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After the First World War, the Kurds, like other nationalities within the Ottoman Empire, were presented with an opportunity to form their own nation-state. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire had left chaos and a political vacuum in the Kurdish-inhabited regions of south-eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq. The Kurdish nationalists, like other nationalists within the Empire, tried to take advantage of this situation and establish a Kurdish state. However, British strategy following the First World War was primarily oriented towards containing the Bolshevik threat, and in the Middle East this necessitated enhancing the territorial unity of Iraq, Iran and Turkey. For this reason, the United Kingdom, which had initially encouraged nationalism as a counter to Turkey's pan-Islamism, opposed the establishment of a Kurdish state in an attempt to appease Kemalist Turkey during the Lausanne peace negotiations. The Lausanne Treaty, which was signed on 24 July 1923, formalized the de facto division of Kurdish-inhabited lands among Turkey, Iraq and Syria.
This article will show why the Kurds were used as pawns during the Lausanne negotiations, how their lands were forcibly incorporated into Iraq and Turkey, and finally how the Lausanne negotiations affected British policy towards the Kurds in northern Iraq. In this way, some light will be thrown on the roots of the present day Kurdish problem in northern Iraq.
The Lausanne Peace Conference began on 20 November 1922 with Lord Curzon and Ismat Pasha Inunu representing Britain and Turkey respectively. The Kemalist regime did not consider itself bound by the provisions of the Treaty of Sevres (signed in August 1920) and it was claiming the whole of the Wilayah of Mosul down to Jabal Hamrin in northern Iraq, while Britain was asking for a frontier to correspond with the northern boundary of the Mosul province1Turkey based its claim to the Wilayah of Mosul on several grounds: 1) race; arguing that the Arabs were only a small minority and Turks and Kurds were not racially separable; 2) economy; Turkey claimed that most of the disputed territory's trade was with Anatolia; 3) illegal occupation of the Wilayah by the British after the Mudros truce between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire; and 4) self-determination, claiming that the inhabitants wanted to join Turkey.2
On 14 December 1922, Curzon...