Amid all the brutality and bloodshed that have for these last months dominated the news headlines, there are ethnic groups of people, and populations, that are suffering oppression and ethnic cleansing for many years and even genocide.

But as the world’s attention remains fixed on Ukraine and the Middle East, the Kurds in one corner of the world and the Rohingyas in another region, continue to suffer in the shadow, away from mass publicity or global protests.

Saddam Hussein’s attack on Halabja on the 16th of March 1988, considered the most notorious act of chemical warfare in modern times saw an estimated 5,000 people, mostly women and children killed when Iraqi jets dropped poison gas on the town with many others dying later of cancer and other illnesses.

Saddam’s al-Anfal (“the spoils”) campaign, known as the Kurdish Genocide, had seen mass killings, the destruction of thousands of villages, and the use of chemical weapons against civilians with 50,000 to 180,000 Iraqi Kurds killed and tens of thousands displaced.

The Iraqi Kurds were again victims to Saddam Hussein’s ire in 1991. After Iraqi forces were defeated by U.S.-led forces, Saddam cracked down on rebelling Iraqi Kurds leading to one million Kurds fleeing to Turkey and Iran, and hundreds of thousands of others internally displaced, triggering a humanitarian catastrophe. 

The Kurdish saga

Around 25 and 35 million Kurds inhabit the borders of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and Armenia, suffering persecution. These make up the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, but remain without a permanent nation-state.

In the early 20th Century, many Kurds began to consider the creation of a homeland - generally referred to as “Kurdistan”. After World War One and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Western allies made provision for a Kurdish state in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres.

But three years later, although the Treaty of Lausanne had set the boundaries of modern Turkey, no provision was made for a Kurdish state, leaving Kurds with minority status in their respective countries and dispersed across the newly demarcated borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

This conflict’s roots go back to the British colonial period

After 80 years of fighting for their independent state, the Kurds managed to establish the Republic of Mahabad, a short-lived, independently governed state in Kurd-inhabited territories of Iran that came under Soviet control during World War II. But Iran reoccupied Mahabad after the Soviet withdrawal in December 1946 and everything went back to square one.

Today, they form a distinctive community, united through race, culture, and language, even though they have no standard dialect with the majority being Sunni Muslims.

Their century-old fight for rights, autonomy, and even an independent Kurdistan has been marked by marginalization and persecution. In Syria, those Kurds who could not prove that their ancestors lived there before 1945, were unable to vote, own property or businesses, or legally marry.

Seeking to court Kurdish support amid an uprising in 2011, embattled President Bashar al-Assad issues Decree 49, which grants citizenship to Kurds who were registered as foreigners in the 1962 census. Kurds who were never registered remain stateless.

In Turkey, the conflict between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which sought the establishing of an independent Kurdistan in Turkey’s southeast led to forty thousand people being killed. Similarly, the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq, supported by Iran and the United States collapsed after Iran withdrew its support.

Hoping to achieve greater autonomy under the rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Kurds supported the January 1979 Islamic Revolution, but rebelled against the regime when their demands were unmet, forcing Khomeini to declare a holy war against the Kurds which led to a military campaign, hundreds of deaths, systematic arrests, and the banning of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran.

The world’s most persecuted minority

Today, the Rohingyas are considered by the United Nations as the world’s most persecuted minority group and have suffered atrocities by Myanmar’s authorities.

This conflict’s roots go back to the British colonial period in what was then Burma and today Myanmar. The British ruled Myanmar for over a century, with a series of wars in 1824 when they had promised the Rohingya a “Muslim National Area” in exchange for support.

After Myanmar achieved independence in 1948, the Rohingya asked for the promised autonomous state, a request that remained rejected and citizenship denied leading to

animosity and rebellions. Myanmar saw the Rohingyas killed, tortured, and raped and its Citizenship Act of 1982, formally denied the group citizenship rights, rendering them stateless and confining them to an open-air prison on the Myanmar border and deprived of basic rights such as access to health services, education, and employment. 

Although the Rohingyas have been present in Myanmar since the 12th century, Myanmar considers them illegal immigrants and are even denied the right to free worship and continue to face restrictions on the right to marry, move freely and own property because of their religious and ethnic identity.

This situation continued to persist during the brief democratic transition of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, a period that saw hundreds of thousands of terrified Rohingya refugees flooding onto the beaches and paddy fields of southern Bangladesh in August 2017.

As the refugees, 60% per cent of whom were children, poured across the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh, they brought with them accounts of the unspeakable violence and brutality that had forced them to flee.

Those fleeing attacks and violence in the 2017 exodus joined around 300,000 people already in Bangladesh from previous waves of displacement, effectively forming the world’s largest refugee camp.

The world may be currently taken up with peace processes in Ukraine and the Middle East but the duty to not forget these oppressed communities cannot be forgotten.