Lemonde.fr | By Kendal Nezan (President of the Kurdish Institute of Paris.)

The Kurdish Institute of Paris has acted for nearly thirty-two years, in France and in Europe, as the voice of the Kurdish people. This people without a state has throughout the 20th Century been the victim of the cruellest injustices, and the Institute has provided information and documentation to journalists, researchers, students, voluntary associations and members of Parliament about the Kurdish world which seemed condemned to disappear or driven into exile because of the disinterest and neglect shown by the public authorities.

Created in February 1983 with the support of President Mitterrand’s government to help manage the substantial flow of Kurdish refugees created by the Iraq-Iran War and the Turkish coup d’état, the Institute brought the Kurds to public attention. This aroused public interest in the Kurdish people’s culture, history and political situation. Consequently, the Institute rapidly became a reference in Europe and beyond for all those who were interested in the Kurdish question. Its Symposia, lectures and conferences, its actions in the defence of Human Rights, its international appeals for a peaceful settlement to the Kurdish question won the respect and support of some twenty Nobel Prize winners and outstanding public figures like Edward Kennedy, Bruno Kreisky, Nelson Mandela, Danielle Mitterrand, and Andrei Sakharov, as well as many ministers and members of Parliament of European countries and the United States.

Many countries, including France, made scholarships available which have enabled several hundred Kurdish students to receive higher degrees. Having become, in consequence, lawyers, doctors, engineers, diplomats, ministers and academics, they are playing an important part in the building of a democratic society in Kurdistan — and also in the republican integration of those Kurds settled in France.

This international reputation gave a complementary soul, a humanist image to French diplomacy, despite its heavy commitment to Saddam Hussein’s bloody dictatorship in his war against Iran and the Ayatollahs — and also against the Kurdish population. This image was perfected during the mass exodus of almost two million Iraqi Kurds following the first Gulf War, when France secured a UN Security Council resolution creating an air exclusion zone in Northern Iraq to enable those refugees to return to their lands. This zone evolved into the present-day autonomous Kurdistan, in which our country enjoys an exceptional amount of sympathy.

As an independent, secular, non-partisan body, open to all Kurds, the Paris Kurdish Institute was long considered an unofficial embassy that facilitated dialogue between Kurdish leaders and the French authorities, a relay connection France and Kurdistan. In 1993 Pierre Bérégovoy’s government granted the Institute the status of Foundation of public benefit because of its contribution to the republican integration of Kurds living in France, particularly the Iraqi refugees who were welcomed as part of the Bi-centennial celebrations of the French revolution.

These survivors of gas attacks by the Iraqi Armed forces, who came from remote and conservative villages along the Turkish border, seemed particularly hard to integrate. However, thanks to a supervisory structure provided by the Institute and the extraordinary hospitality of the Auvergne population, these thousand-odd refugees were perfectly integrated. Their children have completed their education and embarked on careers ranging from lawyers, teachers and pharmacists to pastry-cooks and police officers. One is currently an economist at the IMF.

This text book case, which has been the subject of Ph.D theses, shows that despite varied social and cultural origins, integration is not an impossible task — provided the means are made available
 In this respect, the role of voluntary associations working for integration, which is so rarely raised in the current discussions on the question, can be decisive, particularly for the families for those left out of the school system. Lionel Jospin’s government, conscious of this role, had set up measures to strengthen the voluntary system with three-year agreements. In this context, after a thorough audit, he had granted the Institute public financing of nearly 600,000 euros a year.

This funding, which has been reduced every year since 2002, was finally canceled during Sarkozy’s presidency on the grounds that it was now up to the Kurdistan government to finance the Institute.  The same logic should lead the government to ask the Arab countries, far richer than little Kurdistan, to finance the Institut du Monde Arabe. The argument is all the more absurd since the Kurdish Institute runs the biggest library in Europe, which is at once a centre of unique resources and a record of the collective memory of the 250,000 Kurds in France — integrated French citizens who pay their taxes and are entitled to have access to their ancestral culture.  The recognition of its value is a major factor of good integration.

Deprived of any French public funding, the Kurdish Institute has been able to survive thanks to the support of the Kurdistan Government. Yet the latter has, for over a year, been deprived of its share of the national budget by Baghdad. Drowning under the crushing burden of 1.7 million Iraqi and Syrian refugees, engaged in a very costly war along a 1000 Km frontier, Kurdistan is going through a serious financial crisis and has difficulty in paying the wages of its civil servants with less than a month’s arrears. The international coalition, which on paper, brings together about sixty countries, and which, in the field, depends of the Kurds’ courage to beat the ISIS Jihadists, is grudgingly doling out some military and humanitarian assistance — but no financial assistance.

It is hardly surprising that, with such a minimalist strategy, victory over the Da’esh (ISIS) that already controls half of Syria and a third of Iraq is no closer than the fall of the Damascus regime — an event foretold since 2011.  We might have hoped that,  short of forward to help the Kurds in this trial, the French Government might at least show some solidarity by ensuring the lasting existence of the Kurdish Institute on its own soil.  It does nothing of the kind. The approaches we have made to the Elysée (the French Presidency) and Matignon (the Prime Minister's office) over the last two years for restoring our grants have been unsuccessful. The argument given is budgetary restrictions. These are clearly based on double standards, since the government continues to subsidize some hundreds of cultural centres of other communities, and to grant a financing of 12.8 million euros to the Institut du Monde arabe.  As, indeed, it should. However, it affirms that it is hard put to scrape together 4% of this sum to the sole Institute in France of the 40 million Kurds in the Near East.

In the past, being on the Left meant sharing, defending the most disfavoured, the most fragile; it meant giving priority to culture and the social fabric and to voluntary associations; it meant giving hope and even an ideal of life. Short-termist accountancy seems to have gained the upper hand over all political vision with heavy consequences for our collective lives. The world of voluntary associations is being devastated. The associations which assist integration are disappearing and with them thousands of jobs. The richly endowed sectarian Islamist networks are taking over the abandoned socio-cultural field.

Faced with the unjust and absurd attitude of the French Government towards the Kurds, we are calling, as a last resort, on our French fellow citizens, who all along these last three decades, in difficult times, have shown magnificent solidarity with the Kurdish people.