FARMINGTON – The video, “Good Kurds, Bad Kurds: No Friends But the Mountains,” will be shown at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 8, in Roberts Learning Center at the University of Maine at Farmington. The public is invited to see the film and participate in a discussion after.

The title refers to the difference between Kurds living in Iraq, who receive moral and military support from the United States, and the Kurds in Turkey, who are being oppressed by the Turkish government.

Historian Terry Lynch and his wife, Kathy, of Temple have traveled through Turkey several times, becoming more fascinated with the largest ethnic group in the world that has no country.

The retired Mt. Blue High School teachers purchased a video that exposes the plight of the Kurdish people, long victims of a bloody battle of ethnic cleansing that has gone largely unreported in the American press.

The Lynches have offered their video to the Western Mountain Action Workshop to be shown as part of that group’s educational film series.

Although Kurds live in five nations, the largest single concentration live in Turkey, where authorities have outlawed any and every expression of Kurdish culture, including speaking the Kurdish language. There have been 29 Kurdish revolts since 1923 when Turkey became a modern nation.

The film relates atrocities committed by the Kurdistan Workers Party and by the Turkish government, which has depopulated more than 3,000 Kurdish villages, leaving 2 million plus Kurds homeless and 37,000 dead.

The report also features a Santa Barbara family of Kurdish immigrants whose lives resonate with events in Turkey.

It is free, and the public is invited to stay for the discussion led by the Lynches.