/pol/ - Political

When Parana was almost chosen to become "Kurdistan"
During World War I, England relied on the Kurds' collaboration in the campaign against Ottoman Turkey.
After the conflict ended, the Treaty of Sevres (1920) was signed between the Allies and the Sultanate of Turkey. The Ottoman Empire dismantled and lost a large portion of its territory in the Middle East and Europe. At the same time, it recognized Kurdistan as an autonomous territory, located east of the Euphrates and north of Turkey's border with Syria, and capable of independence.
The Treaty, however, was invalidated due to Turkey's refusal to sign it.
It so happened that the Treaty had reserved a region with an important strategic position, rich in oil wells, for the Kurds. Furthermore, the occasion coincided with the outbreak of Kemal Ataturk's revolution. Thus, with fears of communist Russia's influence still looming, all these circumstances led to the revision of the Treaty of Sevres and the adoption of the Treaty of Lausanne, which, in particular, definitively abandoned the promise of creating a state for the Kurdish nation.
It was then that, under the pretext of providing a destiny for the Kurdish people, the British government, the League of Nations, Lazard Brothers, the House of Rothschild, and the Prince of Wales reached a confidential understanding with the Parana Plantation and the governments of Brazil and Parana to remove the Kurds from the Iraqi enclave, where they were being held under the protection of the British army, and to allocate approximately 100,000 Iraqi Kurds to lands in northern Parana. To accomplish this mission, a commission was dispatched, chaired by British General J. Gilbert Brown, commander of British forces in Iraq, and comprised of J.J. Johnson, secretary of the Nansen International Refugee Office, and Charles Renard, counselor at the Swiss Legation.
The commission then traveled to Northern Parana to assess the local living and health conditions in the region, aiming to ensure the settlement of the Bedouin contingent in our country and facilitate their acculturation process.

Fourteen thousand acres of land were acquired near Jatai (relatively isolated), surrounded by 2.50-meter barbed wire, where the Kurds could live and work freely.

The immigration plan was handled confidentially, but in December 1933, news leaked to the National Congress and the State Assembly, sparking strong resistance from Brazilians to the immigrants. The Curitiba press also did not hold back protests against the Kurds, daily expressing its revulsion at what it called an "Assyrian" invasion. The term "Assyrian" was used in newspapers, laden with vulgar expressions ranging from "race without stoves or altars," "aliens," "fierce Asian mountaineers," to "dubious tribe" and "bloodhound invasion."

Add to all this the prevailing political climate in the country, which was in the midst of drafting the 1934 Constitution and holding state governorship elections, in which interventor Manoel Ribas was one of the candidates. As a result, Kurdish immigration to Brazil was rejected.