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A groups of Kurds living in Germany worked hard to establish a strategic research centre and opened the Kurdish Studies Centre in 2014.
The centre, which initially started its works in Bochum, and is now run by Kurdish and Arabic volunteers who all work together in a spirit of solidarity conducting research mainly centred in Rojava, North East Syria, Yeni Özgür Politika reports.
“It was around 15 years ago, I was following Abdullah Öcalan’s evaluations on how British politics affected and even shaped global politics in the last two centuries. He was pointing out the role of the strategical research centres in the U.K. These centres had been conducting field studies, collecting data and presenting these to various governments, which helped to determine their political strategies. I was influenced by such observations,” said Newaf Xelil, one of the founders of the Kurdish Studies Centre.
According to Xelil, a former journalist who worked for various Kurdish media outlets, Kurds need to do more data collection, research and archiving and that this centre aims to help fill that gap.
“We have to ask ourselves as Kurds, do we have an organised archive, do we make serious works to unite our efforts for archiving and documentation with international institutions. For me the answer was no, we don’t. Mr. Öcalan had seen and adressed this shortfall. I wanted to do my own part to fill this gap and that is why I took part in the foundation of this centre.”
Xelil states that the Kurdish Studies Centre tries to expand its global network organising joint events with other institutions.
“We organise joint seminars and panels with global institutions from various other countries, including the U.S and U.K. We also provide analyses and research to various other institutions.”
The Kurdish Studies Centre recently published four books in Egypt.
“With a collective effort we have produced thousands of pages of translations. We have a serious archive now. We have collected some of our works in several books. Thanks to our studies, now there is an archive of dozens of books.”
Xelil gives more insight to the four books they have published so far. “On Turkey, Kurds and their Future” focuses on the studies of the centre on the Kurdish question and the approach of Turkey to the Kurdish question.
The centre also published The Pages of the Peoples’ Revolution of Rojava, authored by member of the Presidential Board of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), Aldar Xelil, that gives a detailed perspective of the situation of the Kurds before and after the Rojava revolution.
The Centre also published the Abdulaziz El Shafari translation of the “Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds”, authored by Thomas Schmidinger.
Kurdish Studies Centre also published works by Thomas Jeffrey Miley and Federico Venturini’s entitled “Your Freedom and Mine”, which combines a wide range of geopolitical analysis, human rights reports and interviews on the Kurdish question in Turkey.
Xelil says the centre will continue the work of archiving, as well as translating and publishing new books in the coming period. ”We will continue work on wars of the global powers and the impact of this war on Kurdistan. We want to inform the world what is happening in Kurdish cities in Rojava, such as Afrin (Efrin) and Tell Abyad (Serêkaniyê).”
