By Tahseen Wsu Abdullah
Legally, the concept of a referendum is to ask and receive the opinion of the people to decide on a specific and decisive issue, which is directly related to survival and identity.
The referendum is the result of great differences, marginalization, and dissatisfaction, ranging from political, social, cultural, and ethnic dissatisfaction, to historical, military, geographical and demographic dissatisfaction.
We can define a referendum as a way for a people to express their opinion on a particular issue, with or without it, a way of experiencing direct democracy to achieve a specific goal.
The issue of referendum in the world is deeply related to the issue of survival, identity, and self-reproduction, in a dynamic paradigm, in the sense that the relationship between identity and referendum is a direct relationship. It is a reaffirmation and insistence on the survival and preservation of national identity, while that identity is under constant threat.
When the people of South Kurdistan held a referendum on September 25, 2017, it was a moment to regain identity and leap over different forms of falling and overcoming the past. The referendum was a historic turning point in the Kurdish world, historic in the sense that South Kurdistan will hold a referendum within the structure of the Iraqi state and nation to secede from the dominant Arab identity that wants to attach the Kurdish body to its body The Arab world and all the meanings of Kurdistan and all forms It takes away its differences and dissolves them into a strange and inappropriate form.
The referendum is a major dividing line between two different eras and two completely distant social actors, each driven and directed by two different national structures and forces. In other words, the referendum distinguishes two different stages of national struggle, especially for those nations that are still in the stage of national liberation.
Referendums are one of the political tools used in the world to modify and change the boundaries of communication, presence and dealing with other forces! Sometimes a referendum causes a complete break between two parties, or a reshaping of the way and type of their relations.
The referendum as a concept is a new expression in our history and a new beginning for communicating with the world and other forces.
In the past, the Kurdish nation has been seen as a brave warrior in the form of war. This kind of depiction of the Kurds as a nation is a depiction produced in colonial literature, it an imported view from outside the Kurdish world.
The South Kurdistan referendum will change the model of defending identity from confrontation to the act of defending identity through voting and secession, which is a new and modern way of struggling for national liberation.
Over the past 100 years, the Iraqi state, both as a political power and as a cultural framework, has not been able to leave the lines of the concept of isolation and connect with the concept of togetherness, common identity, common memory and imagination Chemical attack on Halabja and destruction of the regional environment Kurdistan is visible. This was the main reason for rejecting the imposed identity and culture, which had been involuntarily attached together.