After 2,000 years, Kurds still seek a home

OVER the last two decades, about 20 new countries have been recognized by the United Nations and no doubt others are on the way. Of course, some of these -- such as Bosnia or the Baltic states -- were not entirely “new,” having experienced some form of national recognition in an earlier era. By contrast, in the last 2,000 years, the Kurds have never had their own country. They are the largest ethnic group to have lived in permanent diaspora. Will the more than 30 million Kurds now living in a region larger than Texas, one that spreads from eastern Turkey, across northern Iraq and into Iran, succeed in obtaining their own nation?

Kevin McKiernan avoids a direct answer to that question in his new book, “The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland.” Indeed, notwithstanding its title, this book isn’t a treatise on self-determination. Rather, it is a kind of personal travelogue, with both the strengths and weaknesses that genre entails. Its strength is McKiernan’s knowledge of his subject -- he’s spent years as a journalist among the Kurds, writes perceptively of their culture and heritage, and offers captivating portraits of Kurds he has come to know. But the book lacks an analytic framework. It’s frustrating to be given so much information about the Kurds’ aspirations without analysis of how they might draw on their situation to make a different future. And that story is complicated because the issues differ for Kurds in the three countries where they have large populations.

Still, anyone who has an interest in this ancient corner of the world will find McKiernan’s book engaging and informative. Readers will come away with this overriding message: Whether or not the Kurds succeed in forming a country, the drive toward nationhood dominates their life and culture today.

McKiernan recounts the day in April 2002 when Barham Salih, then the prime minister of what was the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, and now a key political player in Baghdad, noted gleefully that Newsweek used the word ‘Kurdistan’ in a headline. “The K word is finally out there in the U.S.,” Salih said. “We are making progress.’”

The Kurds have long been recognized as a distinct people with their own language and a culture different from that of the Arabs to the south, the peoples of the Caucasus to the north and the Persians to the east. Centuries of persecution and a hard mountain life have isolated them.

Their struggles, especially in the last century, are movingly traced by McKiernan, a documentary filmmaker and photographer who has spent more than 15 years traveling through what he calls “the lands of the Kurds.” Unlike many journalists who write after a brief foreign posting or covering a war, his fascination with his subject goes back 15 years, to when he joined a relief group bringing aid to Iraqi Kurds who fled Saddam Hussein and took refuge in squalid camps in Iran. It was the first of many trips in which he pushed, finagled and pleaded his way into areas off limits to most foreigners.

His reporting suggests that if any part of the Kurdish world could become fully independent, it is Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds in Iran are too poor and lack the central, political organization. The Kurds in Turkey, after decades of struggle, are beginning to be accepted as a minority with rights. This is due in no small part to Turkey’s effort to join the European Union and thus its need to demonstrate tolerance to non-Turkic ethnic groups.

The book’s virtue is its evenhandedness: Relentless interviewing leads him to portray the Kurds in measured terms, at once sympathetic but clear-eyed. They are persistent but also fighters, willing to kill for what they want. He describes the Iraqi Kurds’ transformation from open and accommodating underdogs, willing to reveal themselves to journalists, into wary managers of the media, even attempting to cloister journalists in guesthouses far from the action and give them minders -- tactics also used by Hussein, the Kurds’ enemy.

In several final chapters, McKiernan offers a lucid narrative of how the fundamentalist Muslim group Ansar al-Islam, which the United States believed had ties to Al Qaeda, insinuated itself into Iraq’s Kurdish population, endeavored to Islamize it, terrorized local Kurds and ultimately used the villages and towns they dominated to launch brazen attacks against the Kurdish government. It’s a textbook example of the tactics used in fundamentalist takeovers of other remote outposts from Afghanistan to Chechnya.

The reporting on Ansar is made more compelling because it encompasses the story of a Kurd in whose life McKiernan became deeply involved. Karzan Mahmoud, a driver for then-Prime Minister Salih, was crippled when three Ansar-linked gunmen tried to assassinate Salih in 2002. Karzan took 23 bullets, and when doctors in Turkey were unable to relieve his pain or help him to walk normally, he sought McKiernan’s help. The author underplays what must have been enormous effort to persuade Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to treat Karzan free.

Usually when a reporter gets involved with his subject, we question his objectivity. But McKiernan never lets his passion get in the way of his reportage. But he understands the pathos of what he is writing about and makes us understand it too.

Alissa J. Rubin is a Times foreign correspondent who has covered Iraq and the war extensively.