Îsmet Şerîf Wanlî

Îsmet Şerîf Wanlî (born November 21, 1924 in Damascus ; † November 9, 2011 in Lausanne ) was a Kurdish scientist , author and politically active until 2003.

His ancestors immigrated to Syria from Anatolia at the end of the 19th century . He attended school in Damascus and was very interested in history - especially Kurdish history - and sports. In the 1940s he met many members of the Xoybûn organization such as Celadet Ali Bedirxan , Kadri Cemilpascha , Ekrem Cemilpascha and Doctor Nuredîn Zaza . Wanli also attended a school in Lebanon , a university in France and the USA . He learned French , Arabic and English , but his Kurdish at the time was poor.

On November 29, 1948 he received his doctorate in law from the University of Lausanne and later he received a master's degree in history from the University of Geneva . He then taught Kurdish history at the Sorbonne . With the uprising of Mustafa Barzani he became politically active and a member of a committee for the rights of the Kurds. He met Barzani personally in Baghdad in the 1960s . He traveled a lot in the Iraqi and Iranian parts of Kurdistan to investigate the political movement of the Kurds. He later wrote a doctoral thesis about it.

In 1985 he and other lawyers founded the Association of Kurdish Lawyers in Europe . He took the chair. Wanli was sentenced to death after the Ba'ath Party coup in Syria.

In 1995 he became the chairman of the Kurdish Institute in Berlin and a member of the Kurdish Parliament in exile (PKDW = Parlemanê Kurdistan li derveyî Welat). In 1999 the PKDW was renamed the KNK (Kurdistan National Congress). In 2003 Wanli resigned as chairman.

On September 9, 2011, Wanlî suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and was treated in Lausanne. Here he died two months later on November 9, 2011. He left a wife and a child.

Books

• The national question of Turkish Kurdistan . Frankfurt am Main 1980
• Kurdistan and the Kurds in 3 volumes . Göttingen 1986–1988