Читать книгу Turkey’s Mission Impossible - Cengiz Çandar - Страница 12
ОглавлениеThe preamble of the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 stated: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.”1 Similarly, since the aftermath of World War I, the specter of the Kurdish question has haunted the Middle East, and Turkey more than anywhere else. All the new states of the postwar Middle East—Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria—established an unholy alliance to exorcise this specter, irrespective of their regimes.
Yes, a specter has been haunting Turkey for almost a hundred years—the specter of the Kurdish question. Ever since its foundation as a Turkish Republic over the debris of the Ottoman Empire that could not survive World War I, Turkey has been vacillating between war and peaceful settlement of the problem with the Kurds. Throughout this rather long period, it stood closer to war than to peaceful resolution of the conflict.
It can equally be asserted that the specter of the Kurdish question has been haunting the region of the Middle East ever since the imposition of the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement dividing the Ottoman territories in a way that ultimately led the Kurdish subjects of the Ottoman Empire to find themselves subjects of the Turkish nation-state, which is mostly situated in Asia Minor, the Arab state of Iraq in Mesopotamia, and another Arab state, Syria, in the Levant in the postwar regional order. Including Iran, where they have constituted a sizeable population, the Kurds were dispersed in four major countries in the region of the Middle East.
Among the four states with significant Kurdish populations in the post-World War I regional order, Turkey is a special case. Almost half of the Kurds in the world are citizens of Turkey. Despite the absence of official and reliable statistics on where the Kurds live in the Middle East, there are estimates based on population statistics and various other data, mainly provided by the Kurdish Institute in Paris. Accordingly, it is estimated that in 2016, 12.2 million Kurds inhabited an area of about 230,000 square kilometers in southeastern and eastern parts of Turkey that the Kurds themselves call Northern Kurdistan. The Kurds comprise 86 percent of the population in this area. The Turkish citizens of Kurdish descent who inhabit the Turkish-majority regions of Turkey and those in the European diaspora are estimated at between 7 and 10 million. Turkey’s megapolis, the former imperial capital İstanbul rather sarcastically considered as the largest Kurdish city in the world with its more than 3 million Kurds. The Kurds of Turkey thus are estimated to have a population ranging between 15 and 20 million. The most modest estimate indicates them as making up around 20 percent, that is to say one-fifth, of Turkey’s population. The more probable ratio, though, is 25 percent, which makes a quarter of Turkey’s population. Also notable is that their reproductive rate is twice that of Turks.
The minimum estimate for the total number of Kurds in the world is 36.4 million, although the actual number may climb as high as 45.6 million. Either way, Kurds of Turkey constitute half of the total Kurdish population of the world. For the rest, about 18 percent live in Iran and Iraq each, and slightly more than 5 percent in Syria. In all these countries other than Iran, Kurds constitute the second largest ethnic group.
In the first draft of this book, these lines had composed the bulk of the introduction. Later, I changed my mind and decided they would be better as the introduction to the introduction. The specter that has been haunting Turkey and the region of the Middle East as a whole in the twentieth century, and continues to do so in the twenty-first, has undeniably affected the lives of millions—and similarly continues to do so. That specter has shaped the domestic and foreign policies of the countries where Kurds live as scattered but significant communities and contiguous territories.
Kurdistan, never a defined political entity but a geographical concept, is, with no access to seas, mostly an area of high, impassable mountains, stiff hilltops riven with deep gorges holding wild creeks and streams, tributaries to the rivers Euphrates and Tigris that created Mesopotamia, the cradle of early civilizations of humankind. It is, in many parts, a breathtaking landscape inhabited since time immemorial, a people who almost never formed a sovereign government of their own but never conceded to be ruled by others. They were unruly people, who were at peace with the tough topography of their homeland. Resisting being subdued by the nation-state formats into which they were forced to accommodate themselves, they subscribed to the motto: Kurds have no friends but mountains.
The Age of Extremes—or the short twentieth century, 1914–1991, as coined by British historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012)—pulled the Kurds into themselves as never before. Although their attachment to the mountains survived, they were a large and scattered tribal community with no political significance. They have transformed to become a variable and a constant in international relations, and primarily as a determinant in the equations of the Middle East.
In the Middle East, Turkey is a regional power, allegedly with global appeal; and the Kurds, as one of the largest stateless national communities of the world, exist in contrasting aspirations. That phenomenon makes the study of Turkey’s conflict with the Kurds ever essential and exciting, as the Middle East is the leading geopolitical region of the world with strong impact on global peace and conflict.
II
Writing a book at this particular historical conjuncture was incumbent upon me because of my lifelong involvement with the Kurdish issue and active participation in the quest for the peaceful, political settlement of the conflict. My involvement with the Kurdish issue in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq goes back forty-seven years. The relationship I had with Turkish Kurds, Syrian Kurdish leadership in the early 1970s, and most importantly with late Jalal Talabani (1933–2017), a historical figure and the first president of Iraq after the downfall of Saddam Hussein, led me to play a role in the establishment of relations between the Turkish state and the Iraqi Kurdish leadership in 1991. Those relations became iconoclastic and landmark developments in the history of Turkey and the Kurds. I was the intermediary between Turkey’s then president Turgut Özal (1927–1993) and two Iraqi Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani in 1991. Talabani served as the president of Iraq from 2006 to 2014 and the latter as the first elected president of the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq (KRG) from 2005 to 2017. Upon Turgut Özal’s invitation, I acted as an advisor to the President of Turkey, mainly on Kurdish affairs, from 1991 until his death in 1993; a status that enabled me to take initiatives as President Özal’s envoy for the reconciliation between the Turkish state and Turkey’s Kurdish insurgents. Including Abdullah Öcalan, the undisputed leader of the PKK (the Kurdish acronym for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party [Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan]), I have had the opportunity to have face-to-face contacts with leading Kurdish personalities of different political creed in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, as well as with almost all the Turkish policymakers since the 1990s on, to exchange views on the Kurdish question.
In March 2009, President Abdullah Gül of Turkey conveyed through me the message about the reconciliation on the Kurdish issue that was kept secret until that date. He invited me to accompany him on his official visit to Iran, which he chose as an opportunity to disclose what would later be called the “Kurdish Opening,” the initiative of the Turkish government to resolve the ongoing conflict via political means. The Kurdish Opening was inaugurated publicly at the end of August 2009 at a meeting with a group of intellectuals, chaired by the then interior minister who was entrusted to be the official coordinator of the Opening. I was among the group, and before the meeting I had a private one-on-one session with the minister upon his invitation. Thus, since the early 1990s, I was involved, at a certain level, in almost all stages of the efforts to resolve the Kurdish question of Turkey.
From 2011 on, I have been a member of the Council of Experts of the Democratic Progress Institute (DPI) based in London. My colleagues in the Council, including Jonathan Powell, chief of staff of former British prime minister Tony Blair (1997–2007) and chief British negotiator on Northern Ireland, consisted of people with expertise on conflict resolution who had taken part in peace talks extending from the ETA-Basque case in Spain to Colombia and the Philippines. With the DPI, I have participated in the initiative to bring parliamentarians of the mainstream political parties, leading public intellectuals, journalists, and academicians in Turkey on fact-finding visits to comparative conflict resolution cases, such as South Africa, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, to analyze their possible relevance and find inspiration in resolving Turkey’s perennial Kurdish question.
Figure I.1 Iconoclastic Meeting in Ankara, 1992. Turkey’s President Özal (fourth from left) receiving anti-Saddam Iraqi opposition delegation. On his right and left, the Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani. Author was the architect of the meeting. Source: Author’s Personal Archive.
I was also among the founding members of the Contact and Dialogue Group initiated by Osman Kavala, leading peace activist and philanthropist who was jailed by the Turkish autocracy in 2017 and remained in prison without any indictment for a long period. The Contact and Dialogue Group, which brought together prominent names in Turkey with diverse views and political affiliations, was particularly active and functional during the interregnum when violence related to Kurdish conflict had erupted once again in 2012. It tried to resume the dialogue between the belligerents, the Turkish state, and the Kurdish insurgents and their affiliates.
Eric Hobsbawm, in the preface of his autobiography Interesting Times, wrote, “When, having written the history of the world between the late eighteenth century and 1914, I finally tried my hand at the history of what I called The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, I think it benefited from the fact that I wrote about it not only as a scholar but as what the anthropologists call a ‘participant observer.’”2
In these lines, I found the perfect description of myself as the author of Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds: participant observer!
Thanks to my exclusive, extensive, and unique experiences concerning the Kurdish question over decades, I am privy to information on this sensitive issue that has never been brought into public knowledge, and am therefore in possession of invaluable anecdotes.
It is public knowledge in Turkey that I, along with my intimate friend and fellow journalist Hasan Cemal, have been the most prolific writers on the Kurdish issue, peace process, reconciliation efforts, and the daily developments related to Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. The archive attests to the fact that from July 2011, when the first peace process was terminated with the resumption of violence until March 2016, the end of my active journalistic career in Turkey, I wrote around 250 op-ed pieces on the Kurdish issue alone. That is roughly one piece a week. These were not products of an intellectual whose residence was an ivory tower of newspaper offices or academic centers. Most of them were written while reporting on the ground and through field experience. I have stepped foot on almost every inch of the territory that Kurds of Turkey and Iraq inhabit, and have also resided in Syria and Lebanon.
During the past decade, I have attended very many conferences, workshops, and seminars on the Kurdish issue, Syria, and Middle East politics from İstanbul to Diyarbakır, the city perceived as the political center of Turkey’s Kurds, from Beirut to Doha, from Erbil and Suleimaniyah to Baghdad in Kurdistan Region and Iraq, and from Brussels to Washington in the Western world, at respected academic institutions from Harvard to Oxford and the London School of Economics.
When my forty-year professional journalism career came to a halt in March 2016, eight months after the Kurdish peace process collapsed in Turkey, I decided to move on to the academic field to do further research and work on the failure of the peace efforts. This obviously was not alien territory for me. For a decade, I had lectured in the capacity of adjunct professor for the senior classes of several private universities in İstanbul on the Modern History of the Middle East, the formative period of the troubled region post-World War I, which held the origins of almost all the current intractable problems, ranging from the Palestinian question to the Kurdish issue.
When I began my research in May 2016 on “Turkey’s Failed Kurdish Peace Processes” at the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies as a “Distinguished Visiting Scholar,” I was confident to take the challenge.
My self-confidence was reaffirmed reading the new introduction that Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans wrote for the 2018 edition of E. H. Carr’s classic What Is History?, which has always been my guide on the philosophy of history and historiography. Evans began his introduction by familiarizing the reader with E. H. Carr:
E.H. Carr (1892–1982) was not a professional historian in any sense of the term that would be acceptable today. He did not have a degree in History. He never taught in a History Department at a University. . . . He did not take a Ph.D., nowadays the conventional route into the academic profession. On graduating in 1916, he went straight into the Foreign Office, where he remained for the next twenty years. . . . When in 1936 he resigned from Foreign Office to take up a Chair at Aberystwyth University . . . [he] spent increasing amounts of time practicing journalism while employed by the University. He became Assistant Editor of The Times in 1941 and wrote many leading articles for the newspaper until leaving his post in 1946. . . . Carr thus approached history from the angle of someone who had spent his life working for the Foreign Office and for a national newspaper. These influences and experiences strongly colored his views about history and how it should be studied.3
As an amateurish historian who does not hold a PhD, like my source of admiration and inspiration E. H. Carr, and a journalist who practiced the job for a period three times longer than his, writing the story of Turkey’s war and peace with the Kurds was a challenge I thought I could undertake.
The experience of my decades-old involvement with the issue, my direct relationship with the main protagonists—a cast ranging from former President of Turkey Turgut Özal, to the current one, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his predecessor Abdullah Gül, the late president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, the first president of Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Masoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey and the source of inspiration for Kurdish self-rule in Syria, Abdullah Öcalan, and the legendary guerilla leader of the Kurds, Murat Karayılan—provided invaluable insights in shaping my views on the road to peace and keeping an account on the war.
Providing exclusive information of historical value that I have been privy to throughout my experience, which has never been published or spoken anywhere publicly will, I hope, make the book unique. The content supported by anecdotes in my records and memory, again, are of historical value and importance as they are about my intimate encounters with the historical figures in defining the future of Turkey and the Kurds. As such, the book has the ambition of contributing to the historical record.
III
In 2010, I was entrusted to write a report on how to proceed to resolve Turkey’s perennial Kurdish question, entitled “‘Leaving the Mountain’: How May the PKK Lay Down Arms” and subtitled “Freeing the Kurdish Question from Violence.” The 114-page report was recognized at the time as the most comprehensive report to date, and it remains so. It was written at a period when hopes for a peaceful resolution of Turkey’s Kurdish question were high. The Arab Spring, disseminating optimism for a promising future for the troubled region of the Middle East, had just blossomed, including in Syria where turmoil had just begun, raising expectations for benign change for all the deprived segments of its population, and above all the Kurds.
The task was to provide a workable blueprint to the decision-makers for the resolution of Turkey’s decades-old Kurdish question by disavowing military means that had proved ineffective, thereby offering a way out of a seemingly intractable conflict without using means that further exacerbated it. The knowledge and awareness of peace talks between the belligerents, the Turkish state, and the insurgent organization the PKK waging an armed struggle against the former had inspired and guided this effort.
In the report’s foreword dated June 2011, I wrote:
There is nothing that has not been said or written to date on the Kurdish Question and the ways to solve it. During the various readings I undertook for the preparation of this report and during the one-on-one interviews I conducted with tens of people extending from the Presidential Palace to the Qandil Mountain, I arrived at the same conclusion. As a person who has been living with the Kurdish Question for the last forty years, it was a reinforced confirmation of a conclusion I had drawn so many times before. Therefore, this report does not reinvent the wheel when it comes to the resolution of the Kurdish Question. . . . The historical period ahead of us gives ample opportunities for removing violence from the Kurdish Question.4
If the report were to be reprinted, I would refrain from keeping the preface of 2011 as it was written. The report deserves a whole new introduction. The wheel, it seems, needs to be reinvented for the resolution of the Kurdish question. The historical period in which we found ourselves in the second half of the 2010s greeted us with more ambiguities than opportunities to end the violence related to the Kurdish question. The experience taught me to be more prudent in reaching hasty conclusions and making generalizations in writing history.
IV
It was early October in 2012, in İstanbul. When we met after not having seen each other for more than two years, Barham Salih, an old friend with whom I had labored to promote good and close relations between Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds, opened his arms wide and approached to hug me, shouting jovially in English, “Cengiz, the Kurdish moment has arrived!” Barham, who would become the president of Iraq six years later, with a beaming face spoke as the harbinger of a long-awaited outcome. From the Gulf War in 1991 on, thanks mainly to the developments in Iraq, Kurds had managed to establish self-rule in the northern part of the country, and in the wake of the controversial War on Iraq waged by a US-led international coalition and the eventual removal of the Arab nationalist totalitarian regime of Saddam Hussein, they had established a quasi-independent state. Their influence had extended to the center of power, to Baghdad, where the portfolio of presidency of post-Saddam Iraq was reserved for them. The epic Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani filled the post for the first time from 2006 to 2014, to be taken over by one of his aides, Fouad Masum, and later his disciple Barham Salih in October 2018.
I generally shared the optimism manifested by Barham in the fall of 2012. In numerous conferences, symposiums, and panels in which I took part in Turkey, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, my recurrent theme was: “Unlike the aftermath of the World War I, when the map of the Middle East was drawn following the demise of the Ottoman Empire that had ruled the region for 400 years, the Kurds have stepped into history. They are on the stage of history now and it is impossible to roll it back.”
It was not only the developments in Iraq where Kurds gained a high profile and acquired almost independent state status that inspired such an argument. In Turkey, where half of the entire Kurdish national community reside, with a decades-old insurgency and violent manifestation of the issue, hopes for a peaceful resolution had emerged thanks to peace initiatives that had been launched. Although intermittent, those processes unleashed new dynamics that broke many taboos in the cultural and societal realm that were believed to be untouchable and eternal. In Syria, a proxy war of global and regional powers and an ugly civil war that devastated and fragmented the country nevertheless brought to the fore the country’s Kurds, who until 2014 were the most forgotten and ostensibly the most insignificant segment of the entire Kurdish people. Syrian Kurds were able to establish control of more than a third of Syria, encompassing all the oil-producing regions. More importantly, they proved to be the most reliable and efficient partners of American-led international coalition on the battlefield in the fight against the Islamic State (Daesh), to the dismay of Turkey. There were adequate reasons and indicators to rewrite the history of the post-Cold War period, with Kurds occupying a central place and promising fortunes on the stage of the Middle East.
However, in 2015 and especially after 2016 and 2017, more prudence and sobriety were required in analyzing and forecasting the prospects for the Kurds. The slippery ground on which the history of the Middle East operates has countless times illustrated that tables can rapidly be turned against the Kurds. The end in July 2015 of Turkey’s peace process, which had generated earnest hopes for a political settlement, postponed the chances for resolution of the Kurdish conflict indefinitely, and perhaps forever. The aspirations for a political settlement were replaced by a zero-sum game that became the modus operandi of the Turkish regime, which drifted from an imperfect democracy into a full-fledged autocracy under the most powerful leader Turkey has had in almost a century. Turkey moved into the Syrian quagmire in 2016, not in cooperation with its NATO ally the United States, but as a partner of Russia, a rival of the US, and in conjunction with a trilateral partnership that included Iran, to confront the Kurds of Syria, at the cost of reversing the gains the Kurds had made since 2012. In 2017, the independence bid of the president of the KRG, Masoud Barzani, drew the ire of Turkey with which it had developed an extremely cordial relationship since 2009, and also of Iran. The latter coordinated with and supported the Shiite-dominated Baghdad government to overrun Kirkuk, the disputed city in Iraq over which the Kurds claim ownership and which they need to form the basis of their ultimate independent state to cede from Iraq. Not only Kirkuk but all the territorial gains of the KRG on the “Disputed Territories” were lost overnight. The divisions among the Iraqi Kurds helped the armies and paramilitary forces of Baghdad, supported by Iran, who easily defeated the Kurdish peshmerga. Turkey established a military presence inside the Iraqi Kurdistan as well, and the Turkish air force undertook a permanent action against the bases and redoubts of the Kurdish insurgents of Turkey in that region.
In January 2018, Turkish armed forces entered the northwestern Syrian Kurdish region and dismantled the Kurdish rule that had been in force for more than five years. A year later, Turkey declared its resolution to terminate the Kurdish rule, stretching along the frontier with Turkey, in northeastern Syria east of the Euphrates. On October 9, 2019, the fateful war of Turkey against the Syrian Kurds was launched. Turkish Army with its Syrian proxies comprising mostly Salafi thugs attacked the predominantly Kurdish Autonomous Administration in northeastern Syria. American military personnel abandoned the region abiding by the decision of President Donald Trump. The developments reverberated across the world as the Kurdish question acquired a global dimension. Russia replaced the United States, and emerged as the new kingmaker in Syria. Thus, the intertwined nature of Turkish and Syrian Kurdish issues had drawn Turkey into the Syrian quagmire with the potential to seal its destiny during the unprecedented historical period of transition of the Middle East in the post-Cold War international and regional order.
Following the developments across the region, I began to be overcautious in prognosticating the prospects for the Kurds. I told my Kurdish friends, some of whom are well-known names in international society, that although facile comparisons are too risky to be accurate, the analogy of the developments of the last years of the Ottoman Empire during World War I might provide an unpleasant but a useful compass to navigate the present and in the future.
The developments following the collapse of the peace process in the summer of 2015 also spelled an incontrovertible departure of Turkey from its fledgling democracy to a nationalist authoritarianism, reminiscent of the final decade of the defunct Ottoman Empire.
The prospect of eternal peace and stability in the Middle East and in Turkey looked increasingly evasive. Fears of new bloodshed, deportation, displacement of populations, and aggravated human agony and misery were rekindled. At this crossroads of history, I was interested in writing a book about why Turkey’s Kurdish peace processes failed, what went wrong, and what can be done to avoid the mistakes of the past and make the peace initiatives of the future more successful. My research thus initially focused on the failures of the Kurdish peace process.
V
The richest experience concerning the Kurdish issue, and one that must occupy a very distinct place in the historical record, took place in the following years, from 2011 to 2015 and from 2015 to 2018. The year 2011 witnessed the violent collapse of the most significant enterprise for the peaceful resolution of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. That phase was marked by secret talks that took place mostly in Oslo, Norway. Any research on these talks leads to the information that they were held between the intelligence officials of Turkey and the PKK delegation, half of whom had come all the way from the organization’s redoubt in Mt. Qandil on the inaccessible frontier zone between Iraq and Iran, therefore suggesting a third-party and international involvement. The PKK’s uncontested leader Abdullah Öcalan, who is serving life imprisonment on a prison-island in the Marmara Sea near İstanbul, indirectly participated in the endeavor. The talks in Oslo continued from 2008 to 2011 following a preparatory phase that goes back to 2006.
This most crucial period pertinent to reconciliation between Turkey and the Kurds has not sufficiently been scrutinized and therefore has not taken its deserved place in the annals of history. This is why it was a personal obligation for me to address the issue comprehensively in Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds.
In the aftermath of July 2011, an interlude marked by the eruption of violence between Turkish and Kurdish belligerents, the peace process was established once again in the last days of the year 2012. Unlike the Oslo talks or perhaps more accurately the previous process that extended from 2006 to 2011, this process was homegrown and coincided with momentous developments in the Syrian conflict that saw effective establishment of control by the PKK’s Syrian Kurdish affiliates on the other side of Turkey’s longest frontier. The second peace process, as it should be correctly termed, as well as being homegrown, was unprecedented, being centered on negotiations with the PKK’s leader Abdullah Öcalan on his prison-island. The quadripartite effort involved Öcalan; the PKK’s political-military leadership in their Mt. Qandil redoubt in Iraqi territory; members of parliament from the pro-Kurdish party BDP (Peace and Democracy Party, banned by verdict of the Constitutional Court in 2012) and then from the HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi–Peoples’ Democratic Party which succeeded the banned BDP); and the Turkish government. In contrast with the previous process that was secretly run, this one was relatively transparent. It continued under the careful public eye, and was observed and reported extensively by the then relatively free Turkish media. More importantly, it aroused hopes for the ultimate resolution of the Kurdish question, “the mother of all the questions” of the Republic of Turkey, which was founded in the 1920s over the debris of the Ottoman Empire. The two dominant leaders, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s prime minister who later became the first president, elected by popular vote in 2014, and Abdullah Öcalan, around whom millions of primarily Turkish and Syrian Kurds formed a cult of personality, made statements on their firm commitment to its success. No initiative in the Republican Turkish and therefore Kurdish history had kindled expectations as strongly as the peace process that ended in July 2015.
The developments related to the Kurdish issue following the year 2015 illustrated that scrutiny on the causes of the failure of the peace processes could and should not be taken in isolation. Any analysis disregarding the regional and international developments would be unforgivably flawed.
Thus, the scope of the book expanded from being merely a study on the failure of peace processes into an analysis of the issue in its entirety, with its past, present, and future.
VI
Working on Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds raised some fundamental questions, the most important of which was the methodology to be used in taking up the subject. I grappled with specific theoretical questions. The paradoxical issue of simultaneous subjectivity and objectivity came to the fore, as I have been an active participant in the story that I would narrate and analyze in the book. It could not be written in the format that a non-committed and uninvolved scholar would employ in revealing the results of his research conducted in libraries and archives.
There are no universal norms and even generally accepted principles on the issue of objectivity and subjectivity in the writing of history. There was a legitimate question I asked from the very beginning: Why would having a role in the resolution of the Kurdish question cast a shadow of subjectivity on my assessments, more so than a respected armchair scholar working only from alleged primary sources? My personal experience during many twists and turns of the Kurdish conflict has been the primary source for this research per se. The value of these experiences as direct testimonies to historical junctures and their first-told narratives can, I believe, easily contest the supposedly objective, yet a distant take of an academic bystander who writes in the comforts of education institutions and misses many details that make the history what it is. The latter would be an easier and more comfortable choice for me yet would lack the excitement of onsite discovery and firsthand experience.
The other theoretical issues that preoccupied me in the writing of the book were concepts of historiography like causation and chance, the role of the individual, free will and determinism, and whether history runs through laws that lead us to inevitability. Is there anything like historical inevitability? The responses to these questions, naturally, would frame the subject matter of the book and eventually its conclusions. These were serious questions, most of which E. H. Carr had discussed in his immortal classic, What Is History?
Contemplating the role of chance in history, I queried: If, as a Turk, I had not involved myself in the most existential question of Turkey with a perceived and staunch pro-Kurdish stance that put me always in trouble with the security establishment of my country and produced threats on my life, how different would the trajectory of my career have been? As an orthodox researcher and academic scholar, I would still choose to work on the Kurdish conflict but with a fundamentally different life than I have had. Would that make me more objective and more scholarly, or more subjective really? The logical follow-up to this question was just another one: If I had not played an intermediary role between Turgut Özal and Jalal Talabani (later including Masoud Barzani as well), which broke what had been a taboo since the 1920s, would the trajectory of the events between Turkey and Kurds have been? If I had not known Talabani in 1973 in Beirut and despite the irreconcilable differences in our upbringing and ideological backgrounds, besides the generational difference, if I had not taken the unexpected pro-Özal position in the overwhelmingly hostile Turkish mainstream media in 1990, would I have been able to play the role I played? Supposedly, the principle of causality in historiography and the element of chance or coincidence cannot survive.
I tried to surmount the paradox—not to solve the problems—by bringing my anecdotal experience into Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds. As I argued earlier, these experiences are my primary sources. I thought this was compatible with what the founder of modern source-based history, Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), would demand. Ranke, in E. H. Carr’s description, is a “talisman for empirical historians” and a titan of historiography who left a powerful mark on history writing in the nineteenth century. For Ranke, the task of the historian was to study, research and then to show “how it really was”5 or as he phrased it in German, “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” He did not believe in the philosophy of history as Hegel did, or in general theories that cut across time and space. In his historiography, he used quotations from primary sources.
For me, my anecdotal contributions in the book were somewhat like taking refuge in Ranke’s gargantuan authority. I knew that Ranke’s dictum “wie es eigentlich gewesen” had attracted extensive criticism from the great historians of the twentieth century whom I also admired, notably E. H. Carr and Fernand Braudel (1902–1985), the great French historian and leader of the Annales School in historiography. They both challenged Ranke. Carr opposed Ranke’s ideas of empiricism as outmoded, and underlined that historians did not merely report facts, they chose which facts they used. Facts and documents are essential to the historian, but they do not by themselves constitute history, according to Carr. The historian’s selection of the facts makes what history is. He argued brilliantly that Caesar’s crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of Rubicon by millions of other people before or after Caesar interests nobody at all, and wrote, “The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy.”6
Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), the renowned Italian historian, philosopher, and political activist, carried that understanding to new horizons. For Croce, “All history is contemporary history, because history consists essentially in seeing the past through the eyes of the present. . . . The main work of the historian is not to record, but to evaluate; for, if he does not evaluate, how can he know what is worth recording.”7
The element of subjectivity, therefore, is not only unavoidable for writing history, but is an inherent condition of it. Carr’s friend but at the same time his fierce critic, Sir Isaiah Berlin, influenced by the experience of the Holocaust and the totalitarian practices of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union, in his famous essay “Historical Inevitability” brings up the argument that “human beings are unique by their capacity of moral choice” and accords “moral responsibility to the historian” in history writing. Thus, Berlin carried the element of subjectivity to further horizons: “There is always a subjective element in historical writing, for historians are individuals, people of their time, with views and assumptions about the world that they cannot eliminate from their writing and research, even if they can hope to restrain it.”8 This observation was entirely valid in the writing process of Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds.
Delving into the passionate debate among the great historians presiding over more than a hundred years to dig out the methodology for Turkey’s Mission Impossible has not only been an amusing and thought-provoking exercise but also a constructive one. The research taught me that until recently, alongside many from my generation in Turkey, I have been guided by a primitive understanding of Hegelian determinism and Marxian materialism in looking at history, tropes that have injected a linear directionality into our view of history. History was seen through the lens of an inevitable progress toward our ideologically preferred objectives. Of course, to neither Hegel nor Marx can be attributed the responsibility for this, but in writing Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds, I consciously refrained from adopting historical determinism as the sole tool of my analysis. Instead, I wanted to make use of all the available tools in the rich arsenal of historiography, in an eclectic manner. If “how it was” and “what really happened” had precedence in Ranke’s historiography, it was “why” for Carr. In my ambitious project, I wanted to reconcile Ranke’s empiricism that empowered my anecdotal notes as primary sources with the relativism of historians like Carr, who construct history with the foundation of their selectively arranged and organized “facts.”
Perhaps I should add that I do not embrace the doctrine which stipulates that there are invisible laws that govern the flow of history. There, indeed, are dynamics to explain specific historical developments and of overall history itself—that is to say, generalizations—but they cannot be put forward as laws that govern it.
The belief in laws of history has more to do with the historians of the nineteenth century who tried to consider the discipline of history as a science, during a period when it was widely believed that nature was guided by laws beyond the control of human beings. Karl Marx contributed to this understanding by presenting his propositions as scientific socialism which in its turn influenced generations of people all over the world. The underdogs in many lands took refuge in the belief that the injustices they faced and the plight they lived through would come to an end with the inevitable triumph they would ultimately enjoy as the laws of history took effect. For me, as even the Law of Gravity established by Newton (1642–1727) lost its significance as “law” upon the emergence of the Theory of Relativity proposed by Einstein (1879–1955), and since we are living in Liquid Times in the Age of Uncertainty as Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) describes, I do not believe in governing laws and inevitability of history.
VII
Another major question with which I also had to grapple was the role of the individual: how, for instance, in terms of the subject matter of the book, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Abdullah Öcalan occupied the places that they did, in both quantitative and qualitative senses. Besides the political controversy regarding those names that erects a formidable challenge in front of the historian or writer, the issue itself, above all, is a philosophical one: the role of the individual in history.
For one of the greatest writers of all time, Lev Tolstoy (1828–1910), individuals play an insignificant role in history. In a draft of the epilogue to his immortal War and Peace, he had stated, “Historical personages are the products of their time, emerging from the connection between contemporary and preceding events.”9 One can find a strong Marxist connotation in this statement; whereas the Oxford historian, one-time member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and of the Labour Party from 1926 until his death, A. J. P. Taylor (1906–90) asserted in his 1950 book From Napoleon to Stalin that “the history of modern Europe can be written in terms of three titans: Napoleon, Bismarck and Lenin.”10
The research period for Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds coincided with momentous developments that have been effective in changing the course of history, such as the regime change in Turkey that placed the country, ostensibly, under the one-man rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. So, in terms of historiography, I have felt closer to Taylor than to the great Tolstoy. For me writing the history of the last 150 years of Turkey in terms of Sultan Abdülhamit II (1842–1918), M. Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938), and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, three autocrats who each in their own right can accurately be described as a titan, would help us better understand that period of Turkish history in all its richness and vicissitudes. Turkey’s drift from an illiberal democracy to the one-man rule of Erdoğan affected the frame and the content of Turkey’s Mission Impossible because of its impact on the destiny of the Kurdish conflict. Just as Turkey’s most protracted Kurdish insurgency, initiated by the PKK, cannot be analyzed and narrated without specific reference to its founding leader, Abdullah Öcalan, the change in Turkey that reached far beyond this country and left its mark on a global scale cannot be understood without reserving a special place for Erdoğan alongside M. Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, and Abdülhamit II, the legendary Ottoman Sultan.
With a nod to the everlasting historiography debate, chronicling the rupture and continuity in Ottoman-Turkish history necessitates the inclusion of these three larger-than-life political names, Abdülhamit II, Atatürk, and Erdoğan. While the narration of history and its crucial episodes certainly features its outstanding individuals, however, I kept as my permanent reference point E. H. Carr’s cogent argument:
What distinguishes the historian is the proposition that one thing led to another. Secondly, while historical events were of course set in motion by the individual wills, whether of “great men” or of ordinary people, the historian must go behind the individual wills and inquire into the reasons which made the individuals will and act as they did, and study the “factors” or “forces” which explain individual behavior. Thirdly, while history never repeats itself, it presents certain regularities, and permits of certain generalizations, which can serve as a guide to future action.11
Moreover, the sine qua non of historiography, “historians should try to rise above their personal prejudices when writing history,” accompanied me throughout Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds. I consciously observed this principle, and therefore I am reasonably confident that objectivity (but not neutrality) in that respect has been achieved in this work.
VIII
I was also lucky to call on the help of some extraordinary historians, my contemporaries, who supplied me with invaluable assistance in terms of information, angle, argument, and empirical data. The leading two names in this respect are, interestingly enough, historians whom I have never met or communicated with. Their books and works, some in long article format, played a tremendously important role in the writing of this book. The Dutch historian Erik J. Zürcher and the American historian Ryan Gingeras have been with me from the very first days of the research period, without knowing it at all.
I have never sympathized with official historiography irrespective of the country it is dedicated to. The so-called historians in the service of the official ideology, for me, are propagandists, not historians. I have always sympathized with, been interested in, and been impressed by what is called, depending on the location, context, or period, the revisionist or new historians. The unorthodoxy that they harbor in their essays and books, the creative thinking that they reveal, the challenging new approaches that they bring to the history of a specific country and period have always been thought-provoking for me besides opening up new horizons and filling my treasury of knowledge with invaluable facts that they provide. Regarding the late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish history, Erik J. Zürcher and Ryan Gingeras excel among all the others of no less importance, to whom I also owe much. In 2018, Swiss historian Hans-Lukas Kieser, with his work entitled Talaat Pasha Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Armenian Genocide, and the revolutionary historiography that he proposes, stepped into the pantheon of historians who have helped me to understand what happened, and why it happened in the way it did, in Turkey in the last 100–150 years. I benefited immensely from reading his revolutionary book and found confirmation for some postulates of mine for interpreting the modern history of Turkey. The closing chapters of Kieser’s book are devoted to the controversial issues of the “Deep State,” “New Turkey,” and the prospects for Turkey’s future, and therefore the Kurdish issue. With their unique and robust arguments relying on valuable empirical data, Zürcher and Gingeras equipped me for Turkey’s Mission Impossible with concepts essential for my hypothesis on the configuration of power in the “New Turkey.”
The spirit of unorthodoxy that I treasure in history writing, along with the strong encouragement garnered from the oeuvres of Erik J. Zürcher, Ryan Gingeras, and many others, has inevitably made its mark on Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds. That was what I cherished in writing the book.
IX
The Herculean challenge confronting me has been how to achieve a time-resistant book, which would remain valid as a source of reference in a rapidly and permanently changing world, especially regarding the fluid political circumstances and constantly shifting sands of the Middle East. Unlike in previous decades, the world and above all, the region of the Middle East seem to have entered into an age of uncertainty. When I was close to completion of writing the book, a young Swedish diplomat who had spent some of his career in Turkey and knew about my mission asked me how I saw the possibilities for settlement of the Kurdish conflict in the near future, and whether the book would have a happy ending.
I reminded him that the book discusses a number of questions: What is the true nature of the Kurdish question? Is it intractable? What went wrong in the peace processes that continued for almost a decade and ended with failure producing devastation and tragic consequences in the world’s most volatile geopolitics? Can Turkey survive the Syrian conflict? Will the aspiration of Kurdish independence come true or remain a pipe dream? What will the future Middle East look like in comparison to the Sykes-Picot order of post-World War I or the seventeenth-century Westphalian order in Europe that followed the Thirty Years’ War? It has certainly been my aim to investigate likely answers to these questions. Yet, I recognized that we were passing through a period characterized above all by uncertainty. Consequently, Turkey’s Mission Impossible does not offer any facile or happy ending. Alongside its ambitious aims, it humbly acknowledges the peculiarities of this unprecedented, unique episode of history: the period of uncertainty.
NOTES
1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Classics, 2002), 2.
2. Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times (London: Abacus, 2003), xiii.
3. E.H. Carr, What is History? (London: Penguin Classics, 2018), ix, x.
4. Cengiz Çandar, Leaving the Mountain: How May the PKK Lay Down Arms? Freeing the Kurdish Question from Violence (İstanbul: Tesev Yayınları, 2011).
5. Carr, What is History?, ibid., 5.
6. Ibid., 8.
7. Ibid., 17.
8. Ibid., xvii.
9. Ibid., lxv
10. Ibid., 48.
11. Ibid., xviii.
