After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?: My Encounters With Kurdistan Book

Their homeland was divided out from under them, scattering them across Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, and the former Soviet Union and denying them long-awaited acceptance and peace. Saddam Hussein gassed them; Stalin deported them; Turkey tried to rob them of their own language and today has them engaged in a bitter guerrilla war. Assassinated in Iran, suppressed in Syria--even among their own kind the Kurds are victims of betrayal as one Kurdish faction wages war on another. This is the bitter truth of journalist Jonathan C. Randal's book, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?, an account of his decades-long fascination with the Kurds. After he was evicted from his apartment by a band of Kurdish mercenaries during the Lebanese civil war, there was no looking back for Randal; for almost 30 years he has roamed the Middle East following the Kurds' fate. In addition to accounts of these travels, Randall also delivers a scathing indictment of U.S. involvement in--and betrayal of--Kurdish interests. Randal details every breach of faith, starting with Henry Kissinger's acquiescence in the Shah of Iran's massacre of thousands of Kurdish fighters supported by the U.S. in their war against Iraq right up to the Bush administration's abandonment of a Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein it had initially encouraged. Whether it is the treachery of outsiders or the perfidious behavior of the Kurds themselves, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? explicates the terrible history and bitter future of this ancient people.Read More