Newroz, the Kurdish New Year, takes place at the beginning of spring, when the dark season is past. To the German police it is a red-alert day. Even though most of the Kurds living in Germany celebrate peacefully or not …
In the past half decade, the collapse of Communist-governed multinational states has inevitably brought disintegration: the seventy-year-old Soviet Union crumbled, Czechoslovakia divided peacefully, and civil war tore apart Yugoslavia. In China, the development of a market economy has led to …
JULY 25, 1983, 6:00 A.M. Two hours ago the phone rang in the hall, waking us all. At first I thought that I was dreaming, but then I heard Amma and Appa’s door open and I knew that I was …
Ethnocultural minorities around the world are demanding various forms of recognition and protection, often in the language of “group rights.” Many commentators see this as a new and dangerous trend that threatens the fragile international consensus on the importance of …
The story of minorities in the contemporary Arab world is not an especially happy one. It is useful to begin a survey of them with Lebanon, if only because this small country was once perceived both as a refuge for …
Any report from Quebec requires that the reporter disclose where she stands in this complex political field. The very notion of being in a “minority” depends on one’s standpoint. For example, I am part of Canada’s anglophone majority (three-quarters of …
Men with video cameras were waiting at the entrance to Cizre, a rundown city in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast. The cameras rolled when police pulled me out of the car and checked my bags, my body, and my press card. Behind …
Minorities are always more important than their numbers might seem to merit for, if nothing more, they are society’s bellwethers. Changes in their legal status and social roles reveal broader changes in a society. In North Africa the shrinking role …
Why won’t the minority issue in East Central Europe go away? By 1914 more than half the people in the area belonged to minorities. By the interwar period the proportion had gone down to one-quarter. Since 1945 minorities have never …
No country in the world matches India in its diversity. It has more than six hundred eighty-seven million Hindus, more than one hundred million Muslims, more than nineteen million Christians, more than sixteen million Sikhs, more than nine million Buddhists …
My friend Mustafa likes to tell the story of the mystified Egyptian hotel clerk. On his first trip to Egypt, the clerk at Mustafa’s hotel asked for his passport. Mustafa duly handed over his Israeli passport, at which point the …
The historian Oscar Handlin noted in 1965 that the “attention [of the civil rights movement] has been so narrowly focused on tactical issues that there has been no time to consider ultimate goals.” He warned that “[i]n the absence of …
We live in an ever-widening circle of genocides, achieved and attempted, perpetrated in the present and discovered in the past. But we see and care about few of them. Such selective perception is, I believe, encouraged by the often-repeated claim …
When the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, pundits predicted that it would end up like Yugoslavia, with ethnic wars tearing the union into fragments. Russians left “abroad”—in Central Asia, Crimea, and the Baltic Republics—would become tinder for …
I have come back here to die,” Desta Abdissa told me in Addis Ababa, “and the sooner the better.” Desta is an Oromo, the largest of Ethiopia’s eighty ethnic groups, comprising as much as half the population. He comes from …
