The Kurds: An Inconvenient People

In parts of the northern regions of the country called Iraq there is a majority of people who consider themselves to be of a Kurdish ethnicity: as there are in a large swathe of Turkey and parts of other 'national' territories; not the least important being Syria. The vast majority of the Kurds were subjects of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the First World War, when that monarchy [like the Austro-Hungarian 'dual monarchy'] was dissolved.

In Europe the victorious allies imposed the Versailles Treaty on Germany, and the Trianon Treaty was supposed to resolve the territorial boundaries of the successor states to Austria and Hungary; including much-reduced 'rump' states called Hungary and Austria. The US President had published his ''Fourteen Points" during the war, setting out America's war aims: to which the British and the French subscribed, insofar as the postwar settlement of Europe was concerned. Prominent among these points was the 'principle of nationality': some groups who had been subject to Austria and Hungary had declared themselves to be separate nationalities and small armies [for example, cohorts of Czechs, Poles and Slovaks] had fought with the allies;  or claimed to be ethnically related to the people of neighbouring states, as with Romanian-speaking subjects of Austria and Russia. All these claims came out at the peace conferences, and an attempt was made to accommodate them.

The distribution of people and languages in Europe did not easily lend itself to a process of drawing clear frontiers around the ethnic groups. Thus German speakers were allocated to France in Alsace and Lorraine, alongside French speakers, and to Poland and to the Czecoslovakia that was cobbled together after the great Slovak leader Stefanik was conveniently removed in an 'air accident'.
Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians were deposited in frontier areas of Slovakia and Romania. The great German port of Danzig was created a 'free city', the polyglot Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste was severed from its hinterland by its allocation to a sliver of Italian territory, and the German-speaking former capital of Hungary - Pressburg - was considered for free city status until it was designated the capital of Slovakia and given the newly-minted title of Bratislava.

Some of these territorial allocations - notably those in Czechoslovakia and Poland - were the trigger point for the Second World War; and hangover border issues still remain as with the Slovak-Hungarian minority. New ethnic mixes were created by Stalin, who rebuilt the USSR by moving millions of people so that Donetsk is an almost-entirely Russian-speaking city and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have large Russian-speaking minorities. Spain faces an urgent crisis over the much longer-running claims for independent sovereignty for Catalonia; and Scots nationalism is not dead. Rich Dubliners send their children to centres in the west of Ireland where they are expected to improve their pronunciation of a language that they are most unlikely to deploy in their careers; while the Ulster protestants are fiercely resisting demands for their province to adopt the formal bilinguality that prevails [at great cost] in the Irish Republic.

With so many loose ends quietly festering in Europe, there can be no surprise that similar problems exist elsewhere; as with Tibet, and with the Muslim minority who are currently in flight from Myanmar.

The Kurds have the misfortune to have had no advocate of significance in western capitals in 1919, when the majority of them were allocated to the newly-defined Turkish state and others were simply in the way of the mapmakers as the British and French arbitrarily delineated new states which defied both the aspirations of the Arabs who had fought with the 'allies' in the First World War and the interest of minority populations within those artificially designated states. After all, it was what the Europeans had done at the end of the nineteenth century in delineating their colonies in Africa: which led to the absurd situation of today, whereby the posit-independence states in Africa bear little or no relevance to the ethnicity of their populations. There is scant chance of Kenya electing a President Obote as long as the Kikuyu are the majority ethnic group.

The Kurds of northern Iraq provided tough and useful allies for the USA in the resolution of the mess that Bush II and Blair created in that country. Yesterday they voted to be a sovereign nation. That is utter anathema to Turkey. A festering sore that is ninety-eight years old is about to swell into a major international crisis. The Kurds surely have their rights; as do the rulers of Turkey, Syria and Iraq. The times call for new thinking: the fraught political situation will not permit that to have any effect.

Putin Near Paris

President Putin is today due to visit France, where he will open an exhibition on Franco-Russian relations over three centuries and have lunch with President Macron in a house once lent to Peter the Great of Russia during his study-tour of western Europe.

Macron will go into the meeting with a list of conversational objectives, all of which will be to some extent constrained by his commitment to the European Union. The French president's smirk during last week's Trump tirade against those members of NATO who under-provide for their defence spending will have been copied into Putin's file; together with a reminder that France [unlike the UK] has a truly independent capability to deliver nuclear weapons. Britain's nuclear missiles are under joint American-UK control; France's are entirely at the disposal of M Macron. This alone makes France a 'power', and the commitment that Macron has expressed to a closer EU must be set alongside that independent capability. France is also one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, which alone will justify the two presidents comparing their positions on the major global issues that have recently been on the Council's agenda, and those that might appear there soon.

France was, in effect, the colonial power over Syria from 1919 to the nineteen-fifties, under the Franco-British carve-up of the Arab lands that were separated from the Ottoman Empire as a result of the First World War. More recently, France has played little active part in the awful war in Syria, as the Russian commitment to the Assad regime has been increasing. France has huge background knowledge and understanding of the country, and the opinion of the French establishment [of which Macron is a selected product] may be helpful to Putin as he looks through the murk that is deepening in Syria as Trump appears to be more willing to take more military action against Assad. France's role in helping to keep the EU states [and NATO, as such] out of that conflict can be useful to Putin; and reinforcing the pressure for a benign neutrality of 'Europe' towards Russia will be well worth the visit.

Closer to home, for Putin, are the questions of Ukraine and Crimea. France has supported the NATO and EU policies of utter opposition to the recent Russian seizure of the Crimea, including the imposition of sanctions. The French economy has suffered slightly from the loss of trade with Russia that has resulted from the sanctions; and gained no benefit from them. There may be time in the two presidents' wide-ranging discussion to exchange hints on how that standoff could be resolved.

Russia regards Ukraine as an integral part of a single homeland. Kiev, now the Ukrainian capital, was the centre of the first city-state that grew into Russia. Moscow [the Grand Duchy of Muscovy] is a much more recent development; and deep in Russian history and sentiment are the sense that Moscow and Kiev belong together in a single state. The fact that the people who speak Ukrainian were abominably brutalised during Stalin's collectivisation of agriculture made many of them willing, at first, to welcome the German invaders in 1942 as liberators. Within a year most people recognised their mistake: the racist brutality of the Nazis exceeded  even what Stalin's police had imposed, and thus the eventual Soviet victory was welcomed; at first. Then the Communist regime imported ethnic Russians who had been made homeless by the war to rebuild the shattered industrial cities, especially in the Donbas, adding linguistic complexity to the situation within the Soviet Republic of Ukraine [which, along with Belarussia was a given a separate seat in the UN, alongside Russia, as an inducement for Stalin to join the organisation]. The separate soviet republics had no independent power anyway, until the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics simply fell apart when Gorbachev lost his grip. Then the former soviet republics gained international recognition as sovereign states, as that term was generally understood in international law. Colonel Putin and his colleagues in the KGB watched, aghast, as the Baltic states, the Balkan states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and even Putin's former workplace East Germany joined NATO and applied to be admitted to the EU.

While Belarus was consolidated as a puppet state to Russia, Ukraine made attempts to establish itself as a significant, independent European power; but fell prey to corruption, faction and alien interference. Russia would like the Ukraine to form a close federating with Russia, accepting Russian foreign and defence policy. France has joined with its allies in opposing Russian attempts to push that situation along. There is every reason to expect that Putin will push Macron to take a more pragmatic view of the Ukrainian [and thus the Crimean] situation than have his predecessors; and it would be interesting to know what quid-pro-quo Putin is able to offer France on that delicate topic.

Trump Triumphs?

President Donald Trump is having a great time in the Arab world. His hosts, led by Saudi Arabia, expect that he will reverse President Obama's raprochement with Iran [which will cause problems for the newly re-elected President of that country] and open up trade and other relations - including access to US territory - to some of those who would have been excluded from the US if Trump's attempted decree to 'ban Muslims' from the US had not been stymied by the lawful authorities.

The upside from all of this, besides The Donald getting a 'very heavy' gong from the King of Saudi Arabia, is that the Gulf States will buy advanced American weapons [some of which Obama refused to let them have], thereby increasing the profitability of the arms industry - including its British contractors; and the Arab states promise to invest heavily in the next generation of US technology and production. President Trump, of course, is claiming that this is a very quick response to his campaign promises to regenerate the rustbelt: which was a major factor in delivering him the election victory last year. But it is clear that the Arab managers of sovereign wealth funds, who have decades of shrewd investment behind them, are not going to invest in steelworks and metal fabricating factories in the midwest that will not have a chance of profitability in competition with low-wage output from emergent economies. The Arabs will select the knowledge industries and high technology projects that will have a very high probability of being doubly productive: they will have high productivity which means a high turnover per employee; and great productiveness which means that they will generate large profits for the firms that own them, that can be allocated to further projects and to high shareholder payouts and to rising wages for employees [which will raise the general level of demand in the US economy]. Trump and his colleagues may be able to offer incentives [such as have existed through the Obama presidency] for some of the investments to be located in the midwest, rather than on the Atlantic or Pacific coasts; but the plant will not offer mass redeployment of the horny-handed sons and daughters of toil who voted so enthusiastically for Trump. There will be a few posts for janitors, car park attendants, caterers and cleaners: but the tragedy of middle-age uemployment will not be removed by the direct outcome from the President's trip.

Other outcomes from the middle-east leg of this tour will be irritation in Iran, an escalation of the conflicts in Yemen, in Syria and possibly in Iraq, and deeper disillusion on both sides in the Palestine conflict and among the US Jewish population that has hitherto backed Trump enthusiastically. The tour goes on to the Vatican [a photo call], to Belgium [ a meeting of NATO which Trump appears to be learning to love: in contrast to his rhetoric on the campaign trail], and to a high-finance gathering at which he will be, at best, a passenger.

The pot of dissent from his actions as President is bubbling on in the US, and may overboil at any time.

I read that US Psychiatrists maintain strict patient confidentiality, and there is a rule against any doctor with specialist skills publishing any speculative piece about the mental state of a currently-serving officer of state. On the other hand, there are just the beginnings of breaches in that rule as the antics of a very non-standard head of state cause more embarrassment. I am sure that the top women and men in the profession will hold to its highest standards; but as international incredulity expands, there will be more speculation on every level.

The deals that the Donald has done this week are between the US and other governments: they will stand; and that should benefit some few of the American long-term unemployed, as well as the rising sectors of the US economy.