The Largest Nation without a Country

There is a people in the Middle East living in four different countries, their numbers are only estimated as the countries where they live might not want their numbers to be too vast. As many as forty million people try to survive day by day and not just providing for their families but keeping their heritage alive against all odds. They have their own language, their own traditions, customs, and history of over three thousand years. Despite of all this, their villages are destroyed, the people living their displaced. Even if they have their houses in the mountains, they might not have health care or schools available for them.

A few decades ago we used to hear about them. Of course as the media picks up on stories, they drop them when new ones are at hand and we will never hear anything about it ever again. So who is this ethnic group of forty million people that has no country of its own.

They are the Kurds. The Kurdish people who know exactly where their country, Kurdistan lies because there live their people, there they speak Kurdish, follow their customs, and their culture. They eat Kurdish food, they even have their own calendar! They know their own history even if they had never gone to school in their lives.

An estimated 3,000 Kurdish villages in Southeast Anatolia were virtually wiped from the map, representing the displacement of more than 378,000 people. During the 1990s, the Turkish military reportedly deployed the US manufactured helicopters Sikorsky and Cobra to drive out the Kurdish population from the villages.

Depending on the country they live in, they fight for their own identity and human rights the way they know how and the way they can. When they lose their villages, their families, their human rights, they go and arm themselves and fight back. This is why they are labelled terrorists. Who was the one terrorized the other first? The one that destroyed the villages and houses, killed people and traumatized thousands or tens of thousands of people, or the ones who will not take it?

This is the 21st century and I was really hoping it was the century of respect, human rights and let live. I still believe what we are experiencing now with all the dictators in the world is just a hick up and humanity will finally grow up and find within itself to look after the whole of the species, all humans with respect for who the y are and what they desire.

This is what borders of countries should reflect. Giving voice to the people there, how they want to shape their lives and how they want to socialize. There is such a thing as the character of a nation or ethnic group.