The latest issue of the French edition of the magazine Le Monde Diplomatique is dedicated to Kurds.

The magaine tells, through the issue, of how the Kurds have been fighting for a century to obtain, if not a state, the recognition of their political and cultural rights; a century that they collide with the interests of the countries where they live - Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey -, in a struggle punctuated by wars, betrayals, divisions, massacres, but also of hopes, resistances and some victories

On 14 July 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne called into question the creation of a Kurdish state, although it had been promised by the Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920) concluded after the First World War.

This major setback did not prevent the Kurds from trying to succeed in the decades that followed. 

From the 1980s, the Kurdish question was duplicated in two major conflicts. The first, in Iraq, which is only the continuation of decades of alternating between armed repression and attempts at peaceful settlement.

The second, in Turkey, marked by the advent of a new actor determined to get by arms concessions in Ankara: the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The autonomy of Iraqi Kurdistan, the beginning of peace negotiations between Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) as well as the experience of democratic communalism in north-eastern Syria are opening up new perspectives for the Kurds.

But the emergence of the Islamic State (ISIS) and the tensions between the Regional Government of Kurdistan (GRK) and the Iraqi power revive the logics of war.

Among the articles are those by Akram Belkaïd, Cécile Marin, Olivier Piot, Éric Rouleau, Claire Pilidjian, Kamuran Bédir-Khan, Thomas Bois, Elizabeth Picard, Jan Piruz.