the current conditions is impossible, but this may be some kind of special status for the Kurdish population.
And only Russia today has the opportunity to act as a force capable of combining the interests of Turkey, Syria, Iran and the United States to solve this problem, without which a peaceful settlement in the region is impossible.
This is in the interests of Russia’s national security. ”