Massoud Barzani Quotes
We do not want to be anybody's pawns. We are an ancient people. We want our autonomy. We want sarbasti—freedom. I do not know who will take my place one day. But they cannot crush us.
Massoud Barzani, ~1900-1979, Kurdish Leader & President of the Autonomous Kurdish Province of Iraq, Interview with William Safire, New York Times, March 1979
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Adams died on July 4th.
He had been King of Portugal and then had come to the Portuguese colony of Brazil where he led a revolution against Portugal, declared independence from the “mother country, and was elected as Emperor of Brazil. The Colony was much larger and richer in natural resources than the “mother country.”
At the partition if India into Hindu and Muslim States, what is now Bangladesh, was a part of Pakistan called “East Pakistan” by the Pakistani government. While India became a thriving democracy, Pakistan with its combination of military strongmen and Islamic Fundamentalists did not fare as well and became a very corrupt, undemocratic military nation. East Pakistan was not contiguous with the rest of Pakistan and was culturally quite different and less religiously fundamentalist. While all Pakistanis suffered from poor government, the East Pakistanis fared worse. Finally, they developed their own identity which was suppressed by the military dictators of Pakistan and the Banglas revolted and Bangladesh became and independent nation.
The Chief Secretary, Lord Castleregh, had put forward a resolution to bring about the unification of Great Britain and Ireland under the single British Parliament at Westminster. He and his allies had bribed a number of the Irish MPs to support the union. With Union some Irish MPs would then be able to win seats representing Ireland in the British Parliament. Although Grattan and most of the Orangemen opposed the Union, 4 months later, the bill passed comfortably. Ironically, Grattan was one of the Irish MPs whose popularity won a seat in the unified British Parliament.
In most revolutionary settings leaders have to persuade people who have voted with no success to turn to the rifle. In Ireland at this point, almost all the nationalsits knew that the rifle would help them but they were not sure that a vote would have the effect of a bullet.
Masoud Barzani is a Kurdish politician who has been leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) since 1979, and was President of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq from 2005 to 2017. Barzani was born in the self-declared Republic of Mahabad, and succeeded his father Mustafa Barzani as leader of the KDP in 1979.
