The Inauthenticity of the Left in the Kurdish Liberation Movement in Iraqi Kurdistan

Abstract

Iraqi Kurds have been involved in a liberation movement since the very beginning of the establishment of the Iraqi state by European colonizers. With the proliferation of communism in the 1960s and 1970s among liberation movements in the third world, the Kurdish liberation movement also adopted popular Marxist, Leninist and Maoist jargons. However, after the 1991 Kurdish uprising successfully liberated some areas of Kurdistan, the leftist rhetoric almost completely disappeared in the dominant Iraqi Kurdish discourse. I argue that, even from the 1960s to the 1980s, the adoption of Marxist rhetoric by the Iraqi Kurdish leadership was inauthentic; it was neither rooted in nor tailored to Kurdistani society. Moreover, unlike the Kurdish liberation movements in Turkey and Syria, as well as Iran to some degree, the Kurdish movement in Iraq failed to recognize gender equality. Thus, while Kurdish women in Turkey and Syria took active roles in the liberation movement, their counterparts in Iraq remained marginalized.