Sunday, September 2, 2007

Dose Sovereignty matter?


By Dilshad Hama
02/09/2007

On the bombardment of Kurdish borders

It’s one of the long-lasting paradigms operating within International (Law, Politics and Relations). Yet, ‘sovereignty’ like many other paradigms of modernity has been vulnerable to various, sometimes, conflicting articulations and/or manipulations. This reality has been more evident in the particular context where, Kurds and the Kurdish question are at stake.

Historically, international society has always been insensitive to the Kurdish aspirations for self-determination (even in its narrowest sense); this is for the most part, if not solely under the rubric of reserving the sovereignty of so-called nation-states to which, the Kurds sanctioned to belong. With the same token, the dominant international rhetoric has, since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, been articulating the Kurdish statehood as impossible, depicting it as an assault on sovereignty of the regional states. Ironically, at many occasions, the same paradigm has seemed to be of no significance, neither to the regional states nor to the international society, and more importantly to its hegemonic actor, America. Under, pretexts such as regional stability, shared security concerns, combating terrorism and no to mention regime change as in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, the same taken-for granted paradigm has been neglected and undermined.

Iraqi-Kurdistan is now experiencing a continuous assault perpetuated by at least two other (sovereign) states namely (Iran and turkey). The simultaneous assaults by the tow states are by no means a matter of coincidence. There is also, no need for any kind of conspiracy articulation in this regard. Taking the long history of regional cooperation among both and other states in which the Kurds reside; cooperations characterised by shared culture of nationalist exclusion and denial of the Kurdish culture and identity; such assaults and many other forms of military operation have taken place, all which have had one thing in common: opposing Kurdish struggle for self-determination and/or cultural and political rights. This is an incommensurable paradox surrounding the taken for granted paradigm of sovereignty. While denying the Kurds( with other stateless nations), the equal right of self-determination, for it going against sovereignty of the pre-existing states; ironically and at the meantime, granting those same states, rights, not only exceeding the legal, political and moral boundaries of sovereignty, but also undermining it and rendering it of no significant. In other words, it’s the double standard irony, operating through the existing state of affairs in the international practice. Bombing of border areas of Kurdistan by the tow countries, and disturbing the most stable area in the troublesome Iraq, again ironically, an area belongs to supposedly an’ ally in the war on terror’,’ or’ the good Kurds’ in Michael Gunter’s terms. all that at a time when the country is factually under American mandate and occupation. If it’s partly, but crucially correlated to the quagmire in which American trapped; it dose to a considerable degree fit the American foreign policy doctrine, as it is inherently contentious and particularly indifferent to the Kurds question as a whole.

No doubt, the very existence of American presence in Iraq is highly controversial by the same token discussed above (breaching sovereignty of other states), meanwhile, accepting the overall rhetoric surrounding their role in the country, one could find no place for any other alternative perception explaining America’s silence, even approval and justification (implicitly in the Turkey’s case) towards and for outrageous assaults being carried out by both Turkey and Iran. Confronting this contradictory American stance and international inaction, one could set forth a seemingly outrageous question before an international order which ‘sovereignty’ makes on of its immutable poles; a question which could be articulated as such: dose sovereignty matter?

Is it the unlucky geographical space of the Kurds which making them’ perennial victims of history’ in Kissinger’s expression? or it’s the discriminatory, double standarded and interest-driven nature of American foreign policy doctrine, which gives no attention to assaults on sovereignty of an actual state, as along as it is taking place in a space where the Kurds reside.

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