The right of nations to self determination is a fundamental principle of international law. It is a basic human right enshrined in two foundational international treaties; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

Both these documents explicitly state that people have the right to formulate their own political system, and pursue their own economic, social and cultural development. Furthermore, they also enshrine the principle of decolonisation, where a colonised people can decide to secede from, or rebel against, the colonising state.

These are non-negotiable rules. Why am I explaining all of this?

The United States and Britain, the Anglophone axis, has selectively applied these principles, cynically invoking them and turning ethnic minorities into guns for hire. The right of nations to self determination is loudly supported by the Washington-London axis when it suits their regime change purposes.

To be sure, the Anglophone allies have a track record of exploiting national self determination when it suits their interests. In August 1941, UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and US President Franklin D Roosevelt, signed the Atlantic Charter. In this document, they declared their willingness to actively support those nations struggling for self determination to break free from Nazi German occupation.

Admirable sentiments to be certain, but they faced an obvious problem – should not the right of national self determination extend to those peoples living under British colonial rule? For instance, Mahatma Gandhi asked that very question when discussing the future of British India. Should not the Vietnamese have their own independent government, free from French rule in Indochina?

Churchill strongly rejected the universal applicability of the right of nations to self determination. Fully committed to the preservation of the British empire, Churchill categorically rejected any notion of granting independence to India.

What has this history got to do with current political events? There has been a deluge of commentary regarding the US-Israeli attack on Iran, and most of it has focused on immediate military exchanges between the opposing forces. That is all well and good, but there is an episode which has received scant attention, but deserves more scrutiny. This is the attempt (abortive in the end) to instigate a Kurdish uprising against the Tehran authorities inside Iran.

The Kurds, a marginalised ethnic minority spread out over several Middle Eastern nations, are a sizeable group inside Iran. There were reports, subsequently denied, that the US administration of President Trump tried to supply weapons to Kurdish political parties inside Iran.

The purpose of such supplies was to incite an anti-government uprising, weakening the Tehran government’s grip on the nation. Such an uprising was to be welcomed by Washington and London as a welcome expression of the right of self determination by an oppressed ethnic group fighting a repressive regime.

The Iranian Kurdish political groups, through their representatives, expressly denied that any such covert arms supplies were ever delivered. They stated that there never was any such arrangement, or for any American weapons to be subsequently turned over to anti-Tehran rebels inside the country.

The Iraqi Kurds, for their part, stated that they were not going to carry out any military incursion into Iran on behalf of Washington. Shanaz Ibrahim Ahmed, prominent Kurdish politician and wife of the current Iraqi president Abdul Latif Rashid, denounced plans to use the Kurds as cannon fodder for a war started by Washington and its Tel Aviv collaborators. She stated ‘leave the Kurds alone, we are not guns for hire.’

Unfortunately, Kurdish organisations have been used as mercenaries for Anglophone regime change wars in the past. It is no secret that Tel Aviv’s government strongly supports an independent state for the Kurds – as long as the latter agree to trade with Tel Aviv and support its economic interests. Cynically exploiting the principle of national self determination, Tel Aviv and its supporters have cultivated economic and military ties with Kurdish parties (and other non-Arab peoples) as a way of outflanking Arab nations.

Iranian media, aligned with the Tehran government, bragged that they foiled a CIA-sponsored plan to use Kurdish militias in an anti-government uprising. The article, by journalist and documentary maker Robert Inlakesh, elaborates that several Kurdish organisations inside Iran entered into a formal alliance, only days prior to the start or formal hostilities. The timing of such a move suggests that the Kurdish militias were readying for a military role in toppling the Tehran authorities. However, such plans came to nothing.

There is an element of bravado here to be sure. If there was a CIA-MI6 plot to use Iranian Kurds as military proxies, I do not know. However, the Al Mayadeen media outlet does have good reason to warn of CIA plots. The intelligence agencies of Washington and London have long track records of surreptitiously supplying and organising mercenary ethnic-based militia groups under the guise of supporting national self determination.

During the closing stages of World War 2, while the British and American governments were opposing granting national self determination to India, Cyprus, Palestine and other British empire colonies, they were loudly demanding national self determination for the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940.

In fact, the London authorities recruited Baltic ultranationalist and Nazi collaborator groups, and refurbished them into military-grade fighting units. These Baltic groups, reconstituted into the Forest Brothers, were Holocaust perpetrators and ultranationalist killers. They were responsible for killing thousands of Jews in the Baltic states, and assisted the Nazi secret police at every turn.

Rebranded as super-patriotic freedom fighters, they launched an anti-Soviet guerrilla war in 1944. Upheld as heroes until today in the Baltic republics, their role as accomplices to genocide has been carefully airbrushed from history.

That particular anticommunist insurgency failed. But it did set the template for American and British foreign policy – self determination is great as a weapon against officially designated enemies. Ethnic minorities can be deployed as guns for hire. Even ex-Nazi collaborators can find gainful employment as long as they agree with Washington and London’s geopolitical objectives.