“I’ve almost felt a sense of relief among Pakistani officials, that they’ve been in a bad marriage for too long, and they were never going to ask for a divorce, but now the other side has said, ‘I’m going to leave you,’ so you don’t look bad in front of the kids,” said Moeed Yusuf, an expert on U.S.-Pakistan relations at the United States Institute of Peace.

Sarhang Hamasaeed spoke to SiriusXM POTUS Ch. 124 about the results of the non-binding Kurdistan independence referendum. Hamasaeed explained the internal and international consequences of the referendum having taken place in addition to the need to prevent an escalation of tensions that could lead to violence with Shia militias, the Iraqi Army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces being in proximity to one another. He also addressed the role the international community including the United States can take to facilitate and mediate between Iraq’s federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government.

Mediation, Negotiation & Dialogue

After decades of activism, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia announced on Tuesday that it was lifting a longstanding ban on women driving. The change, which is set to take effect in June 2018, was welcomed news to many, but women are still denied a variety of rights in the Kingdom.

Gender

Pity the Kurds. Theirs is a history of epic betrayals. A century ago, the world reneged on a vow to give them their own state, carved from the carcass of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. The rugged mountain people were instead dispersed into the new states of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, with another block left in Iran. Since then, all three countries have repressed their Kurds. Saddam Hussein was so intent on Arabizing Iraq’s Kurdistan that he paid Arab families to unearth long-dead relatives and rebury them in Kurdish territory—creating evidence to claim Arab rights to the land. He also razed four thousand Kurdish villages and executed a hundred thousand of the region’s inhabitants, some with chemical weapons. Syria stripped its Kurds of citizenship, making them foreigners in their own lands and depriving them of rights to state education, property ownership, jobs, and even marriage. Turkey repeatedly—sometimes militarily—crushed Kurdish political movements; for decades, the Kurdish language was banned, as was the very word “Kurd” to describe Turkey’s largest ethnic minority. They were instead known as “mountain Turks.”

“It’s not a binary choice. There are some pretty significant downsides – politically and in terms of delivery itself – with the current approach to humanitarian assistance,” said Payton Knopf, coordinator of the South Sudan Senior Working Group at the US Institute of Peace, and former head of the UN Panel of Experts on South Sudan.

Human Rights;  Fragility & Resilience

Healthcare and humanitarian workers are increasingly in the crosshairs as hospitals and aid centers have become part of the battlefield in today’s wars. So far, there has been little to stop the profound surge of violence seen across several open-ended conflicts which has claimed thousands of lives, destroyed health systems, triggered mass displacement and state collapse, and exposed the crisis facing the norms of international humanitarian law contained in the Geneva Conventions.

On a scorching day in August, 2006, Wajeha al-Huwaider threw off her abaya, the enveloping black cover worn by Saudi women, and donned a calf-length pink shirt, pink trousers, and a matching pink scarf. She then took a taxi, from Bahrain, to a signpost on the bridge marking the border with Saudi Arabia. She got out and, with a large poster declaring, “Give Women Their Rights,” marched toward her homeland. Within twenty minutes, she was picked up by Saudi security forces, interrogated for a day, and officially warned. An intelligence officer, she recounted to me later, had pointed at her mouth and said, “Control this, and we won’t have a problem.”

Gender