Honorable Nelson Mandela
Private Bag X70 000, HOUGHTON, 2041
Street: No 4 13th Avenue, Houghton,
JOHANNESBURG, 2041
Tel: (011) 728 1000
December 31, 2004
Dear Mr. Mandela
The Kurdish National Congress of North America is an umbrella organization concerned with justice, democracy, and human rights for Kurdish people around the world. We request your support in recognition, and appeal for your attention in regards to the institutional racism prevalent in the Middle East against Kurds even at a time when the word democracy is being used in the same sentence as the future of Kurds.
As the most well known and well respected advocate for human rights in the last and present centuries and as a man of compassion and principle, we are hoping that with your appeal to the world community on the issue of Kurdish human rights, continuous atrocities against Kurds may be exposed and examined. Kurds have suffered and continue to be the object of the most outrageous human rights violations today. These human rights violations are sanctioned by current governments and many before them and have deep roots in ideologies such as Ba athism, Kamalism, and others, which consider Kurds an inferior race.
In the 1960s Arab Ultra-Nationalist ideologists of the Ba