Elisa von Joeden-Forgey and Thomas McGee
The Kurdish-inhabited lands of the Middle East—spanning territories in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey as well as the Caucasus—have hosted a complex ethno-religious mosaic of civilizations since ancient times. The region’s fertile soils bear witness to centuries of social cohesion and intercommunal harmony, punctuated by persecution, war, genocide, and atrocity committed against its peoples by internal and external historical agents. In the modern era, genocidal strategies have been employed against ethnic Kurds as well as Armenians, Assyrians, and Ezidis,1 among other groups, as part of the rise of nationalism and nation-states within a larger global context characterized by regional competition and Russian, European, and North American imperial interests.
At times, Kurds have found themselves caught up in genocidal processes as perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers, as was the case with the Ottoman Empire’s genocide against its Christian (and Ezidi) populations during and after World War I. At other times, and more frequently, Kurds have found themselves targeted by genocidal violence, to the extent that they have been referred as “a nation of genocides.”2 The enduring trauma of genocide and of the historical processes of erasure, as well as the trauma associated with the unfinished project of creating a sovereign homeland in which Kurds can find protection, is palpable to anyone who visits the region.
This special issue of Genocide Studies International engages with the question of genocide in the variously defined territory known as “Kurdistan” and in the Kurdish diaspora. We have focused on “Genocide and the Kurds” rather than “in Kurdistan” to emphasize the shifting nature of claims to the land as well as the diversity of peoples that have inhabited it historically, whose presence is still so definitive of the region and its politics. The articles published here help to give shape to the overlapping experiences and discourses of genocide for different Kurdish communities and their neighbors in the unique landscape of palimpsestic genocide. They do so with a view to better understanding genocide’s impact on the spatial and temporal dynamics of identity construction and the long-standing question of Kurdish self-determination in the Middle East, and at times touch upon the complex politics of genocide memory and genocide recognition in the region.
In planning this issue, we were very much influenced by the contemporary, and in some cases ongoing, genocides committed by the Islamic State (also known as ISIS/ISIL/Daesh) against various minority communities in northern Iraq and Syria. These actions have placed multilayered pressures on communal relations, as well as the capacity of local authorities to respond to the needs of the survivors and displaced population. Most notably, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has accepted close to 1.5 million internally displaced people, including Ezidis, Christians, Shabak-Shia, Turkomen, Mandean, and Sunni Arabs since 2014, which has placed an immense burden on an already contracting economy.3 Nevertheless, the stories of persecution and displacement told by these traumatized communities are very familiar to the host society, which experienced genocide most recently from 1986–1991, and have been incorporated, in some instances, into Kurdish articulations of their own need for and right to self-determination, and sometimes to an independent state.
Nowhere is this trauma more clear than in what is often referred to as the 74th Ezidi firman (literally “edict” or “royal decree” in Persian and Turkish, but generally translated in the Ezidi case as “genocide”), which began in August 2014, when ISIS overran the Sinjar/Shengal region and the Nineveh Plain.4 The Ezidi count between 73 and 74 firman against them, with the ISIS genocide of 2014 to the present being the most recent. The ISIS attack on the Ezidi was preceded by the fatal, and seemingly planned, withdrawal of Kurdish Peshmerga troops from the Ezidi homeland of Sinjar on the Iraqi border with Syria. This left the Ezidis completely unprotected when ISIS arrived some hours later. The withdrawal has been experienced by many Ezidis as an abandonment and a betrayal, leading to tensions between Ezidi IDPs and the Kurdish authorities, often expressed through disputed identity claims. While Ezidis have long been characterized as the “guardians of the original Kurdish faith,” the 2014 ISIS attack on Sinjar intensified the tendency for Ezidis to identify as a distinct ethno-national group rather than as Kurds.5
The argument that Ezidis are ethnically Kurdish is in some measure used to ground the KRG’s territorial ambitions to the Sinjar (and Nineveh) region. This is evident in the slogan used at the 2017 anniversary of the Sinjar genocide, one month before KRG’s independence referendum: “Yesterday was genocide, today is referendum and tomorrow will be an independent Kurdistan.”6 The incorporation of Ezidi identity into Kurdish ethno-nationalist identity has raised fears of a further erasure of Ezidi identity and culture in the post-genocide KRG, while simultaneously supporting Kurdish hopes for greater territorial control and ultimately independence. The tension (and sometimes the contradiction) between the fears of destruction and the consequent security demands of two traumatized communities, both victims of genocide, highlights an enduring feature of genocidal processes in the region.
Palimpsestic Genocide
Since 2014, genocidal attacks by the Islamic State against various communities in Iraq and Syria have added new layers to the already historically complex notion of genocide in the territories broadly defined as “Kurdistan” today. This recent (and arguably ongoing)7 persecution, recognized by the United Nations as “genocide” in the case of the Ezidis from Sinjar,8 underscores the palimpsestic nature of victimization in the region. At issue today is the ultimate meaning of genocides to the borders of group identities, and how these meanings should inform future peace and justice processes as well as articulations of good governance and institutions of group security.
The concept of the “palimpsest,” drawn from literary and cultural theory, can helpfully frame the history and politics of genocide in Kurdistan by pointing out the shifting nature of power and the way it has coalesced with episodes of great violence and cultural erasure as well as cultural renewal. The term palimpsest draws our attention to two important and interrelated aspects of genocide: (1) the distinctness of each case and (2) the “contamination” of one by the other, so that “even though the process of layering which creates a palimpsest [in the history of literary texts] was born out of a need to erase and destroy previous texts, the reemergence of those destroyed texts renders a structure that privileges heterogeneity and diversity.”9
ISIS genocides have laid bare the fragility of long-term efforts by religious and national minority communities in the region to find security within competing imperial, religious, and nationalist ideologies. They have also called attention to the complex historical dynamics that have moved groups around within power matrices that have often resulted in catastrophe for some and relative gain for others. The spatiotemporal geography of genocide in Kurdistan does not involve total erasure of past events as much as their supersession and transmutation by events that come after, so that intercommunal tensions have a high chance of developing existential characteristics. Prior destructive events and processes exist in discourses and experiences of people in the present day, even when they are no longer actively remembered, creating an affective landscape deeply scarred by trauma that is shared by people within groups as well as between them. There is substantial cross-cultural fertilization as well as tension between the memory of genocidal events in one group and memories in another. Therefore, in addition to shifting the discourse around “genocide in Kurdistan” to address a multiplicity of minority communities targeted alongside Kurds,10 the recent ISIS genocides highlight the parallels, recurrent practices, and continuity of survivor experiences within the various overlapping cases of genocide implicating Kurds and Kurdistan.
With the above in mind, this special issue considers “Genocide and the Kurds” through a long-term historical lens across a rich and varied geographic, demographic, and affective landscape. Indeed, our contributors have emphasized the long-term historical depth of genocide in the region, pointing out that the dynamics of community destruction in Mesopotamia have taken surprisingly similar forms over time, a central feature of which has been the deprivation of homelands through expulsion, dislocation, cultural destruction, sexualized violence, and the denial of memory and identity. Genocidal processes have often coexisted in the region, unfolding at different tempos and at different levels of local, national, and international organization and frequently affecting several different groups at once, though in different ways. Viewed over the longue durée, the history of genocide in Kurdistan challenges and offers correctives to approaches that focus exclusively on genocide as a process linked to modern nation-building.[1]

=KTML_Link_External_Begin=https://www.kurdipedia.org/docviewer.aspx?id=606656&document=0001.PDF=KTML_Link_External_Between=Click to read Editors’ introduction: palimpsestic genocide in Kurdistan=KTML_Link_External_End=