A large Kurdish demonstration gathered in Lausanne some 6,000 people, according to police and media sources, to mark the centenary of the treaty which delimited the borders of modern Turkey in this Swiss city, and to denounce its consequences for the Kurds.
The Kurdish community meets regularly around the anniversary date of the treaty, attracting a few hundred demonstrators but they were many more than usual, according to the same sources.
Leaving from the surroundings of the Château d’Ouchy hotel, on Lake Geneva, which hosted the pre-treaty talks, they marched, with flags bearing the effigy of Abdullah Öcalan, a Kurdish leader imprisoned since 1999, to the Palais de Rumine, in the city center, which housed the signing in 1923.
“We want to take advantage of this centenary to show the whole world that the Kurdish question remains unsolved. And that the consequences of the Treaty of Lausanne are still tragically felt”, explained to the Swiss press agency ATS Hayrettin Öztekin, member of the Cultural Center of Kurdistan (CCK).
This treaty, according to the CCK, “acted the separation of the Kurdish people between four States – Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria -, largely failing on the democratic level”.
In Turkey, the Kurds were abandoned by the great powers “to the nationalist and racist Turkish state, allowing a century of massacres, forced population displacements and policies of repression and assimilation”, according to the CCK.
“Decriminalize the Kurdish movement”
For Berivan Firat, spokesperson for the Kurdish Democratic Council of France, “the Kurdish people, like all the peoples of the world, claim the right to live with their identity on their own lands”.
“This treaty has opened the door to all bullying, to all massacres against the Kurdish people,” she told AFP. “Our detractors are the worst dictators in the Middle East and it is time to decriminalize the Kurdish movement and above all to review the Treaty of Lausanne which has no value for us. It is null and void. »
The Lausanne conference began in November 1922 to renegotiate the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres concluded between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire, which Turkey no longer claimed under the aegis of its new leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
The conference, with Britain, France, Italy and Turkey in the foreground, was coordinated by British diplomacy.
The treaty was followed, among other consequences, by forced population exchanges between Turkey and Greece. Eastern Anatolia was attached to today’s Turkey, in exchange for relinquishing claims to Syria and Iraq dating from the Ottoman era.
The Armenians and Kurds were sidelined and their territorial ambitions put on hold.
“We apologize to Lausanne, which has divided Kurdistan into four parts,” said one protester, Munevver Gok, 56, a housewife living in the Netherlands.
Kardo Lucas Larsen, 41, from Denmark, told AFP: “We know that no country can help us […] to take the right decision to solve the Kurdish problem. »
“A demonstration like this brings the Kurdish people together and gives us the feeling of belonging to a nation,” he added.