By Muhsin Aslan
For over a century, the Kurds have been rendered stateless, not by chance, but by design — and the world has watched.
Kurdistan was not lost. It was divided, sliced into pieces by law and policy. Its people, with a distinct language and culture, were placed outside every mechanism of self-determination. Europe withdrew its flag but not its intent. Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria did not stumble upon a “Kurdish problem.” They were assigned a mandate: ensure that Kurdish claims never return to the realm of law.
The instruments of this mandate were precise. Language bans. Forced displacement. Demographic engineering. Executions. Coups. Chemical attacks. “Terrorism” manufactured as legal fiction. This was not improvisation. It was a sustained plan, designed to make a people legally impossible.
Bonhoeffer warned that a society’s most dangerous enemy is not the malicious, but the stupified — the mind that abdicates moral judgment under enthroned power. The populations under these four regimes were not persuaded. They were anesthetized. Fear. Habit. Slogans instead of thought. Obedience transforms cruelty into routine.
The international community is not neutral. Silence is not absence. Silence is a decision. To call this “internal sovereignty” is not analysis. It is complicity. Statelessness was produced, delegated, and then rebranded as “stability.” Colonial crime survives without flags because it is embedded in law and in global consent.
A people can survive violence. It cannot survive erasure. Violence ends when its source is exhausted. Erasure persists until its logic is confronted. Until the settlement itself — not the symptoms — is named, the crime continues.
And by international law, this pattern constitutes crimes against humanity. The acts carried out by Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria against the Kurds satisfy Article 7 of the Rome Statute and customary international law. They are systematic, state-directed attacks targeting civilians on prohibited grounds.
The catalogue is clear:
- Persecution (Art.7(1)(h)) — criminalization of Kurdish identity, suppression of language, dissolution of elected structures, labeling civic activity as “terrorism.”
- Deportation or forcible transfer (Art.7(1)(d)) — strategic depopulation, forced exile, demographic manipulation.
- Torture and unlawful detention (Art.7(1)(f) & (e)) — custody regimes, incommunicado detention, coercive interrogations, sentencing to extinguish political identity.
- Other inhumane acts (Art.7(1)(k)) — cultural erasure, political disenfranchisement, state information control, collective punishment.
These are deliberate, not incidental. They are state-conceived, state-executed, and persistent, intending to destroy Kurdish political existence. The four regimes operate in concert, sustaining a century-long policy of de facto statelessness. They meet both elements of Article 7: widespread or systematic attack and repeated, deliberate commission of enumerated acts.
This is not a geopolitical debate, an internal security issue, or cultural friction. By international criminal law, what is happening is unambiguously crimes against humanity. The Kurdish people remain colonized — not because the world does not know, but because it chooses not to act. Until this legal and moral architecture is confronted, justice remains deferred, and the crime endures.
