A PEOPLE WITHOUT A COUNTRY

There are around 40 million Kurds in the world, and today a small group of them was gathering at the Alexanderplatz in Berlin to get some attention by dancing and protesting in an non-violent way.

The Kurds are an ancient people with a 4,000 years history. They are Indo-European people that immigrated to the Middle East and settled down in the Zagros Mountains. The first mention of the Kurds are more than 2000 years old, and they were then called cyrtii. When the term 'Kurd' was used eight hundred years later the term was used as a socioeconomic description of a nomadic people. It is only later that the term 'Kurd' linked to ethnic identity.

Kurdistan has never been collected as a single independent state. However, there are a province named Kurdistan in Iran. In northern Iraq, three provinces were merged to the autonomous Kurdistan region in accordance with the Constitution of 2005.

Kurds are experiencing serious human rights violations which are documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other human rights organizations.

In Oslo we see Kurds demonstrating and fighting for a free Kurdistan and human rights on a regular basis, so there was something familiar to see the same kind of demonstration in Berlin.

I hope you all have a great Tuesday!