The Kurds – estimated at between 30 and 45 million people worldwide – are the largest people in the world without their own state. Their homeland stretches across four states – Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria – and a further roughly two million Kurds live in Europe, of whom about 1.3 million are in Germany, many already in the second or third generation.
Years of cooperation with Kurdish associations in Germany allow one to say: their Kurdish origin matters to them, while at the same time they understand themselves as Germans and Europeans – and in doing so have proven to be reliable partners for democracy, minority rights, religious freedom, and equal rights. This cooperation goes back a long way: as early as 14 December 2015, the author delivered the keynote address to some 300 guests at Goethe University Frankfurt on the founding of the German-Kurdish Lawyers’ Association (Deutsch-Kurdische Juristenvereinigung e.V.), where he called for the Kurds’ right to self-determination.
His engagement with the Kurdish question reaches back further still and is both scholarly and personal: he has studied the subject academically and remained in ongoing dialogue with Kurds in Germany and from all parts of the Kurdish-settled territories. As early as 1985, his publishing house for Culture and Science (Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft) published the “Kurdish Grammar” (“Kurdische Grammatik”), and it has since brought out numerous further books by and about Kurds; he himself has published articles on the subject as well.
In northern Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has developed since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 into one of the most stable democratic entities in the Middle East. The argument consolidated below rests on nine points: democratic legitimacy, the timeliness of the question, the systematic non-implementation of the Iraqi constitution, the protective role for minorities, the role as a partner of Europe, the international law of self-determination, the border question, international voices of support, the Kurdish diaspora – and, quite openly, the still-unresolved position of the Kurdish government itself.