ABSTRACT
For most Westerners the Kurdish problem looks like the liberation process of a national minority, comparable to countless similar problems around the earth. For Europeans it is natural to recollect how the European parts of the Ottoman Empire gained their indpendence in the 19th century. Thus Greece, Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Romania emerged. Because of Ataturk's armed rebellion in central and eastern Anatolia, the dethronement of the Sultan and the creation of the Turkish Republic, the agreement never came into force but was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which included no autonomous or independent Kurdistan. But the Turks still suspect the Western powers of intention of establishing Armenian and Kurdish states on their territory. The simplest solution would be a democratic Baghdad accepting Kurdish autonomy within a federal Iraq, something that is out of sight. The Sultan governed the Kurdish areas through the intermediary of chieftains and the creation of the Turkish Republic brought no change.
