Among the hundreds of petitions and memoranda submitted before the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was a fifteen-page document entitled Memorandum on the Claims of the Kurd People. Its author, Sherif Pasha, had been a high-ranking Ottoman diplomat, serving for a time as Istanbul’s ambassador to Sweden, but he later broke with the Young Turks, criticized the wartime killings of Armenians by Ottoman forces, and by the war’s end had joined the Society for the Rise of Kurdistan, a Kurdish nationalist organization dedicated to the establishment of an independent Kurdish state in eastern Anatolia. Addressed to the world leaders in Paris who had taken on “the task of remapping the globe on the basis of nationality,” the memorandum delineated in great detail the geographic boundaries and demographic character of the territories it claimed for the future Kurdish state and cited Western scholarly authorities on the history and ethnography of the region to support its assertions.