1930’s

A Brief Overview…

It has been a decade after the secret Anglo-Franco Agreement (Sykes-Picot 1916) changed Kurdistan’s fate forever. The infamous agreement, led to the partition of the Middle East into various influence zones, including greater Kurdistan. The calamity was exacerbated by the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty to end the 5 yearlong WWI.  While WWI ended, the treaty only furthermore uprooted and divided the people of the Middle East through the creation of many modern failed states, fueling ethnic conflicts, fascism, nationalism, religious fanatism, and creating on-going explosive geo-strategic realities that still haunt the region and the world up until today. 30 million Kurds, by a stroke of a pen, found themselves in newly created nation states, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. With many becoming stateless on the soil that their ancestors inhabited for two millennia’s. In Turkey, most of the Kurdish areas were under martial law until 1946. Brutal massacres were committed against the Kurdish population, with the infamous Dersim Massacre committed by the Turkish Army in 1937 still haunting the ancestors today. The words ‘Kurd and Kurdistan’ were banned until the late 1980s and replaced with “Mountain Turks”.  Despite an almost orchestrated effort by the greater powers and newly formed nation states, to entirely erase the Kurdish people from history books and maps, the modern Kurdish national movement that finds it beginnings in the early 20th century was only gaining further momentum – most probably because simply being Kurdish, speaking Kurdish, singing Kurdish, dressing Kurdish, overnight, became political and a matter of existence and survival. Throughout this era, Leila Bedirxan who was considered as the first Kurdish woman to be a modern dancer, performed across Europe. Leila Bedirxan was hailed a sensation by critics for her Eastern dance styles and accomplished a successful solo tour of the USA and was referred to as a ‘Kurdish Princess’ due to her noble heritage.