The Kurdish people have been getting the short end of the stick for a long time now, and the US, at the behest of Turkey, is helping to perpetuate that tradition. Turkey is an important ally right now, especially since Saudi Arabia isn’t letting us crash at their place anymore, and the US is, once again, turning its back on the Kurds.

Iraqi Kurds are relatively upbeat about the removal of Saddam, seeing it as the end of a reign of terror they have suffered under for decades. But they don’t really trust us—nor should they. The US has proved time and again to be a fair-weather friend to the Kurds, playing them when we need them, and dropping them the minute we don’t. It was George Bush the elder who called upon Kurds in the north of Iraq, As well as Shiites in the south, to rise up against Saddam during the first Gulf War, promising our help. When help was not forthcoming, the result was an epic slaughter of both Kurds and Shiites, and one of the darker days in America’s long history of fickle and cowardly treatment toward foreign peoples. Now we’re working with Turkey in our ‘War on Terror,’ and promising them that the Kurds in Iraq will not be getting any kind of independence.

The Kurds are the largest nationless people in the world, over 30 million. It wasn’t always that way—their country was actually drawn out of existence by the English and the French when they divvied the Middle East between themselves after WWI. The Kurds, who wanted their oil-rich land for themselves, found their territory suddenly divided five ways, mainly between Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. The Europeans literally drew lines on a map—also creating Kuwait in the process. The Kurds found themselves arbitrarily and irrevocably torn asunder, in what may have been one of the biggest strategic blunders of the 20^th century. Since then, they have been one of the most oppressed minorities in history, brutalized repeatedly by some of the most ruthless and xenophobic rulers in the world, all with the help of the US. It was we who supported and armed Saddam Hussein as he used lethal and torturous chemical weapons against Kurds within his own borders. It was we who supported and armed the Turkish effort to exterminate the Kurdish Workers Pary (PKK) in their fight for independence. Time and again, we pander to the Kurds when it suits us, and then jump ship when we no longer need their help, knowing that they will have no choice but to take us back when we need them again.

There are 15 million Kurds in Turkey, out of about 67 million inhabitants, yet they are not even recognized as an ethnic group within its borders. The Kurdish regions of Turkey have been in a “state of emergency” for over 70 years, due to armed insurrections. The Turkish government hates and fears its Kurdish minority, and is dead set against any autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq or anywhere else, for fear that it will further encourage Turkish Kurds to agitate for their own independence.

In Turkey, it has been illegal to wear traditional Kurdish clothing, to engage in Kurdish traditions and rituals, to have a Kurdish name, and even to speak Kurdish until recently, when Turkey started grooming itself for entry into the European Union. (Sadly, both the EU and the US tend to overlook human rights abuses when there’s money to be made, and the EU has asserted no requirement for Turkey to resolve the Kurdish issue. Rather, the PKK has made the EU’s list of banned ‘terrorist’ organizations.) “Language suppression” has been Turkey’s main strategy for assimilating the Kurds. Most have managed to retain their native tongue, although literary development has effectively ceased in Turkey.

The list of persecutions against the Kurds committed by Turkey is positively nauseating rangin from use as human mine detectors to the forced eviction of nearly three million Kurds from more than 2,000 villages. But none of this registers with our leaders when it comes to choosing friends on the international stage. Our courtship of Turkey, as well as our games with the Kurds, reveals our pompous talk of liberation and “spreading freedom” to be what it truly is—a laughable charade. Whatever our intentions in our current world war frenzy are, you can be sure it has absolutely nothing to do with doing right by the downtrodden and oppressed people of the world—just ask the Kurds.