Luqman Barwari | Special to Ekurd.net

In less few days, on Monday, Sept. 25, the largest nation in the world without a state of its own — the Kurds — will finally hold a vote for independence referendum.

Though only Iraqi Kurds are participating in the referendum, its consequences will extend well beyond the boundaries of the Iraqi Kurds and into the Kurdish communities of Iran, Syria and Turkey. Estimated to number around 40 million throughout the Middle East.

This brings us back to what we have been hearing a lot about lately, the Sykes-Picot, a secret agreement signed by British and French diplomats 101 years ago. It aimed to carve up the collapsing Ottoman Empire between France and Britain.

For the Kurds the Sykes-Picot Agreement was the beginning of a century-old tragedy. The historically Kurdish populated areas were left to the mercy of countries such as Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran that emerged much later and were meant to protect the Kurdish people; however, the opposite occurred.

What did the secret Sykes-Picot agreement mean for the rest of the Middle East, more specifically the Arab nation?

Great Britain, behind everybody’s back, was negotiating with France, and planning how they were going to actually divide up the Middle East after the WWI. The plan was intended to make sure there was no united Arab kingdom that would ever get in the way.

Under this agreement, the British and the French drew new boundaries, fracturing the region so, the British and their allies in the region could control it.

The aim was to divide the Arabs, divide them, so they could protect the trade routes. They did not care about the Arabs, or any other ethnic or religious groups of the region, they didn’t care about anything. They wanted to maintain the trade routes.

The Arabs and the regional nations were forced to accept this western European model of the nation-states because they had no choice.

Do other alternatives, other than nation states exist?

While the Kurds in Iraq will be voting on Monday for independence referendum, their brethren in Rojava (North of Syria) are experimenting and implementing a new form of governance, the democratic confederalism as a non-state political administration or a democracy without a state, whereby it is flexible, multi-cultural, anti-monopolistic, and consensus-oriented; whereby ecology and feminism are central pillars of this project. In such, self-administrative system an alternative economy will become necessary, which increases the resources of the society instead of exploiting them and thus does justice to the manifold needs of the society.

Democratic confederalism as the fundamental political practice of modernity can be a significant model not only to the Kurds, but also to the Middle East and other regions that are ethnically diverse and multi-cultural.

Whichever way the Kurds choose to move, i.e., creating their own nation state among other nation states in M.E., or taking the alternative route, as in RojAva of democratic confederalism, the current region of M.E will take another shape, and that will be the disruption of 101 years of Sykes and Picot agreement.

I hope, the other regional, and international nations will respect the will of the Kurdish nation, and allow them to govern themselves, where we hope in the future the entire M.E and the world can benefit from it.

Luqman Barwari, former president of Kurdish National Congress-NA in U.S. Associate Scientist in Biotechnology.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Ekurd.net or its editors.

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