Not far from the Pont Mirabeau, under which Apollinaire’s Seine flows.
At the heart of that old working-class Paris depicted, in the first half of the 20th century, by Paul Nizan, Roger Vailland, and the Aragon of Les Communistes.
It is Friday, September 5.
And this is where the Paris Council unanimously decided to inaugurate a Peshmerga Alley.
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The Peshmerga are, for the record, the Kurdish fighters who go “to meet death.” Ten years ago, I devoted a film entitled Peshmerga to these brave women and men and I followed them, for months on end, along the 1,000 kilometers of the front line that ran from Sulaimani to Shingal (Sinjar) and where they stood courageously against ISIS.
Then I made a second film, The Battle of Mosul, and I embarked with their elite units that set out to retake the Nineveh plain and, with the support of Iraqis who came from Baghdad, the city of Mosul which was, along with Raqqa in Syria, the capital of the caliphate.
Then, later, in 2020, in the middle of Covid, the key sequences of a third film, The Will to See, where I filmed them, with their brothers in Rojava, Syrian Kurdistan, resisting —Iran, the reborn Persian empire and Turkey, that neo-Ottoman imperialist country in the process of shaking itself awake — and all the territory-less imperiality of radical Islamism.
If I share this, it’s to hammer home the point that I know the Peshmerga well.
And so that it be known that I speak from experience when I say that they are guerrillas of unparalleled bravery. And when I affirm that they are friends of the free world and that they were, like the Ukrainians now, the shield of Europe, its rampart, the living and impassable wall absorbing the shock of ISIS at the hour of the Paris attacks and no doubt preventing there from being more attacks still. And when I recall that they practice a modern and enlightened Islam, and preach and implement, even on the battlefields, equality between women and men. They honor the holy sites of Jewish memory wherever they exist on their territory. And they flew to the aid of Christians when they were hunted down, branded like cattle, sometimes crucified at their doorway, by an Islamic State then at the height of its power. They were, and still are, our most precious allies in that region of the planet.
I add that they are, through the fault of the empires that have succeeded one another, up to this day, on their ancestral lands, the oldest stateless people in the world.
The West is, for these reasons, in debt to them.
With Justice for Kurds, the Franco-American NGO that I created ten years ago with Tom Kaplan, we have not stopped pleading for this debt to be honored, for this solidarity to be taken into account, and for a place of memory, in New York and in Paris, to honor the sacrifices made by these sisters and brothers in arms.
We were not granted our wish in New York.
In Paris, which is faithful to a part of its history that makes it a world capital of freedom, our wish is granted.
Paris of which “nothing is so pure,” said Aragon in a 1944 poem, as its “insurgent brow.”
Paris which knows, from time to time, how to turn misfortune to “courage” and, the storm, into a “glow.”
Paris stronger than “fire” and “lightning,” when it extends a hand to “people from everywhere.”
Paris which, from Thomas Jefferson to Adam Mickiewicz, from Simón Bolívar to Giuseppe Garibaldi, from Walter Benjamin to Hannah Arendt and her friends at 10, rue Dombasle (read the marvelous Parias, by Marina Touilliez, Éditions L’Échappée), has been a safe haven city for the persecuted and the liberators.
Paris, a refuge city that is never so great as when it honors the hunted, the fugitives.
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Thank you, Paris.
Thank you, Anne Hidalgo and her deputy Arnaud Ngatcha, who, after the Commandant-Massoud Alley inaugurated almost five years ago in the Champs-Élysées district, continue their work in broad daylight.
Thank you, Philippe Goujon, mayor of Paris’s 15th arrondissement, who — before Bernard Kouchner, Gilbert Mitterrand, president of the Danielle Mitterrand Foundation, Kendal Nezan, director of the Kurdish Institute of Paris, and a hundred Kurds from Erbil and from France — delivered forceful words about the friendship that binds us to that other people of “horsemen.”
And thanks to Masoud Barzani, father of the Kurdish nation, who told me one day that he has not been president all his life but that he has been — and will be, until his last breath — an eternal Peshmerga: he too was there; he too, who seldom travels, insisted on being present among a hundred of his compatriots. Some of them were clad, like him, in the traditional jamadani, the long red-and-white turban that one wraps around the head and which, together with the wide cloth belt into which, before going into combat, one slips a sidearm, constitutes the uniform of the Peshmergas. And among all these friends, Masoud Barzani paid a vibrant and resoundingly strong tribute to our great Franco-Kurdish alliance.
It was a fine Friday.
And one of the rare happy pieces of news of this terrible week when one has the feeling, everywhere, of a world coming apart.
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French philosopher and the author of forty-nine books. Lévy is the director of eight films including Peshmerga (2016 Cannes Film Festival Official Selection), The Battle of Mosul (2017) and The Will to See (2021) which dive into the extraordinary courage of the Kurds in the face of barbarism. A devoted supporter of Kurdistan, Lévy is the co-founder, with Thomas Kaplan, of the organization Justice for Kurds.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.