Historical Kurdish Sources and Archives in Paris and England
Historically marginalized and in a centuries-long fight for statehood, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group without their own nation. Consequently, Kurdish History is fragmented, and suffers from a lack of sufficient Middle Eastern Scholarship. For me however, Kurdish history is extremely important. Not only for modern understanding of ethnicity and nationhood, but also for my own identity as an American Kurd. Spread out across a wide territory spanning Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, Kurds constitute a unique group. Although Kurds live in various countries, they have their own highly distinct and rich culture.
In broader pan-Kurdish thought and solidarity, all these Kurds are of the same ethnic and cultural origin. All of them identify as Kurd first and foremost, regardless of the country they live in. Frankly, the ability of a people to historically persevere and maintain a broader cultural coherence in the wake of statelessness, genocide, and marginalization is worth scholarly analysis. Analysis that I intend to do with a history thesis rooted in Kurdish History. My research particularly focused on Iraqi-Kurdistan, which speaks the Sorani dialect of Kurdish.
Kurdish documents are particularly hard to locate outside of the Middle East. Thankfully, large collections of documents can be found in France and England. I visited three locations to collect documents, progressively shaping my research and highlighting where I wanted to focus. I eventually honed in on focusing on the civil war between the two major Kurdish Political Parties in Iraq in the 1990s. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP).
Results or arguments from the documents I gathered are not conclusive. Due to time constraints, my time at the archives was focused on gathering documents, rather than analyzing. Throughout all my time across archives, I obtained over 300 documents relating to Iraqi Kurdistan from 1970 to 2000. My research spanned three different archives:
Kurdish Institute of Paris
The Kurdish institute of Paris houses the largest collection of Kurdish documents and materials outside of the Middle East. While the institute itself was more focused on the Kurmanci dialect of Kurdish, it contained documents that still shaped my research as I went to the University of Exeter. Their political pamphlets of both the PUK and KDP incentivized me to investigate how they interact with each other.
I particularly enjoyed the Institute as in addition to an archive, it acted as a cultural center as well. Consequently, the staff themselves were all Kurds from various different countries and backgrounds.
University of Exeter
The University of Exeter is home to the Omar Sheikhmous Collection of Kurdish research. A collection of over 10,000 documents directly donated by one of the founders of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. I was blown away by the collection when I visited, and this location was by far the most important I visited.
The collection contains significant political materials, especially of the PUK. Press releases, internal documents, and letters all compose an extremely comprehensive snapshot of the PUK throughout the the late 1900s. Although the collection of documents directly concerning the Civil War are limited, the amount of PUK and also KDP documents around the 1990s allows one to compose a strong picture of the circumstances surrounding the conflict.
University of Cambridge
I planned to visit the University of the Cambridge primarily anticipating to investigate older Iraqi-kurdish histories and wanted to access their Middle East colonial records. However, due to the time I had spent at the University of Exeter, visiting Cambridge was not as valuable. The university itself simply just lacked documents that heavily related to my newfound interest in the Civil war. However, despite this I still collected some British colonial documents related to Kurds from the University archives.
I have compiled some images of the more visual documents I collected here: