A century has elapsed since one of history’s most hypocritical, enduring, and consequential betrayals of principle. Following World War I (WWI) and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, an independent Kurdistan was about to emerge. In Europe the Treaty of Versailles had implemented the principle of self-determination for ethnically-defined peoples, giving birth to new nation-states. Likewise in the Middle East, the Kurds were promised local autonomy and then independence from the Ottoman Empire within one year by the Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920). But the Allies shortly reneged and the Sèvres Treaty was eventually reversed by the Treaty of Lausanne (24 July 1923), forestalling the emergence of Kurdistan as a sovereign state. Despite its official title as the ‘Treaty of Peace with Turkey’, the Lausanne Treaty fell short of establishing peace and stability in the region.
the states phone number list of Turkey, Iran, Syria, Iraq, and the Soviet Union. In 1930, Stalin terminated the territorial entity of ‘Red Kurdistan’ (Kurdistanskii uezd or Krasnyi Kurdistan) and incorporated it into Azerbaijan. With the deportation of Kurds to other Soviet republics, Kurdistan was left as a contiguous ethnic region divided across only four states. The Allied Powers’ political and economic interests, especially those of Britain, France, and the Soviet successor state to Russia, played a decisive role in denying sovereign independence to the Kurds.