Lausanne: On Saturday, about 6,000 Kurds gathered to protest the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne, which established the boundaries of contemporary Turkey but crushed aspirations for a separate Kurdish state.
In opposition to the 1923 treaty, protesters marched through the Swiss city as organizers pleaded with the international community to reevaluate the agreement and its implications for the Kurdish people.
The protesters, who had gathered by Lake Geneva before marching uphill to the Palais de Rumine, where the treaty was signed, were from all over Europe. The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is banned in Turkey and blacklisted as a terrorist organization in the European Union, was represented by flags carried by several people.
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The treaty, according to the Kurdistan Cultural Center in Lausanne, "enacted the separation of the Kurdish people between four states — Turkiye, Iraq, Iran, and Syria — whose democratic record over the past century is largely negative."
The Kurdish people, like all other peoples around the world, assert a right to the ability to live with their identity on their own lands, according to Berivan Firat, a spokeswoman for the Kurdish Democratic Council of France.
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She claimed that "this treaty opened the door to all kinds of oppression and massacres against the Kurdish people." It is time to decriminalize the Kurdish movement and, in particular, to review the Treaty of Lausanne, which has no value for us. Our opponents are the worst dictators in the Middle East.
In order to replace the 1920 Treaty of Sevres between the Allies and the Ottoman empire, which Turkiye no longer recognized under its new leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Conference of Lausanne was established in November 1922.
Lausanne was selected primarily because of Switzerland's neutrality, but it was also convenient for the Orient Express train, which connected Paris with Istanbul.
The conference took place from November to February and then again from April to July, with the main participants being Great Britain, France, Italy, and Turkey. Benito Mussolini, the newly elected Italian leader, spoke at the meeting.
Turkey and Greece were forced to exchange populations as a result of the treaty. It made the Turkish Straits open to unrestricted civilian travel.
Eastern Anatolia was incorporated into modern-day Turkiye in exchange for the renunciation of its Ottoman-era claims to southern Syria and Iraq. Kurds and Armenians had no part because their territorial aspirations had been crushed. "Lausanne is a byword for treachery and severe trauma for these peoples. And it still exists today, according to historian Antoine Fleury, emeritus professor at the University of Geneva, who spoke with the Swiss news agency ATS.
The protester Munevver Gok, a 56-year-old housewife from the Netherlands, demanded that Lausanne apologize for dividing Kurdistan into four parts.
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Kardo Lucas Larsen, a 41-year-old fellow protester from Denmark, told AFP: "A protest like this brings the Kurdish people together and makes us feel like a nation.
"We can continue to be strong... and then we can choose our course of action." Around the 100th anniversary of the Turkish republic in October, the Turkish community in Switzerland is planning conferences and concerts to commemorate the treaty.