Читать книгу Turkey’s Mission Impossible - Cengiz Çandar - Страница 15
Оглавление“There is no Kurdish problem where a Turkish bayonet appears.”1 This is what the İstanbul-based journal Vakit announced on May 7, 1925. It is not a denial nor an acknowledgment of the Kurdish question. On the contrary, it signifies acquiescence to the existence of the problem. What was emphasized was the way to tackle and resolve it: introducing the military solution to the problem that confronted Turkey immediately following the foundation of the Republic. Vakit’s characterization, given the strict government control on the media, was indeed reflecting the official point of view concerning the Sheikh Said rebellion, the first Kurdish nationalist violent response with strong religious undertone against the secular Turkish nation-state at its earliest stage of construction.
The Sheikh Said rebellion was the first to leave a permanent link in the chain of Kurdish insurgencies that threatened Turkey’s territorial integrity and ultimately its survival. The Turkish (state) response to Kurds’ taking up arms was and has been ferocious. As David McDowell pointed out in his seminal book A Modern History of the Kurds, the most comprehensive source concerning the saga of the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, “nothing that Iraq’s Kurds could complain of remotely compared with the oppression meted out to Turkey’s Kurds.”2
The Sheikh Said rebellion broke out prematurely on February 8, 1925, and was suppressed by the Turkish military might in April of that year. Its leader, a locally influential clergyman of the Naqshbandi order, Sheikh Said (1865–1925), was executed along with the ringleaders of the short-lived uprising. Even their remains disappeared. Not a trace of the leadership of the rebellion was left, probably to prevent burial sites from serving as the object of pilgrimage or reference points for the future Kurdish generations. Following the suppression, the Kurds of Turkey were subjected to assimilation into the upper Muslim identity, the Turk. Any and every measure from deportation, in order to change the demography of the Kurdish-majority regions, to the introduction of new restrictive legislation has been implemented to this end.
Kurdish Rebellion Shaping Turkish Domestic Politics
The consequences and importance of the first Kurdish rebellion in the post-Republican Turkey were not confined solely to the Kurdish question. As would be seen persistently in the unfolding of the Republican Turkish history, it yielded results in shaping the nature of the new regime that was being installed, and also has become instrumental and manipulative regarding the power struggle that has been ongoing among the founders of the new state.
British historian and Labour MP M. Philips Price (1885–1973) in his undeservedly unnoticed book A History of Turkey: From Empire to Republic, published in 1956, astutely observed the pertinence of the issue to the overall nature of the regime of the young Republic. He wrote: “Following the Kurdish revolt in 1925 and the suppression of the Liberals and remnants of the Young Turks in 1926, Turkey became for a time a totalitarian state. All power was virtually concentrated in the hands of Mustafa Kemal.”3
What Tayyip Erdoğan did with respect to the Kurdish problem and his regime change steering Turkey from an, albeit imperfect, parliamentary democracy toward a presidential government system with extraordinary executive powers vested in him looks like a replica of Mustafa Kemal’s handling of the Kurdish revolt of 1925, in eliminating his political opponents (including potential ones) and further consolidating his grip on power. The following assessment in A History of Turkey: From Empire to Republic is noteworthy:
Mustafa Kemal . . . saw his opportunity . . . to rush through the Assembly a Statute of Law and Order; established press censorship and set up special tribunals. . . . These tribunals dealt summarily with the Kurdish ringleaders and even those . . . who had given him trouble in the past.4
The most authoritative source on the first Kurdish rebellion of the Turkish Republican era is Robert Olson’s The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism 1880–1925. His narrative, on the aforementioned matter, is more articulate and informative: “The Sheikh Said rebellion occurred at a crucial time in the developing domestic politics of Turkey. . . . The most authoritative source on the first Kurdish rebellion of the Turkish Republican era is Robert Olson’s The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism 1880–1925.” His narrative, on the matter mentioned above, is more articulate and informative: “The Sheikh Said rebellion occurred at a crucial time in the developing domestic politics of Turkey. . . . As a result of the struggle for power between the ardent Kemalists and those who opposed some of the policies of Mustafa Kemal (the Second Group and Kazım Karabekir, Ali Fuad Cebesoy, Rauf Orbay, Refet Bele, Adnan Adıvar, Halide Edip, etc.),”5 Atatürk thought it imperative to call İsmet İnönü back to the government. İsmet İnönü wanted to adopt a much harder line and to mobilize more military force against the rebellion than the Prime Minister Fethi Okyar. Mustafa Kemal sided with İnönü and his hard-line approach. İnönü criticized the press that was opposed to Mustafa Kemal, saying that indirectly encouraged the rebellion because of its opposition the government’s secularization policies. . . . On 25 February, the government proclaimed martial law in all of the eastern provinces. . . . After losing a vote of confidence within the People’s Party on March 2, Fethi Okyar resigned, and İsmet İnönü again became prime minister with a mandate from the government and from Mustafa Kemal to pursue strong measures against Sheikh Said. The very next day, March 4, İnönü got the Grand National Assembly to pass the Takriri Sükun Kanunu (Restoration of Order Law). This law allowed for the reactivation of independence tribunals for two years. Granted dictatorial power to convict, imprison, and execute rebels or traitors against the government, the independence tribunals were to be operative in Diyarbakır and Ankara. The Ankara tribunals were to be utilized to prosecute individuals opposed to the Kemalists. The tribunal in Diyarbakır was to be used primarily to prosecute and sentence the rebels and their collaborators. The great significance of the Restoration of Order was not lost on the opposition to Mustafa Kemal, which realized that it could and would be used to limit or stop all newspapers and publications that stated views differing were from those of the government.6
The story is continued by another writer, David McDowell, in his A Modern History of the Kurds:
In early April Kâzım Karabekir and a colleague, both vociferous critics of Mustafa Kemal’s autocracy were denounced by two khojas, as supporting the insurgents in their attempt to restore the caliphate. Despite the absurdity of the accusation, it served notice of the government’s intention to crush him and his associates. Karabekir was accused of writing to Khalid Beg Jibran [the most important military commander of the rebellion] two years earlier complaining “They [the Kemalists] are attacking the very principles which perpetuate the existence of the Muhammadan world,” while his Progressive Republican Party was accused of sending delegates to stir up religious fervor in the Eastern vilayets. That the Progressives roundly condemned the revolt did not protect them. In the second week of April, the party headquarters suffered a night raid by the police and all its papers were confiscated. The party was suppressed. Likewise, the government began to harry journalists who wrote unwelcome commentaries on political events.7
Whatever opportunity the botched military coup of July 15, 2016, provided to Tayyip Erdoğan for eliminating his political opponents, stifling any dissent to his regime change that transformed Turkey’s parliamentary system into a presidential government system giving the president unprecedented executive power, thereby consolidating his one-man rule, a variant of autocracy, as we will see later in this book—the Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925, the first Kurdish uprising against the Turkish nation-state, almost provided the same to Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). Built around a personality cult, along with the alleged assassination plot in İzmir that targeted him in the following year, Atatürk’s one-man rule ended with his death in 1938. It was replaced by the reign of İsmet İnönü, which ended 1950 thanks to a global paradigm shift as a result of the end of World War II.
What July 15, 2016, is to Tayyip Erdoğan, Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925 was to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. For some with knowledge of European history and the advent of totalitarianism in Europe, the Reichstag fire in 1933 Berlin that became a milestone in the future practices of Hitler and Nazi Germany served as an analogy to explain the function of the botched coup of July 15, 2016. Yet, Turkish history itself provides much more apt and vivid precedents for such an analogy, like the Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925.
The Sheikh Said Rebellion and the Mosul Question
One of the unintended, yet most important consequences of the Sheikh Said rebellion concerned the ultimate settlement of the Mosul question, the only but ostensibly the main issue that remained unresolved between Turkey and Britain even in the Treaty of Lausanne (July 1924).
The Ottoman province of Mosul, with its Kurdish-majority population, was claimed by Turkey. It comprised the entire area of today’s Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, as well as “the disputed territories,” stretching diagonally from the northeastern corner of Syria with Turkey and Iraq to the current Iraq-Iran frontier near Baghdad. These territories were included in the National Covenant adopted by the Ottoman Parliament in its last session. The National Covenant was published on February 12, 1920, just before the occupying powers in İstanbul that were landed in the wake of World War I disbanded the Ottoman Parliament. The National Covenant defined the borders of Turkey following the Great War. The six decisions taken in the last session of the Ottoman Parliament in İstanbul were later used as the basis for the claims of the Turkish Grand National Assembly that was inaugurated on April 23, 1920, in Ankara. In terms of drawing the borders of the “New Turkey,” it also formed the basis of Turkish claims in the Treaty of Lausanne. Interestingly, at the Lausanne negotiations, İsmet İnönü laid claim to Mosul because its population was non-Arab. He claimed it on the grounds that its Kurds were, in reality, Turks. The exchange between him and the British chief negotiator Lord Curzon at Lausanne were reported in many sources. Curzon, who was determined to hang on to Mosul, for the sake of oil rather than its Kurds, was withering: “It was reserved for the Turkish delegation for the first time in history to discover that the Kurds were Turks. Nobody has found out it before.”8
Whatever the legitimacy of the Turkish claims on Mosul, for the British, the Ottoman administrative unit (vilayet) of Mosul had to be united with the former Ottoman vilayets of Baghdad and Basra for the creation of the new state of Iraq under the British mandate. Incorporation of the Mosul vilayet into Iraq was seen as a sine qua non for the economic viability of the newly designed state, even without the oil wealth discovered by the British in Kirkuk, a part of the province. The Mosul vilayet would provide wheat for Iraq.
The dispute on the Mosul vilayet was submitted to arbitration before the League of Nations since neither Turkey nor Britain was willing to allow to the treaty negotiations at Lausanne to collapse because of that single sticking point. A Mosul Commission was formed in November 1924 under the chair of a Swedish diplomat (Carl Einer Wirsen), and including the membership of a former Hungarian prime minister (Count Pal Teleki) known for his staunch pro-Turkish views, as well as a Belgian colonel (Albert Paulis). The three-member Commission came to Mosul vilayet in January 1925, toured the province and conducted interviews until March 1925, and presented its findings to the League in July 1925. A second Mosul Commission was then formed under the chair of Estonian general Johan Laidoner who visited the province in the same year. General Laidoner presented his Commission’s report to the League of Nations in November 1925. The findings in the second report were almost identical with the previous one. The bottom line of the both was that without the incorporation of Mosul vilayet to the Baghdad and Basra vilayets, the entity to be called Iraq under the British mandate could not survive—although, from the legal point of view, the disputed area should be considered as an integral part of Turkey.
The British “Betrayal”
The concurrence of the Kurdish revolt and the arbitration efforts of the League of Nations on the unresolved Mosul vilayet issue between Turkey and Britain led many Turkish nationalists to see “British finger” behind the Sheik Said rebellion. The treaty that was signed in Ankara on June 5, 1926, between the United Kingdom, Iraq, and Turkey regarding the settlement of the frontier between Turkey and Iraq based on the decision reached by the League of Nations, to the effect that Turkey relinquished its claims on the Mosul vilayet, strengthened the nationalist conviction on the correlation between the Kurdish revolt and the alleged British machinations. The overriding belief in the Turkish nationalist milieu until today is that the legitimately claimed Mosul vilayet was lost and eventually incorporated into Iraq due to sinister British political maneuvers fomenting Kurdish unrest inside Turkey proper, that is, the Sheikh Said rebellion. However, the historical facts, data and documents open to scholarly research on that period of history do not support such Turkish arguments. Robert Olson, the foremost international expert on the Sheikh Said rebellion, wrote the following eye-opener:
The objections raised by the Middle East Department and the director of intelligence at the War Office in late autumn 1921 regarding possible support of a Kurdish rebellion in Turkey still obtained during the period of the Sheikh Said rebellion. . . . In my research in the Public Record Office, I found no documents to indicate that the British changed their policy regarding support for Kurdish rebellion(s) and revolt(s) in Turkey. The policy as established in November 1921 remained in effect up to the outbreak of Sheikh Said’s rebellion on 8 February 1925, in spite of the differences between Great Britain and Turkey resulting over the failure to resolve the Mosul question.9
The British determination of not supporting any Kurdish rebellion or revolt in Turkey that goes back to the year 1921 was the outcome of abandonment of the idea of Kurdish independence. In the Paris Peace Conference when the idea of an independent Armenia was shelved, “Kurdistan was finished too. By March 1921 the Allies had backed away from the vague promises in the Treaty of Sèvres,” writes Margaret MacMillan.
As far as Kurdistan was concerned, they said, they were ready to modify the treaty in “a sense of conformity with the existing facts on the ground of the situation.” The existing facts’ were that Atatürk had denounced the whole treaty; he had successfully kept part of the Armenian territories within Turkey; and he was about to sign a treaty giving the rest to the Soviet Union. Kurdish nationalists might protest but the Allies no longer had any interest in an independent Kurdish state.10
According to MacMillan, British indifference vis-à-vis the Kurdish independence bid extends back to the period of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
Unlike other emerging nations, Kurdistan had no powerful patrons in Paris, and the Kurds were not yet able to speak effectively for themselves. Busy with their habitual cattle raids, abductions, clan wars, and brigandage, with the enthusiastic slaughter of Armenians or simply with survival, they had not so far demonstrated much interest even in greater autonomy within the Ottoman Empire, where the majority lived. Before the Great War, the nationalisms stirring among the other peoples of the Middle East had produced only faint echoes among the Kurds.11
Following such derogatory characterization of the Kurds, she continues:
British support was at best lukewarm in 1919 and was tied, at least partly, to the United States taking on a mandate for Armenia. By the autumn it was clear that was not going to happen. It was also clear that the Turks were far from finished. Atatürk was rapidly building his forces in the east, close to the Kurdish areas. The idea of Britain’s propping up a separate Kurdistan became increasingly unattractive from both financial and military points of view. . . . In Mesopotamia, British authorities argued for incorporating part of the Kurdish territory to the new mandate of Iraq.12
Jonathan C. Randal, too, is categorical on the British “betrayal” to the Kurds:
The British entrusted with a League of Nations mandate for Ottoman territory in what was to be called Iraq, were also bent on thwarting Kurdish nationalist aspirations. Determined to control the oil in territory Kurds claimed as theirs, Britain forced them into a blood-spattered union with its freshly minted Iraqi state, dominated by its Sunni Arab minority.13
Kemalist Realpolitik on Mosul: Dividing Kurdistan
Britain had no real reason to instigate or support a Kurdish rebellion in Turkey. It had had no interest in an independent Kurdistan since the beginning of the 1920s. For Kemalist Turkey, the Mosul vilayet was never a high priority, and ironically the Sheikh Said rebellion led Turkish leaders, and primarily Mustafa Kemal himself, to think that Turkey’s best interests would be served if the Mosul vilayet were left out of the “New Turkey.” Leaving out the Mosul vilayet would make Turkification easier in Asia Minor. It would also remove an obstacle for the rapprochement with Britain that Mustafa Kemal deemed necessary.
The implications of this revolt to the government were obvious. First, the region represented a security problem. This, of course, was well known to the Turks, as it had been so long before the period of Ottoman rule. Second, any attempt to exercise a greater level of control in the Mosul district would only extend military supply lines through already hostile territory. Pacifying the region would present a greater drain on the already extended Turkish resources. While a divided Kurdistan troubled many in the regime . . . the loss of Mosul would create a new frontier far more suitable geographically for the Turks. In giving up the province, the Turks lost a major transportation hub as well as the oil fields of Kirkuk. At the same time they gave up a largely Kurdish population, an attractive option to the nationalists who were engaged in the program of Turkification during this post-Lausanne era of population exchanges. Indeed, if one looks at late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century history, it becomes clear that the process of drawing borders and exchanging populations to reify those borders was one aspect, if not the dominant aspect, of government policy. With the advent of the Young Turks and then the Republicans under Kemal, the process took on an ever more nationalist bent. . . . For the founding fathers of the new regime in Ankara, job one was to simply survive. Once the Greeks had been defeated in 1922, the immediate existence of the regime was no longer in question. At this point, however, territorial integrity was still very much in the forefront of their thinking. Mosul, with its largely Kurdish population, was an extremely low priority.14
In those years, the main aim of Turkish foreign policy was rapprochement with Britain. Turkey was also appraising diminishing a Kurdish population that could be difficult to control in the future. A divided Kurdistan was to its interest in this regard. Therefore, it acquiesced to the division of what had been one single unit geopolitically throughout history and pondered abandoning the Mosul vilayet. Leaving Mosul outside was a Kemalist decision, yet this remained unregistered as a fact in the Turkish official historiography.
From the last quarter of the nineteenth century on, distancing from Britain—which had become the greatest guarantor of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire until then—had brought the Empire’s end. Kemalist Turkey was in favor of changing the direction of foreign policy for a new rapprochement with Britain. If the price of such policy overhaul would be relinquishing the Mosul vilayet, Mustafa Kemal and his team were willing to pay that price. The names Eastern Anatolia and Southeastern Anatolia were designated to those parts of Kurdistan that would remain in Turkey, and the populations inhabiting those regions would be subjected to vigorous policies of Turkification and assimilation.
The fate of the Mosul vilayet, in a sense, was meant as a geopolitical rearrangement of Kurdistan. With Mosul to be delivered to Iraq under British tutelage, it would be considered that no Kurd would remain in Turkey. Prior to the ruptures that occurred in 1925 and 1926, in the first decade following the end of the Great War, the destinies of the Kurdish-majority inhabitants of the Mosul, who would later be called Iraqi Kurds, were interconnected with those of their kin in Turkey. The connection had been established through the Treaty of Sèvres, the only treaty that was not implemented among the post-war treaties.15
Not the suppression of the Sheikh Said rebellion, but the abolition of the Caliphate by the Kemalist regime alienated the Kurds of Mosul from Turkey. With the defeat of the Kurdish revolt and more importantly the settlement of the border question over a trilateral agreement between Britain Iraq and Turkey, interaction between the Kurds of Turkey and those of Iraq was severely hampered. C. J. Edmonds, a British political officer in Iraqi Kurdistan during the 1920s, in his Kurds, Turks and Arabs: Politics, Travel and Research in North-Eastern Iraq 1919–1925 disclosed the feelings of surprise and astonishment among the British officials in Mosul when they heard in mid-March 1924 that the Turkish Grand National Assembly had abolished the caliphate. Edmonds wrote that the propaganda that had kept Kurdistan like a volcano ready to erupt was mainly due to the loyalty that the Kurds held toward the highest authority of their religion, the caliphate in İstanbul.
The abolition of the caliphate not only broke the spiritual and emotional bonds connecting the Kurds of Mosul (later the Iraqi Kurds) to İstanbul, it also incited the religious segments of Turkey’s Kurdish community to revolt under the banner of the influential Sheikh Said. Ottoman Kurds’ loyalty, through their religious identity, was to İstanbul. But the imperial Ottoman İstanbul, the seat of the Muslim caliphate, was replaced by the republican Turkish nation-state’s Ankara, with which the Kurds could not identify themselves. Because of the deeply religious identity of its leadership, the Sheikh Said rebellion allowed Ankara to portray the situation as the revolt of reactionaries against the progressive modernists.
Autopsy of the First Kurdish Rebellion
In reality, although the rebellion broke out prematurely, there was a long period of preparation done by a clandestine nationalist organization called in short Azadi (Freedom, in Kurdish). The date of foundation of Cıwata Azadi Kurd (Society for Kurdish Freedom), later named Cıwata Kweseriya Kurd (Society for Kurdish Independence), is unclear: some claim it to be in 1921, some in 1923. Either way, the organization was responsible for the events leading up to Sheikh Said rebellion. The majority of its founders were nationalist Kurds who had served as officers in the Ottoman army during World War I. Its organizational mode was secretive, and events had moved very quickly since its establishment. Facing difficulties against a constantly on-guard Turkish intelligence and with the time-consuming task of inculcating nationalism in uneducated, poverty-stricken Kurdish society, Azadi leaders realized that the Kurdish populace would believe the sheikhs due to their traditional position and the high regard in which they were held. Azadi’s ranks were therefore filled with sheikhs belonging to the Naqshbandi order. After the arrest of hundreds of Azadi leaders in the wake of a mutiny, the sheikhs were the only ones left to lead the rebellion that was being prepared. They had become indispensable. The supreme command of the rebellion thus fell to the most respected, spiritually admired and trusted nationalist, Sheikh Said.16
The rebellion, when it broke out prematurely on February 8, 1925, had around 15,000 fighting men opposed initially by 25,000 Turkish troops. By April, Turkish troops numbered slightly over 50,000. In mid-April, Sheikh Said was captured, and along with other ringleaders was tried in Diyarbakır and hanged on June 29, 1925, the date considered as the end of the rebellion. By late August 1925, British intelligence which was monitoring the developments with extreme attention and had the most reliable sources for collecting data estimated 357 Kurdish notables had been sentenced to death by the independence tribunals, which had been reactivated to deal with the rebellion. After the capture of Sheikh Said, extensive operations continued to crush the seeds that could grow any possible future Kurdish nationalist movement. The hardest fought battles took place in March, and the tide of the rebellion was turned back in that month. Numerous factors ranging from tribal divisions among the Kurds; sectarian differences that pushed the Alevi Kurds to side with the Turkish government against a Sunni-clergy led rebellion; betrayal, a historically common trait of Kurdish revolts in the region; and lack of significant endorsement of support internationally and from the region, culminated in its eventual defeat.
Although there are varying numbers on casualties, there is not much dispute that no less than 5,000 people lost their lives as the Sheikh Said rebellion was quelled. The figure might even be somewhat higher than this. Robert Olson emphasized that the greatest suffering of the Kurds was not from the numbers killed or the casualties they sustained, but rather from the lands destroyed, villages burned, people deported, and persecution and harassment by Turkish officers, soldiers, and gendarmeries. While this brutality peaked during the period of the rebellion and its aftermath throughout 1925, harsh tactics continued unabated throughout 1926 and 1927. After a brief respite, similar tactics and measures were again employed during the rebellion of 1929–1930.17 The Sheikh Said rebellion, albeit defeated heavily and suppressed mercilessly, had ignited the chain of Kurdish rebellions of different magnitudes.
Syria: New Political Headquarters
With the brutal suppression of the revolt, deportation, and harassment of the Kurds, the Kurdish nationalist leadership came under attack. As a number of Kurdish tribes that had participated in the revolt were forced to flee across the borders, Syria became the recipient of many members of Turkey’s Kurdish nationalist and traditionalist leadership and thousands of Kurds who took part in the rebellion. The exact number of Kurds who went to Syria in this way and who were accommodated by the French mandate authorities in Syria is unknown. Academic research suggests that it would be around 25,000.18
Those who fled to Syria included Kurds, such as Jaladat (Celadet) Ali Bedirkhan (1893–1851) who created the Kurdish-Kurmanji alphabet in Latin letters, and his brother Kamuran Bedirkhan (1895–1978) belonging to the ruling dynasty of Cizre; Botan (Jazirat al-Omar), who were the forerunners of Kurdish nationalist sentiment in the nineteenth century; Ihsan Nuri Pasha, the commander of the second big Kurdish revolt in the aftermath of Sheikh Said rebellion; Ekrem Jamil Pasha (1891–1974) and Kadri Jamil Pasha (1892–1973), renowned notables of Diyarbakır; and Osman Sabri (1905–93), the founder of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Party in 1957.
The settling of Turkey’s Kurdish national leadership in Syria sowed the seeds for the intertwined nature of Turkey’s and Syria’s Kurdish problem, as would be seen in the second decade of the 2000s. In the short run, their settlement with some rebellious Kurdish tribes in Syria laid the ground for the second most important Kurdish rebellion in Turkish Republican history: the Ararat Rebellion of 1927–1931.
As much as the trans-border character of the Kurdish question was determined by the installation of the Kurdish nationalist leadership in the territory of Syria,19 it is also indicative that, for the Kurds, whether they were on the Turkish or Syrian side of the border (which was disputed at the time by France, the mandatory power in Syria and Turkey), the overlap was more of a common space, in terms of language, tribal affiliation, ethnicity, and family, rather than a distinct line of separation.20 Moreover, in the 1920s, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq had not yet emerged in nation-state format, thus for the Kurds, the borders that delineated the former Ottoman territories between Turkey and its new southern neighbors, Syria and Iraq, did not carry much practical significance.
France in Syria: Different from Britain in Iraq
France, as the mandatory power in Syria, should be considered the main reason attracting the beleaguered Kurdish nationalist leadership of Turkey and the bulk of the rebellious tribes escaping from the wrath of Turkish power. As historian Tejel explicates:
French policy in the Levant went completely in the opposite direction to that of the British in Iraq. Instead of looking for support from unified Sunni Arab nationalism, the French policy was based on the defense of non-Sunni communities, notably the Druzes, the Alawites, and the Christians. The French administration presented itself simply as being the arbitrator between the ethnic and religious minorities and the Sunni Muslim majority. . . . For France, Syrian unity was nothing more than an Arab nationalist invention perceived as an artificial creation of the British to harm French interests in the Middle East.21
As Syria under French rule presented the best refuge for the Kurdish exiles from Turkey, those nationalists, both intellectual and tribal, continued their endeavors to confront the Turkish government from the Syrian territory. Allsop explains:
The efforts of Kurdish exiles culminated in the establishment of the Xoybun League in 1927. The committee which came together for its formal establishment in Lebanon was made up of Kurdish intellectuals, leaders of tribes, sheiks and rebel fighters from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. The group set out to unite the Kurdish movement around a single aim: to unify their political efforts and turn their struggle towards Turkey and the liberation of the Kurds from Turkish claws.22
The spelling Xoybun, according to alphabet developed by its founding leader Jaladat Bedirkhan, also transliterated as Khoybun or Hoybun. It literally meant “Be Yourself” connoting independence. “This committee,” wrote Jordi Tejel in his chapter entitled “The Kurds during French Mandate,”
was the basis for the conceptualization, in Kurmanji dialect, of modern Kurdish nationalism, and by consequence, for the widespread doctrine in Turkey and Syria. The Khoybun League made deliberate efforts to create diplomatic contact, for the most part unofficial, with state players (Iran, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Soviet Union) and nonstate actors of the region (Armenians and the Turkish opposition). In so doing, the Khoybun succeeded in establishing itself as part of the network of politico-military alliances, to such a degree that it became an essential regional actor, for example, at the time of the Ararat revolt (1927–31).23
Tejel continues:
It is clear that the French authorities could have prevented, from the very beginning, all activity by the Khoybun League if it had so wished. According to available documentation, the French Intelligence Services were well aware of the Kurdish committee’s subversive activities. The movements and contacts of its members were under surveillance.24
However, French authorities were aware of the potential usefulness of the Kurdish nationalist activity against the Kemalist regime in Turkey even while Franco-Turkish negotiations on the delimitation of the Turkish–Syrian border were underway. They wanted to employ the “Kurdish card” against Turkey.
Ararat: The Second Big Revolt
The most significant role of the Khoybun League was its involvement in execution of the Ararat revolt (in Turkish Ağrı Dağı İsyanı). At the founding meeting of Khoybun in Beirut, Ihsan Nuri Pasha, a Kurdish officer who had served in the Ottoman army, was declared as the supreme commander of the Kurdish forces on Mt. Ararat (Ağrı Dağı). “In 1928 he initiated the revolt leading his men to Mount Ararat and set up a mini Kurdish proto-state which flew the Kurdish flag and had thousands of trained and armed forces.”25
Unlike their response during the Sheikh Said rebellion, at the initial stages of the Ararat revolt the Turkish authorities made attempts of conciliation with the rebellious Kurdish forces. These went nowhere however, and in 1930 a military campaign was launched. Mount Ararat was surrounded from all sides, and the Turkish air force continuously rained bombs over the rebels. The same year also saw a big massacre in the Zilan valley, situated at the northwest corner of Lake Van and in the proximity of the rebel headquarters on Mount Ararat. The Turkish daily Cumhuriyet, in its 16 July 1930 issue, claimed that 15,000 people were annihilated in the Zilan military operation, and that Zilan Creek flowing in the valley was filled with corpses. The campaign against the rebellious Kurds was over by September 17, 1930. The insurrection was entirely defeated by 1931 and the central government of Turkey resumed control over the territory.
During the rebellion, because the border between Turkey and Persia (Iran) ran up the side of Lesser Ararat (in Turkish Küçük Ağrı) to its peak, Turkish military was unable to stop Kurdish fighters from crossing the border at an extremely rugged location. After extinguishing the revolt and resuming control over the territory, Turkey demanded that the entire mountain be ceded. In January, the two countries signed the agreement redesigning the frontier. Compensating Persia with 90 square miles in the vicinity of the mountain, Turkey acquired the entirety of the 5,165-meter Mt. Ararat and extending to its southeast to incorporate Lesser Ararat (Küçük Ağrı), itself 3,896 meters in height.
Following the failure of the Ararat revolt, Khoybun ceased to function. As the revolt began in 1928, the French and British mandate administrations had imposed onerous restrictions on those who were involved with the organization, under pressure from Turkey. The French authorities took further measures to remove the Khoybun chiefs from the Kurdish regions of Syria. The brothers Jaladat and Kamuran Bedirkhan were forbidden from entering the regions east of the river Euphrates. Even during times of high Franco-Turkish tension, France always sided with Ankara, to the detriment of the Kurdish nationalists, wrote Jordi Tejel.26 With the passage of time and the diminishing value of the “Kurdish card” against Turkey, the French-Kurdish collaboration, limited as it was, ended in 1936, the year of the signing of the treaty between France and Syria, which foreshadowed the French military withdrawal from the territories of Syria and the country’s independence. A year later, in 1937, a French-Turkish rapprochement was underway, signaled by relinquishing to Turkey the Sanjak of Alexandretta (İskenderun in Turkish, then called the Province of Hatay), which was ultimately given in 1939. Utilization of the Kurds against Turkey was no longer an item on the French agenda.
Despite the perception of the Turks, and the expectation of the Kurds, the foreign support from the Big Powers once again did not materialize, just like in the case of the Sheikh Said rebellion. Besides, the activities of the rebels were restrained to the extent that Kurds started perceiving their abstinence as a betrayal. Kurdish sentimentalism aside, the imperatives of realpolitik never worked in the Kurds’ favor in the 1920s and 1930s, similar to what would be witnessed half a century later.
Dersim: The Alevi–Zaza’s Turn and the Massacre
Following the suppression of the Ararat revolt, it was Dersim’s turn. An area with stiff, majestic mountains, Dersim was the exclusive home to Alevi–Zaza Kurds and Armenians before 1915, and had traditionally enjoyed virtual autonomy for centuries, mainly due its topography. The new highly centralized Kemalist state, an intrinsically Turkish Sunni edifice, would not permit the survival of such a de facto autonomous entity in a rebellious Kurdish region, as demonstrated by revolts of different magnitudes and responses by the state since the foundation of the Republic. The first Kurdish revolt, coming before the foundation of the Republic, was an Alevi uprising known as the Koçgiri revolt of 1921, in a region adjacent to Dersim that some historians and geographers considered the Koçgiri region belonging to the Greater Dersim area. The Society for Rise of Kurdistan (Kürdistan Teali Cemiyeti), the first Kurdish nationalist organization, was formed in İstanbul in 1918 with the aim of establishing an independent Kurdistan. Involving a number of high-level Ottoman officials of Kurdish origin, the Society planned the Koçgiri revolt, which it took three months for the state to crush. The revolt was suppressed so brutally that the commander in charge of the repression was eventually dismissed by the Grand National Assembly and called back to Ankara. McDowell describes the revolt in these terms:
In May 1932, Dersim had attracted government attention. Dersim was notoriously defiant. No fewer than eleven military expeditions had tried to quell its inhabitants since 1876. From 1930 onwards, the government began a policy of deportation, disarmament and forced settlement of nomadic tribes in a manner which resembles the operations against Armenians in 1915 to achieve greater control of Dersim. At first, it was piecemeal, but it was clear that the suppression of all Dersim was only a matter of time.27
Tackling Dersim was a prerequisite of the government’s articulate “Reform Plan for the East” (Şark Islahat Planı), which combined administrative reorganization, including demographic changes, with military repression. In 1935, Dersim was made a province and named Tunceli, literally meaning “the Bronze Hand,” connoting the iron fist of the Turkish government and military. A stage of siege was declared in 1936, and a military governor was appointed endowed with extraordinary powers. The military buildup started and in the spring of 1937, the military operations commenced. The Dersim leaders, pleading to be granted self-rule, sent emissaries with a letter to the military governor. In reply, the Tunceli military governor had the emissaries executed. The revenge of Kurds materialized with an ambush that took the lives of ten officers and fifty soldiers. The most respected Alevi cleric of Dersim, septuagenarian Seyyid Rıza, along with seven relatives including his son, were executed in July 1937. Their remains were never recovered.28
The Turkish military, unlike in the case of the Ararat rebellion, wasted no time for in initiating armed operations against the Kurdish insurgents. Over the course of a year, the army units established a strict cordon around Dersim, restricting both locals and outsiders (including journalists) from passing through the mountainous region. The full might of the Turkish armed forces was brought to bear in suppressing the rebellion, an effort that included the use of warplanes and “burning and asphyxiating” chemical bombs. Tens of thousands of people had been killed or deported by the time the armed conflict came to a close in 1938.29
From 1938, the pacification of Dersim, to 1984, the start of the Kurdish insurgency under the leadership of the PKK, the Kurds in Turkey had never taken up arms. The Kurdish issue had submerged into oblivion, and any expression pertinent to Kurds and Kurdishness had sunk into deep silence.
The huge toll of Dersim regarding human life and the immense tragedy that ensued triggered an ongoing debate over whether it was really a Kurdish rebellion in line with those of Sheikh Said and Ararat. While Dersim is treated as a Kurdish rebellion in Turkish military history, the survivor Alevis called it in Zaza the Tertele Dersim (Dersim Genocide) and tried to win international acknowledgment. Whether it was just another suppressed Kurdish revolt or a pacification campaign conducted by the Turkish government against the Kurds resulting in enormous human losses, there is a quasi-consensus that it was an untold tragedy, even conceded as such by Tayyip Erdoğan.
The might of the Turkish military reflecting a new and vibrant power may explain the defeat of successive Kurdish revolts in the first 15 years of the Republic, from its foundation until the death of its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Equally important in explaining the failure of the Kurdish revolts, however, was the societal structure of the Kurds, which involved linguistic and more importantly sectarian divisions among them. The Sheikh Said rebellion had a religious Sunni leadership and a strong Zaza character, while Khoybun, the political organization that initiated the Ararat rebellion, was overwhelmingly Sunni and Kurmanji. The Kurdish rebel forces, consequently, in the Ararat revolt were mostly Kurmanji. Dersim, however, was an Alevi–Zaza affair.
Alevi Kurds, in light of many years of religious persecution at the hands of Sunni Kurds, had no desire to see a rebellion led by an orthodox Sunni sheikh succeed. Religious divisions, in addition to the tribal politics . . . prevailed over a larger sense of Kurdish nationalism, despite the obvious hostility towards Ankara of both Sunni and Alevi Kurdish groups. Twelve years later, Kirmanci Sunni and Zaza Kurds would return the favor by sitting on their hands while another major Alevi Kurdish revolt was crushed in Dersim (1937–1938). Ihsan Nuri’s Mount Ararat uprising was crushed in 1930 largely due to a similar failure to overcome divisions within Kurdish society.30
The Fourth Revolt or the First All-Kurdish Insurgency
No Kurdish rebellion in Turkish Republican history has been able to achieve an all-Kurdish character. Deprived of vital international support and legitimacy, the limited scope of each such move and the insurmountable cleavages dividing groups have made it easier for a Turkish government that had emerged from a successful national struggle (1919–1922) with increased self-confidence. Furthermore, for the battle-tested strong military of Turkey, it was not difficult to suppress the revolts in a determined manner. In ethno-sectarian terms, the Sheikh Said rebellion had a primarily Sunni–Zaza nature while the Ararat revolt had a Sunni–Kurmanji, and Dersim an Alevi–Zaza nature.
The Kurdish question had to wait until the last quarter of the twentieth century to find a vehicle for an insurgency with a bold aim of engulfing every segment of the Kurdish polity and society, and extending its tentacles to Turkey’s neighboring countries with Kurdish populations and to the European diaspora where hundreds of thousands of Kurds have been residing.
That vehicle, the PKK, changed all the parameters of the Kurdish issue. It has been an enigma from its very birth and has not changed much in this regard.
NOTES
1. McDowall, A Modern History, 200.
2. Ibid., 184.
3. Price, A History of Turkey.
4. Ibid.
5. The Second Group is the title used for those members of the parliament opposing Mustafa Kemal. Among the names listed, Kâzım Karabekir, Ali Fuad Cebesoy, Rauf Orbay, and Refet Bele were erstwhile comrades of Mustafa Kemal, legendary generals of the Turkish National Struggle (1919–1922). Adnan Adıvar and Halide Edip were among the leading thinkers and public intellectuals of the time.
6. Robert Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1885–1925 (Austin; University of Texas Press, 1991), 123, 124.
7. McDowell, A Modern History of the Kurds, 196–97.
8. P. B. Kinross, Atatürk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey (London: Quill, reissue edition 1964), 407; Walter Reid, Empire of Sand: How Britain Made the Middle East (Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd, 2011), 192–93.
9. Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism, 128.
10. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 449; H. W. V. Temperley, ed., A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, 6 vols. (London, 1920–24), vol. 6, 91.
11. MacMillan, Paris 1919, 445.
12. Ibid., 446.
13. Randal, After Such Knowledge, 4.
14. David Cuthell, A Kemalist Gambit: A View of the Political Negotiations in the Determination of the Iraqi-Turkish Border (Columbia University Press, 2004), 90–91.
15. Cengiz Çandar, Mezopotamya Ekspresi: Bir Tarih Yolculuğu [Mesopotamia express: A journey in history] (İstanbul: İletişim, 2012), 509–10 (my translation).
16. Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism, 99.
17. Ibid., 126.
18. Harriet Allsopp, The Kurds of Syria (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 150.
19. Hamit Bozarslan, La question kurde. Etats et minorités au Moyen-Orient (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1997).
20. Jordi Tejel, Syria’s Kurds: History, Politics and Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 5.
21. Ibid., 16.
22. Allsopp, The Kurds of Syria, 53–54.
23. Tejel, Syria’s Kurds, 17.
24. Ibid., 18–19.
25. Allsopp, The Kurds of Syria, 55.
26. Tejel, Syria’s Kurds, 19.
27. McDowell, A Modern History, 207.
28. Ibid., 208.
29. Ryan Gingeras, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Heir to an Empire (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 166–67.
30. David Romano, The Kurdish Nationalist Movement: Opportunity, Mobilization, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 107.
