Peter Boyle
Kurds and their supporters rallied at Sydney Town Hall square on Sunday to join global protests over the ‘cancelling’ of Kurdistan in the Treaty of Lausanne, 100 years ago.
Below is a short speech I made at the rally:
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First, I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered here on the land of the Gadigal people, the indigenous people of this country whose land was stolen from them by British colonialists 235 years ago.
One of the first human rights campaigns I was involved with in Australia was for the rights of the First Nations people because when I came here as an immigrant, I witnessed with my own eyes the terrible legacy of suffering that the colonisers inflicted on First Nations people. This is the same story that we are gathered here today to protest against the Treaty of Lausanne: colonialism and its legacy of suffering, genocide and years of oppression that came from an act of colonial decision-making 100 years ago.
As our friend Mansour said, with a stroke of the pen an entire people were cancelled, deprived of recognition, deprived of legitimacy, and consequently subjected to systematic oppression and genocide.
What is the lesson from this history?
The lesson is that we can never trust those colonial powers that did this to so many peoples around the world.
And we are not talking about an act of injustice in the distant past because it continues today. Many of those same colonial powers that first drew up a secret agreement in 1916 – the Sykes-Picot agreement to divide the Middle East between themselves – are still powerful.
And even after the Russian revolutionaries who overthrew the Tsar in 1917 exposed the Sykes-Picot agreement, the colonial powers went on, as victors in the First World War, to put that colonial carve-up into practice.
They did that first through the Treaty of Severin and then finally in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
None of these agreements represented fair treatment of the people who lived in that part of the world. They only reflected the narrow and selfish interests of these big colonial powers.
That is what happened with the Treaty of Lausanne, and the Kurdish people have paid a terrible price.
The Kurdish people were not the only colonised people to pay a terrible price as a result of such acts of colonial cancelling of entire peoples because that is what happened to the First Nations people of this country as well. They, too, were ‘disappeared’ with a stroke of the pen!
We must never allow that to happen again.
So, what should be our message today be for our government here in Australia? It is our government, at least in theory. We have all made our homes here after fleeing from persecution or poverty in other parts of the world. We have started new lives through hard work and love and support for each other in our communities. So, what is our message to our government?
It is: Be on the side of the victims of colonialism and not on the side of the colonial powers. That is what our government should do. Be on the side of the oppressed and not on the side of the oppressors – not on the side of the colonial powers which, in the Lausanne Treaty, cancelled the Kurdish nation and people.
Be on the right side of history on the side of justice and freedom.
Peter Boyle is a well known journalist and political activist living in Sydney, Australia. He is also a correspondent of the Green Left Journal.
