From the Bosphorus: Straight - Who are the Buraku, Chamorro and Terekeme?

We would be willing to bet that a few among our readers have heard of the “Ainu,” the minority of indigineous people who inhabit the island of Hokkaido in Japan. We’d be more cautious about any wager on awareness of Japan’s “Buraku” people, even though they number some 3 million to the Ainu’s 20,000.

Most educated adults have some knowledge of the “Sami,” sometimes called “Laps,” of Sweden and other Nordic countries. But how many have hard of the “Scania” a group in southern Sweden that every 10 years or so surfaces to demand more autonomy and cultural rights from “imperialist Stockholm.”

Who is not familiar with America’s civil rights movement, the struggle by African Americans whose most notable success is Barack Obama? Or the trials and tribulations of Native Americans, the ones we used to call Indians? But who cares about the rights of the “Chamorro,” the indigineous people on the American island of Guam? Roughly half the island’s 250,000 population is Chamorro. And their long list of grievances includes the fact the speaking or writing in their language was banned by U.S. officials until 1967. But they hardly show up on anyone’s list of concerns.

We go through this tedious recitation because we think it makes the point of the report we used for yesterday’s main front page story, “Minorities face Iraq ‘catastrophe.’”

One can make a pretty good argument that the world’s small groups of people, minorities, can be roughly divided into two categories: those with a certain amount of media cache and resulting awareness convertible to international assistance; and those who lack it. Just one little exercise. Go to www.euminority.eu, ostensibly the advocacy page for Europe’s oppressed minorities. Today there is a video there on the sad plight of Turkey’s Kurds, Roma and Armenians. We are glad these groups and their plights have pierced the consciousness of concern. But we have our doubts that the producers of that video have even heard of Turkey’s “Hemshin” or “Terekeme.” Don’t worry, we are not going to demand that state television TRT give them their own broadcast channel.

But we do think all these groups are worth thinking about in light of Human Rights Watch prescient warning that Iraq’s Chaldean Christians, Yazidis, Shabaks and Turkmens may well perish, caught in the crossfire between Iraq’s Arab majority and Kurdish minority. In the case of northern Iraq, it’s the Kurds in the majority and those groups just mentioned in the minority and the struggle is the “identity” of oil-rich Kirkuk.

Certainly we are heartened that Human Rights Watch has taken on the cause of these defenseless and powerless groups. But no need to stop there. The map of the world’s cultures, and ethnic boundaries is crudely conceived and poorly understood to the peril of millions.