Russians, but the US Senate rejected the notion.
Nevertheless, by the Treaty of Sèvres an inde-
pendent Armenian republic was recognised in
1920, but the West made no attempt to defend
the new state when Turkey and Soviet Russia
attacked and divided the republic between them
in December of that year.
The Kurds, who had struggled for independ-
ence when under Ottoman rule, took heart from
Wilson’s promise of self-determination and from
the defeat of the Turks. The same Treaty of
Sèvres recognised the creation of independent
Kurdistan, but Kemal Atatürk tore up the treaty
and forced the Allies to revise it by the Treaty of
Lausanne in 1923; by then he had conquered
Kurdistan. In the final disposition of the Ottoman
Empire the Kurds found themselves minorities in
five states. In 2000 it is estimated 600,000 lived
in the USSR, 4.7 million in Iran, 3.6 million in
Iraq, 1.7 million in Syria and 14 million in
Turkey. They have rebelled sporadically, always to
be savagely repressed. The tragedy of the Kurds
in the aftermath of the second Gulf War, when in
March 1991 they rose against Saddam Hussein
in Iraq, is that no nation wants to raise the issue
of an independent Kurdistan. The US wishes
to build a ‘stable peace’ in the region through an
alliance of Arab states, Iran, Turkey and the
Soviet Union and these have a common interest
in suppressing Kurdish nationalism in their own
countries. The Palestinian diaspora also had its
origins in the aftermath of the First World War.
For more than half a century the sense of national
identity which characterises these three peoples
has not been extinguished – nor, as the twenty-
first century begins, is it likely to be.
Radio and television can mobilise the masses in
ways not dreamed of in the days of the Ottoman
Empire. In addition, the movement of the rural
population to the cities has been a phenomenon
throughout much of the less developed world,
including the Middle East. In 2000 some 6 mil-
lion have crowded into Teheran, Iran’s capital;
Cairo’s population exceeds 10 million; and even in
the Lebanon, a country with a small population,
close to a million live in Beirut. The explosive
growth of urban living, the increase, especially in
towns, of literacy, the frustrations and the thirst
for activity among student groups, the restlessness
of unemployed labour existing on the margins
of subsistence, the abject poverty of most of the
peoples of the Middle East, all these have added
greatly to the volatility of the region and created a
gulf between the urban and rural populations.
In the rural areas, despite some ambitious pro-
jects, high population growth has negated the
advances in crop yields and agricultural methods,
leaving the peasants no less backward and poor. In
the oil-rich states – Saudi Arabia and those along
the Persian Gulf – agriculture is of little import-
ance. In Iran and Iraq, however, despite the rev-
enues from oil, agriculture must absorb the labour
and provide a subsistence living for up to half the
population. So the possession of oil alone does not
solve the economic problems of these states.
The purchasing power of the oil-rich states has
turned them into vital elements in the Western
world’s economic advancement. Underdevelop-
ment and backwardness rub shoulders with ambi-
tious modern projects and international airports in
the Middle Eastern states. In great-power contests
it remains a region of strategic importance. The
continuities of cultures and religions provide links
with the past, but there are also huge differences
as a result of the transformation that occurred in
the twentieth century.
The resurgence of militant fundamentalism,
especially after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran
by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, threatened
to destabilise the whole region. It was not only a
reaction against Western dominance, whether
Russian, British or American, but also a reversal
of the road to Western modernisation taken by
Turkey under Mustafa Kemal after the First
World War. Thus rival Islamic ideological con-
flicts were added to the Western ideological
confrontations of ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’.
Among the more powerful nations there is also
a continuous struggle for regional predominance.
In the 1980s there were several such national and
international conflicts. A bloody war between
Iraq and Iran was followed by Saddam Hussein’s
invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, which lined
Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Western
powers up against him and led to the second Gulf
War in January 1991.
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