Adventurer, poet, and military strategist Gérard Chaliand passed away on Wednesday in Paris.
Chaliand left behind a vast legacy of more than forty books, having been a privileged witness to the conflicts of the last half-century.
Chaliand, who had been on the ground in many conflict zones around the world, made significant contributions to studies on the Kurdish people.
His works on the Kurds, including “Anthologie de la poésie populaire kurde” (Anthology of Kurdish Popular Poetry), “Les Kurdes et le Kurdistan: la question nationale kurde au Proche-Orient” (The Kurds and Kurdistan: The Kurdish National Question in the Middle East), and “Le Malheur kurde” (The Kurdish Tragedy), brought the cultural and political struggle of the Kurds to the attention of the international community.
He also played a critical role in making the voice of the Kurds heard in Europe through the Paris Kurdish Institute, which he helped establish in the 1980s.
Throughout his life, Chaliand spoke out against the Kurds’ lack of statehood, their division into four countries, and the betrayals they suffered. He was particularly vocal in his harsh criticism of the West’s attitude toward the Kurds during the war in Afrin.
In an article on Afrin, published in Le Figaro in 2018, he described the groups supported by Turkey as “mostly jihadists with ISIS or similar ideologies” and characterized the operation as “the West’s betrayal of the Kurds.”
In response to journalist Valerie Toranian’s question “Why do Kurds always resist everything?” in Revue Des Deux Mondes in 2018 regarding the Turkish state’s attacks on Rojava, Chaliand replied:
“The Kurds never accept defeat. This is an ongoing history for them. Each generation writes its own chapter. They fall, they rise again. The Kurds are a people with great fighting capacity. The ‘mountain people’ are generally more resilient. They are stubborn. Demographics also work in their favor. New generations take up the reins.”
Source: ANF News
