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Writing Turkey’s Mission Impossible

It was February 2017 in Beirut. I was delivering a speech at the Institute of Palestine Studies, the respected research center where I had enjoyed the privilege to speak on Turkey’s Middle East policy several times in the last decade. My talk was entitled “New Turkey: A Revival of the Ottomans or the Last Phase of the Ottoman State?” In front of an audience comprising the Lebanese and Palestinian political and cultural elite, I commenced my talk with a self-criticism that would not normally be anticipated from me. It was almost half a year since an autocratic regime had begun to establish itself in Turkey, and the peaceful settlement of the Kurdish question had already turned into a pipedream. With these two developments, my decades-old career had seemingly ended in failure.

“I concede my defeat,” I said, and reminded them of the myth of Sisyphus in ancient Greece. Sisyphus was the heir to the throne of Thessaly in central Greece, yet he was condemned to eternal punishment for his offenses against the gods. He was doomed to roll a massive rock up to the top of a steep hill. His efforts were always in vain for whenever Sisyphus neared the top, the rock would roll all the way back down and Sisyphus had to start all over again. “The lives of myself and many in my generation connoted the task of Sisyphus. We tried to roll up the rock, and every time we were near the summit, it rolled down and we obstinately started from scratch all over again.”

“But this time,” I continued, “it is different, because I have neither the energy to push the rock back uphill, nor the time left for it.” Notwithstanding with the futility of our efforts and our refusal to surrender completely to the bitter facts, I said, “I can find consolation in the truth that, at least, we tried. That will be our legacy for the future generations.”

If before my Beirut talk I had read An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese-British novelist who won the Nobel Literature Prize in 2017, I could have modified my introductory statement. Ishiguro wrote:

A man who aspires to rise above the mediocre, to be something more than the ordinary, surely deserves admiration, even if he fails and loses a fortune on account of his ambitions. . . . If one has failed only where others have not had the courage or will to try, there is consolation—indeed, deep satisfaction—to be gained from his observation when looking back over one’s life.¹

What Ishiguro had written is a better description of me and many people of my generation than what I tried to depict with the myth of Sisyphus.

Taking courage from his portrayal, writing this book, Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds, is in a sense an effort to keep trying.

Although this is by no means a literary work, I found many commonalities between my book and Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels. His novels, for example, often times end without a resolution, and the issues that his characters confront are buried in the past and they too remain unresolved. Thus, Ishiguro ends many of his novels on a note of melancholic resignation. Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds, I must say, has a similar spirit, follows a similar pattern, and arguably ends in a similar way.

Ishiguro’s characters accept their past and embrace what they become, typically discovering that this realization brings comfort, and an end to mental anguish. That also, partly, explains my motivation for writing this book. I too accept my past and who I have become. Writing becomes therefore a sort of obligation to myself, to bring at least relative comfort and resolution of my anguish.

An Artist of the Floating World is an examination of the turmoil in postwar Japan, seen through the eyes of a man who is rejected by the future and who chooses to reject his own past. This served as an excellent metaphor for my book: peace with the Kurds is rejected by the future, and they (the Kurds) and we (all those who have wanted to resolve the conflict through compromise and in human dignity) have chosen to reject the past. That rejected past was shaped by the war with the Kurds.

Yet, Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds could never have been written, at least in its current form, if there had been no coup attempt in Turkey on the night of July 15, 2016. The coup found me in Stockholm where I was busy with my five-month residency at the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies. Two months later I was to begin my one-year residence at the Middle East Centre of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. Prof. Eugene Rogan, director of the Centre and a brilliant historian of the Modern Middle East and late Ottoman period, had sponsored my participation. I had encountered Eugene Rogan’s name for the first time in 2010 while visiting Blackwell’s, the legendary bookshop in Oxford. It was inscribed over a brick-thick volume entitled The Arabs sitting solidly on the shelf. The publication was brand new and I was fascinated by a quick glance through its seemingly endless pages. I purchased it without any hesitation. A few years later what, for some, would be his magnum opus, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920 was fresh on the market. Probably I was lucky enough to be one of its earliest readers when by mere coincidence I discovered it on its first day in Berlin’s famous bookshop Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus, in 2015. I avidly consumed it over a couple of hours.

With this background, I could not have been happier when I received an invitation from Eugene Rogan to deliver a talk on Turkey’s Kurdish question in October 2015. I was exhilarated speaking at the new auditorium of St Antony’s, a project newly completed by the renowned Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. What was more important though was getting to know Eugene Rogan in person and becoming good friends with him.

A few days after my conference at the University of Oxford, in Turkey’s re-run elections President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his party the AKP succeeded in reversing the results of the elections held on June 7, 2015. The results had denied single-party rule for the AKP and thus the constitutional amendments for the executive presidency, which would signify Turkey’s drift to authoritarian rule under Erdoğan. Turkey’s move from a relatively democratic political climate toward a twilight zone with gloomy prospects could be anticipated. The day after the elections, I received an e-mail message from Eugene Rogan. Its ending was brief and simple: “After this election result, you might want to seek asylum in Oxford.”

As if confirming his worries about me, the week after the elections, I received a notice informing me that President Erdoğan was suing me for my six op-ed pieces published in July and August 2015 on the daily Radikal where I was the senior columnist. I was accused of “insulting the President” and, according to Turkish Penal Code, if convicted I could serve six years in prison. Each one of the articles that allegedly “insulted the President” was critical of Erdoğan’s termination of the Kurdish peace process and the resumption of war.

I decided to take “intellectual refuge” for a while. Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies was interested in providing visiting scholar status for me, and I committed myself to do research and write a book on “Turkey’s failed Kurdish peace processes.” I had, after all, been actively involved in those processes over a long period, and I felt an obligation to put into print Turkey’s dismal experience with an issue, which indeed had long since become my lifetime commitment.

Oxford would follow Stockholm. I would undertake a mission as well. With the endowment provided for that purpose, I would establish the Jalal Talabani Programme for Kurdish Studies, as one of the sub-units of the Middle East Centre. It would be a tribute to Jalal Talabani, the former President of Iraq, an old and very dear personal friend of mine who was incapacitated because of a stroke in December 2012. He sadly remained paralyzed, able to see with only one eye, and had lost his faculty of speech. I visited him in Suleymaniyah, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and told him about the project. Although unable to talk, he could follow and understand whatever was told him, and I noted the tear in his good eye.

I visited Oxford several times for these arrangements. Eugene Rogan introduced me to internationally acclaimed historians who were associated with St Antony’s, Avi Shlaim and Norman Davies, whose names I held in high esteem. Avi Shlaim was considered a leading figure among Israel’s New Historians, the revisionist group that made a revolutionary impact on the historiography of the Palestine question, challenging the traditional versions of Israeli history and turning the official Israeli narrative upside down. Talking with Avi Shlaim and Eugene Rogan in St Antony’s Middle East Centre about its founder, the legendary Albert Hourani, gave me the feeling that becoming an Antonian would be the crown of my decades-old career concerning the Middle East.

Besides establishing the Jalal Talabani Programme for Kurdish Studies at the Middle East Centre of St Antony, I pledged to Eugene Rogan to write a book about “Turkey’s Failed Kurdish Peace Processes.”

In March 2016, the owner of Radikal, Turkey’s leading opinion paper and the only surviving liberal voice of Turkish media, finally pulled the plug as a concession to President Erdoğan. For the broader interests of the publishing group that were running other businesses, putting Radikal out of business was a gesture addressed to Erdoğan. Thus, critical views against the government would be denied a voice and its senior columnist—me—would be silenced.

My forty-year professional journalistic life had come to an end. Soon after, I arrived in the tranquility of Stockholm bearing the title “Distinguished Visiting Scholar” at the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies. In the congenial atmosphere I enjoyed at the Institute—and as I tried to adapt to the Scandinavian tranquil rhythm which is almost the total opposite of the nervous vibrancy of my homeland—I was taking the preliminary steps in my research on “Turkey’s Failed Peace Processes.”

The coup in my homeland found me the very hour I arrived back at my temporary apartment in Stockholm, from Vienna where I had been working for two days. I had been taking notes on some confidential documents concerning secret talks between Turkish officials and PKK representatives that were kept by a person who had been involved. That was an essential part of my research.

Connecting to the internet, I could not believe what I saw on my screen: putting up checkpoints on the Bosphorus Bridge, military columns had seized control from the Asian side to the European side of İstanbul. There was a military coup underway, and it had started only ten, fifteen minutes ago! This was not a joke. It was real.

With over half a century of experience of Turkish military coups, I did not find this one convincing at all. It was real, but not convincing; it looked too amateurish, as if designed to fail from the very beginning. My hunch was that the coup was doomed to failure and the repercussions would be very severe—for my country and, more importantly, for its people.

I spent a large part of my adult life being very hostile to the repeated coups and also any other kind of military intervention in civilian politics. It is almost public knowledge in Turkey that the military establishment and I have been at odds most of the time.

Therefore, it was only natural that I would wish for the failure of the coup attempt on that Friday night, July 15. It eventually did fail—and my worries were confirmed with the relentless crackdown targeting hundreds if not thousands of people who had nothing to do with the coup, including my fellow journalists, academicians, and colleagues.

Less than a week after the failed coup, Turkey suspended the European Convention on Human Rights and declared a state of emergency.

There could be no serious academic life and activity. My research project and the book I wanted to write could not be carried out in Turkey. The content and the leitmotif could easily be criminalized. This is not an aberration. Among my close friends and colleagues with whom I had taken part in certain activities regarding the Kurdish issue, many are jailed including some without indictment.

Despite the deserved appeal of Britain’s highly prestigious higher education institutions, the Brexit decision to move away from the European Union, which came a month before the coup attempt in Turkey and its giant step toward autocracy, meant that Britain was looking precarious to me. The permanent unease I would feel due to the situation in Turkey, combined with the restrictions Brexit might entail, would deprive me of the peace of mind that was an essential element for what I would be working on. For that, I needed freedom; not only freedom of the mind, but a vast space of free movement. Continental Europe and its larger Schengen area extending from Portugal to Greece, from Iceland to Malta, would provide me with that freedom.

Sweden, a member of the European Union, is in continental Europe. It is admittedly somewhat remote from Europe’s nerve centers, but at the heart of Scandinavia and immersed in Nordic mystery and tranquility, it has considerable appeal in many respects. Its natural beauty and the serene friendliness of its people make it even more attractive for souls exhausted by the conflicts and turmoil of the Middle East. Modesty and honesty shine as social characteristics of the Swedes, and the liberal atmosphere and cosmopolitan texture of the uniquely beautiful city of Stockholm provided the essential ingredients for the writing of this book.

A Turkish friend of mine who has been living Stockholm for an extended period, said to me one day, as if consoling me for being so far from my homeland, “You know what, the best part of living here for you is that it is an ideal place to write books. So tranquil and easygoing, just what you will need.” It was true. It is not by coincidence that for many decades, it has been the favorite residence for the Kurdish political and literary elite in exile, who in time were followed by tens of thousands of their kin. Living in Stockholm I have encountered numerous astute Kurds from Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria who have transformed into loyal and responsible Swedish subjects fully integrated into their adopted country, while keeping strong attachment to their ethnic identity and commitment to their homelands. In Sweden, they freely exercised the ethnic and civil rights of which they were deprived in their home countries; in this way, they became good Swedes while preserving their Kurdishness. I encountered the same sentiments even more strongly in the Syriac-Chaldean and Assyrian Christians who have emigrated to Sweden in tens of thousands from the southeastern part of my country, Iraq, and Syria—that is, Upper Mesopotamia.

Their presence in Sweden, their warmth, hospitality, and excessive manifestation of solidarity they displayed to me—typical of our Sharq (East), contrasting with the reserved demeanor of the Nordic people—has been an additional input to facilitate my life and my work. To my astonishment, there were instances when I was also recognized by Kurds who were not my compatriots. I met with bus drivers who introduced themselves as Iranian Kurds and expressed their gratitude to me for my advocacy of Kurdish rights, and invited me to their homes. That was very moving indeed, at a time when my homeland had developed into a brutal setting with no rule of law, where many of my colleagues and friends were suffering, either behind bars or at large.

Being surrounded by these people in Sweden became a constant reminder for me to accomplish the task of writing this book as a permanent reference about our shared history and collective saga.

In time, I also conceived that ironically there could be no other place more interesting than Sweden in which to write a book on a perennial war atmosphere and subsequent peace efforts. It has been over 200 years since Sweden was last at war. This country, which espoused neutrality during a century stigmatized by two devastating wars on a global scale, has taken the lead in mediation of international conflicts some of which are thousands of miles away. From Folke Bernadotte who was assassinated by a terrorist gang in Jerusalem four days before my birth while trying to mediate between the Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem, to Dag Hammarskjöld, the secretary-general of the United Nations, who died in Congo on his road to stop the bloodshed in the central African nation, Sweden has been a country whose best children have fallen martyrs to peace. Its historical personalities like Prime Minister Olof Palme and Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, both friends of the Kurdish people and the oppressed of the world, were assassinated at the heart of peaceful Stockholm, which was and still is deservedly considered a very safe and secure city. That is a paradox indeed, and one that made it attractive to me, as a Turk, to undertake the mission of writing a fair and accurate account of the conflict between my state and my Kurdish compatriots, under the paradoxical title Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds.

Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds was written wherever I have been during the past three years, on the Greek islands in the Ionian Sea or in my beloved Aegean; or even on the road, on trains in Sweden and the United Kingdom, onboard airplanes over the skies of Europe, and across the ocean to the United States. Yet it was mostly in Stockholm and Berlin, my two domiciles other than İstanbul, that the final touches were made.

Stockholm and Berlin (October–November 2019)

NOTE

1. Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 134.