The current campaign to win formal recognition of the Kurdish genocide is nearing its finale in Britain. Last week, leading supporters of the all-party group on Kurdistan urged a business committee, which allocates time, to endorse an historic parliamentary debate on the Kurdish genocide and its contemporary relevance.

The untold story of the Kurdish genocide was the subject last week of a major international conference organised, just a stone's throw from Parliament, by the Kurdistan Regional Government in the UK.

Leon Trotsky, not someone I usually quote, once said that people may not be interested in politics but politics is often interested in them. British people may be wary of foreign interventions but foreign crises can profoundly affect domestic politics. The suffering that we see every day in Syria won't go away and will have to be addressed, sooner rather than later.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu's views of Tony Blair and the Iraq war are not new. Very little is in the debate between those who supported intervention in Iraq and those who opposed it.

The Iraqi Kurds are trying to encourage the world to understand that a decades-long process of genocide killed hundreds of thousands of people and that it remains a living legacy that affected almost all people in a region just twice the size of Wales, or about the same size as Holland.