Mike Amitay is Executive Director of the Washington Kurdish Institute, a position he has held since the Institute opened in 1996. Formerly, he served as a staff advisor at the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a government agency which monitors human rights and security issues. There, Mr. Amitay focused on Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, and Kurdish issues, and was responsible for the Commission’s domestic compliance activities. He also presently chairs the Washington Coalition on Human Rights, an informal network of more than 60 NGOs. In 1995 and 1996 Mr. Amitay was Coordinator of the Washington office of the London-based Minority Rights Group.

Hamit Bozarslan was born in Diyarbekir, the main Kurdish city in Turkey. Dr. Bozarslan is the author of The Kurdish Question: States and Minorities in the Middle East (French) as well as of numerous articles dealing with Kurdish identity, society, and politics and their historical and contemporary relations with Kemalism and international geopolitics. Dr. Bozarslan is currently Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where he is researching topics relating to political and social violence in the Middle East.

Dogu Ergil is a renowned Professor of Political Science, now at Ankara University. In August 1995, he published a groundbreaking statistical study of political, social, and economic conditions of Turkey’s Kurdish citizens. Commissioned by the Turkish Union of Chambers of Commerce (TOBB), the report surveyed Kurdish attitudes towards the State, the PKK, and various human rights issues. More recently, Professor Ergil has been involved in efforts to institute regular discussions between Turkish and Kurdish citizens in Turkey through the Foundation for the Research of Societal Problems (TOSAV), which he helped to found in 1996. Since its establishment, the group has been working to promote peaceful collaboration between Turks and Kurds in Turkey as well as to engage in support for democracy and human rights activities.

Graham Fuller is currently a Senior Political Scientist at RAND Corporation in Washington, D.C, where, since 1988, he has conducted research on Middle Eastern politics. Mr. Fuller served twenty years in the U.S. Foreign Service, and also worked at the CIA, acting as the National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia and as Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Mr. Fuller’s publications include The Center of the Universe: Geopolitics of Iran (1991) and The Democracy Trap: Perils of the Post-Cold War World (1992). More recently he has conducted RAND studies on the Kurdish question, on the survivability of Iraq, and on questions of democracy and Islam in the Middle East. This year he co-authored Turkey’s Kurdish Question with Henri Barkey.

Kamran Karadaghi has traveled extensively in Northern Iraq and Turkey, and has worked since 1988 as a Senior Political Correspondent and Columnist for Al-Hayat, the London-based Arabic daily newspaper, where he covers Iraqi, Turkish, and Kurdish affairs. He is the author of "The Two Gulf Wars: The Kurds on the World Stage, 1979-1992," published in People Without a Country (Chaliand, Ed., 1993). Mr. Karadaghi was a visiting fellow to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in 1993, and regularly participates in conferences and forums that deal with Kurdish issues.

Najmaldin Karim is President of the Washington Kurdish Institute and a neurosurgeon by profession. He is also the president of the Kurdish National Congress of North America, the largest Kurdish organization on the continent. As a leader of the Kurdish community, Dr. Karim has participated directly in negotiations to resolve disputes between Kurdish political parties, has testified before Congressional committees, and has briefed U. S. Government officials on issues concerning Kurds. In the early 1970s, Dr. Karim was the personal physician of former KDP leader Mustafa Barzanî.

Alan O. Makovsky, a Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is a specialist on Middle Eastern and Turkish affairs. He joined The Washington Institute in May 1994 after eleven years in the U.S. Department of State, where he had served in a variety of capacities, most notably as Special Advisor to Special Middle East Coordinator Dennis Ross in 1993 and in 1992 as State Department liaison officer and political advisor to Operation Provide Comfort. Mr. Makovsky has penned several articles on Kurdish affairs, one of which (published in Middle East Insight (May/June, 1995)) examines how the 1995 Turkish invasion of Northern Iraq to fight the PKK presence there affected Turkey’s potential full membership in the European Union.

Salahuddin Mohtadi, a lawyer by profession, is originally from Bokan, a center of Kurdish culture in Iran. Since the early 1960s he has been active in Kurdish political movements, and was jailed for his activities from 1967 to 1970. Following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Mr. Mohtadi served as the chief Kurdish negotiator with the Iranian regime regarding Kurdish autonomy arrangements. Mr. Mohtadi has lived in Sweden since 1984 and has published widely on Kurdish issues, while maintaining good relations with all Kurdish parties in Iran.

Golmorad Moradi is a political scientist who has lectured at the University of Heidelberg and other universities in Germany on the history of the Middle East and the Kurdish question. While Dr. Moradi’s Ph.D. dissertation was on the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, he is also a specialist on social and religious movements in Iran. Dr. Moradi presently is also a counselor for refugee families in Germany.

Kendal Nezan, a nuclear physicist by profession, is currently President of the Kurdish Institute in Paris and a Washington Kurdish Institute Board member. In 1975, Dr. Nezan established the France-Kurdistan Society, which included such leading intellectuals as Jean-Paul Sartre. He established the Kurdish Institute in 1983, and has published and lectured widely on Kurdish political, cultural, and social issues. Dr. Nezan maintains close relations with numerous European governments and with the European Parliament.

Mahmoud Osman was formerly chief advisor to Kurdish Democratic Party leader Mustafa Barzani. In 1975 he left the KDP to form the Kurdish Socialist Party of Iraq. He was the chief Kurdish negotiator for the Kurdish autonomy agreement brokered with Baghdad in the early 1970s. He is presently a political commentator and analyst based in London.

Ümit Özdag is Associate Professor of International Relations at Gazi University in Ankara, Turkey. Dr. Özdað wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the relationship between the army and politics in the Atatürk-Ýnönü era, and has conducted research on cultural structures and identity problems in southeastern Turkey as well as on social and economic conditions in Kurdistan of Iraq. In 1997-1998, Dr. Özdað was a visiting professor at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland.

David Phillips is Executive Director of Columbia University’s International Conflict Resolution Program. He is also Project Director and Senior Associate for the International Peace Research Institute, an Oslo-based organization; Director of the CPA Project on the South Balkans for the Council on Foreign Relations; and Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Mr. Phillips has been a member of numerous advisory boards and is currently active on the boards of such organizations as The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Action Center for Human Rights, Amnesty International, and the Organization for Human Rights in Iraq. Mr. Phillips has published a number of articles in diverse newspapers and journals, including an article in the CHRF Reporter titled "Prospects for Peace and Democracy in Iraqi Kurdistan" (1993).

Jonathan C. Randal is the senior foreign correspondent at The Washington Post, a position he has held since 1969. In addition to working for the United Press, The New York Herald Tribune, Time, and The New York Times, Mr. Randal is the author of Going All the Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers, and the War in Lebanon (1983), and most recently, After Such Knowledge What Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan (1997), a rich account of Randal’s firsthand experience with diplomacy and politics in the Middle East and Kurdistan, where he has traveled extensively.

Barham Salih is director of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan’s bureau for international relations. Since April of 1991 he has been the Washington representative of the PUK, acting as a liaison between the Iraqi Kurdish movement and the United States government. Mr. Salih is a member of the party’s leadership council as well as a senior foreign policy advisor to PUK leader Jalal Talabani.

Omar Sheikhmous is a researcher and lecturer at Stockholm University. He has published a number of works on Kurdish issues, including articles entitled "Conflict Dynamics and Human Rights Problems in the Kurdish Areas of Iraq and Syria," "Water Disputes and Ethnic Conflict in the Middle East: The Case of the Kurds," "Kurdish Prospects in the Shadow of the New World Order," and "The Kurdish Question: Conflict Resolution Strategies at the Regional Level."

Hazhir Temourian was born in the Kurdish town of Sahneh, in western Iran, where he spent nineteen years before moving to England. He entered journalism and has been employed by the BBC and The Times (London). He presently works at The European weekly newspaper as a Middle East specialist, but also contributes regularly to a number of other organizations throughout the West, which deal with political and social issues.

Ken Timmerman is Executive Director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, a Washington-based non-profit organization that promotes democracy in Iran. Since 1982, he has worked in the Middle East for a variety of U.S. and international news organizations, including Newsweek, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and CBS News. From 1987 to 1993 Mr. Timmerman published Middle East Defense News from Paris. He joined the staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1993 and directed studies on Iranian weapons procurement activities. Since 1994, Mr. Timmerman has directed the Middle East Data Project, Inc., which publishes The Iran Brief, a monthly investigative newsletter on strategic policy, trade, and related issues.

Abbas Vali is presently Lecturer in politics at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is the author of Pre-Capitalist Iran: A Theoretical History (1993), and Kurdish Nationalism: Sovereignty, Identity and the Dialectics of Violence in Kurdistan (forthcoming, 1999), as well as of numerous articles on modern Kurdish history and politics. Dr. Vali is currently completing a book on the Kurdish Question in Iran.

Mehdi Zana, the former mayor of Diyarbekir, the principal Kurdish city in Turkey, is a prominent figure in the international Kurdish community. After spending fifteen years in prison in Turkey for promoting Kurdish rights when he served as mayor, Mr. Zana continues his work as a peace activist from his home in Sweden, where he currently lives in exile. Mr. Zana is the author of Prison No. 5: Eleven Years in Turkish Jails, which has been translated into English and French from its Turkish-language original, and is currently writing a number of other works.