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By Hiwa Aziz at Stockholm in Sweden (se)dec 10, 1997.
Article 62:
But the treaty was a dead letter from the moment it was signed, for history was written otherwise by Mustafa Kemal and and finally by the Threaty of Lausanne in 1923. By then it was clear that within Ataturk's Turkey there was no place for an Armanian or a Kurdish nation. Ataturk, however, did not disdain the support of Kurdish forces in his drive for Turkish unity from 1920-1923, after which he turned his attention towards internal pockets of resistance , including the Kurdish highlands toward the east. In 1925 Shaikh Said led a large-scale revolt in southern Turkish Kurdistan and two years later Ihsan Nuri Beg organized a resistance movement that lasted three years in the north and east on the slopes of Mt Ararat. Both of this revlots were effectively put down by the Turkish army but only after fierce fighting and heavy casualties. Thereafter the Turkish Government undertook two break down further those kurdish feudal-tribe relationships which enabled the Kurds to revolt or otherwise assert their independence. Titles were abolished, chiefs and sections of tribes were transplanted, the study of the Turkish langauge was made compulsory, and the Kurds became known officially as " Mountain Turks".
Meanwhile, in Iraq , the influence of the mandatory power held the Arab Government to its commitments towards minorities, including the Kurds who represented about 20 per cent of the population. Nevertherless new difficulties arose because of the pretansions of Shaikh Mahmud in the Solaimaniya area and the Shaikhs of Barzan and the followers farther north. Asyrien levies were employed in some of the punitive actions undertaken against Kurdish tribes; But in 1933 the now independent Government of Iraq, prompted by a variety of motives, took action against the Assyrians, many of whom were massacred and their vellages looted,. After this the Mar Shimun was removed to Cyprus, whence he eventually made his way to the United States.
In Iran Reza Khan, later Reza Shah Pahlavi, forged a new national unity by defeating tribe after tribe by force of arms and intrigue. He then palced influential chiefs in forced residence in Tehran or elsewhere away from their tribal domains. Efforts were there made to impose the Persian language in Kurdistan and to replace regional dress, for which the Kurds were noted, by a westernized Iranian variety. Then on 25 August 1941 Soviet Russian and British troops invaded Iran from the north and the south and a few days later Iranian resistance ceased. It took the Second World War and a foreign occupation to release Iran from the authoritarian but modernizing hand of Rezah Shah, who abdicated on 16 September 1941 in favour of his son, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, a young man of quite different temperament.
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