The Kurdish Question and Turkish-Iranian Relations
From World War I to 1998

"What I try to do in the following essay is to extract the essential facts of the Kurdish question and the Kurdish problems that affect directly Turkey's and Iran's internal and external policies." Sounds like a good idea, and Olson, a professor at the University of Kentucky and prolific author on matters Kurdish, would seem like the right person to carry it out. His argument that Iranian-Turkish relations with regard to the Turkish question show "great continuity" from the imperial past to the republican present is a provocative one. Unfortunately, the author's view that the paucity of scholarship on Kurds somehow is the result of great power interests and his unbalanced politics (he accuses Turkey and Israel each of "ethnic cleansing of their largest minority populations" but does not find Iraq guilty of any such crime) make his study less than trustworthy. Further, the book's eight chapters have a discontinuous quality, jumping from one subject to another and providing only spotty coverage. Libraries should skip this study and instead hold Michael Gunter's The Kurds and the Future of Turkey (1997) and his The Kurds in Turkey (1990) as well as the recent study by Kemal Kirisci and Gareth M. Winrow, The Kurdish Question in Turkey (CH, Jan'98).