It was in Paris, in 1983, that I fi rst met Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou. We were introduced at the Kurdish Institute, where I was attending an art exhibition with the fi lmmaker Yilmaz Güney and his wife, Fatosh. I had met Güney at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982.

This collection of studies remedies a dearth of serious scholarship in the area. Kurdish history, society and culture are considered, as are the international political and legal dimensions of the Kurds' situation.

This dictionary focuses on modern use of the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish, which is spoken in Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and parts of the former Soviet Union. It is the most comprehensive Kurmanji-English volume ever composed. Michael L.

The Kurds, who number some twenty-five million people in the Middle East, have no country they can call their own. Long ignored by the West, Kurds are now highly visible actors on the world's political stage.

Ismail Besikci is a renown Turkish sociologist who specializes on Kurds in south-eastern Turkey. He has authored several important works on Kurdish social organization and the continuing plight of Kurds today.