Catalonia and Kurdistan Look Beyond Preserving Language and Heritage

BARCELONA, Spain – Iraqi Kurdistan and the Catalonia region of Spain have more in common than just a love of good football:  Calls for independence have been growing louder in both autonomous regions, where each is trying to learn from the experience of the other.

Both the Kurds and Spanish Catalans have experienced persecution at the hands of dictators, and fought for centuries to preserve their own language and heritage.  And today, both are clamoring for independence.

Last month, Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani told Sky News Arabia that, “A Kurdish state is on the way.” With the Kurds locked in serious oil and budget rows with the Arab government in Baghdad, and Iraq spinning out of control with sectarian violence, many believe that independence for Iraq’s estimated five million Kurds is inevitable.

In the four-province autonomous Catalonia region, where Barcelona is the capital, the striped red-and-yellow Catalan flags flutter from windows in nearly every other apartment building. “Independence is Progress,” says a banner hanging from one window. “Independence is Justice,” declares another.

This is a momentous year for Catalonia: The regional Catalan government is preparing to hold a referendum next November, asking the 7.5 million Catalans if they want to separate from Spain. Madrid’s central government and Spanish MPs have already rejected the official request to hold a referendum.

Catalonia has been one of the economic motors of Spain, and a worsening economic crisis in Spain has been fuelling nationalistic feelings.  Just as Erbil wants greater control over its own resources and revenues, the economically-vibrant Catalans are demanding greater fiscal powers from Madrid.

Iraq’s Kurds feel they can do better outside Iraq. And Catalans believe they are better off outside Spain, angry that their hard-earned tax revenues go to help other less wealthy regions of the country.

“The Catalans have wanted to make a difference in being more progressive and more democratic than the rest of Spain.” Quim Arrufat, a Catalan parliamentarian from the leftist and pro-independence CUP party, told Rudaw.

“Kurds in northern Iraq should do the same thing and mark a difference. They should create a modern state, different from the dictatorships of the region. Kurdistan should not only develop economically, but democratically and culturally,” advised Arrufat, who has visited different parts of Kurdistan several times.

Although in separate continents and thousands of kilometers apart, Catalonia and Kurdistan are joined by their shared wish for independence. 

Kurdish delegations have visited Catalonia to learn from its educational system in primary school, where children are immersed in Catalan, even more than in Spanish.

“Our system of linguistic immersion is exportable,” explained Arrufat. “This is interesting for nations like the Kurdish one, which has a regional government and wants to know how we did it,” he said. “Catalonia is the only place in the world where children learn their regional language perfectly in school, as well as the state language, even though Catalan is considered a minority language.”

As Iraq’s Kurds have known exile under Saddam Hussein, hundreds of thousands of Catalans shared that experience under Francisco Franco, the Fascist dictator who exercised an iron rule over Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975.

Aureli Argemi, a former monk who left Spain to accompany the abbot of his monastery in exile for making statements against Franco, has been instrumental in raising awareness in Spain about the suffering of the Kurds.

“We are one of the first groups that in the 80s introduced the issue of the Kurds in Catalonia and created a network of collaboration with them,” said Argemi, who founded the Escarre Centre for Ethnic Minorities and Nations (CIEMEN) in Barcelona.

Argemi remembers his feelings from traveling in the 1990s to Erbil, capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.

“I was surprised how Kurdistan was organized. I saw that they had the military, which was Kurdish. They had Kurdish flags everywhere… everything was Kurdish,” he said, noting that in Catalonia the military is run by the government in Madrid and the official symbols in Catalonia are both Catalan and Spanish. 

But oil, Argemi believes, is both Kurdistan’s boon and its bane.

“If you have oil, independence is very difficult,” he said, explaining that Kurdistan’s abundant energy reserves mean there are multiple economic and political interests involved.

Dani Roldan, director of CIEMEN, said that his organization’s aim is “to develop deeper feelings in Catalonia towards the Kurds.”

He explained that, when the three female activists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party were killed in Paris last year, Arrufat pushed a motion in the Catalan Parliament to condemn the killings. But he said that Turkey used all its diplomatic pressure to successfully stop the motion.

“We would have liked that, when these types of things happen, they (the governments) do not have it so easy, and that they feel the popular pressure,” Roldan said.

Another effort connecting Catalonia to Kurdistan is KurdisCat,  a Catalan-language website that is run by a Kurdistan-Catalonia solidarity committee and publishes news about Kurdistan.

“Our aim is to give information about the Kurdish process and Kurdistan in general” said Jordi Llopis, the coordinator of KurdisCat.

“We can only love what we know, and once one knows Kurdistan it is very easy to love it,” Llopis told Rudaw.