Читать книгу Turkey’s Mission Impossible - Cengiz Çandar - Страница 14
ОглавлениеHistorical and Ideological Background
Turkey has the distinction of being the only country that has denied the existence of the Kurds for decades—although it is home to one of every two Kurds in the world. Turkish official denial of the existence of a distinct Kurdish identity goes back to the foundational period of the republic in the aftermath of World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman Turkey, the predecessor of the Republic of Turkey, as an empire was thus in essence a multi-national and multi-ethnic entity. Its successor state was constructed on those former territories of the Ottoman state that could be salvaged from partitioning by the victors of the World War, primarily Britain and France, or from acquisition by the allies of those victors. It was designed to be a Turkish nation-state.
The “New Turkey” of the 1920s that replaced Ottoman Turkey was the logical outcome of a formative phase, the years of the Balkan War (1911–1912), World War I (1914–1918), and the war for national independence (1919–1922) where Muslim nationalism had predominance as an ideology. Creation of a Turkish national state could be achieved by demographically de-Christianizing Asia Minor to be inhabited as a refuge for Ottoman Muslims, and as a cradle for a modern state where the upper identity would be Turkish, a notion used synonymously for Muslim. The disparate Muslim subjects of the former Ottoman state would be galvanized into the Turkish identity irrespective of their ethnic background.
Turkish Social Darwinism
In his revolutionary historiography, Swiss historian of late Ottoman history and the history of Turkey, Hans-Lukas Kieser, depicted Talaat Pasha, strongman of the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) of the Ottoman Empire during the World War I years, as the “Father of Modern Turkey” along with his infamous reputation as the architect of the Armenian genocide. Kieser underlined that Social Darwinism had been applied, albeit differently, to the Kurds, as well as the Ottoman Christians:
Talaat and his close political friends had inscribed mass crime into their project of an imperially connotated new Turkish nation building, the result of which were very distant, viable futures for Asia Minor. Talaat’s comprehensive effort at new nation building was, first, demolition and spoliation. This included not only mass removal, demographic engineering, and comprehensive looting but also starvation and systematic mass killing. . . . With the purpose of achieving an exclusive Turkish-Muslim unity in Asia Minor, Talaat’s policy ‘replaced’ the removed Christian population with Muslim migrants. Moreover, Talaat sought to ‘dilute’ non-Turkish identities of Muslim groups and considered these groups fit for assimilation into the new nation of a “New Turkey,” in contrast to Ottoman Christians.
Talaat’s demolitionist domestic policy had started as a consequence of the Balkan Wars, and from spring 1914 the Rûm1 presence on the Aegean coast was erased. His policy reached an unprecedented extent with the Armenians in April 1915 by embracing its most ambitious and comprehensive scheme of erasure and demographic change. Talaat also engaged in the large-scale removal of Kurds from parts of the eastern provinces in 1916, because to him many Kurds appeared as unreliable elements. It was a prime moment for him to exploit the fact that thousands of Kurds had fled before the advancing Russian army. . . . Talaat defined his policy.
He forbade sending Kurdish refugees from the war zones to southern regions “because they would either Arabize or preserve their nationality there and remain a useless and harmful element.” To be useful and acceptable elements of the new nation, Kurds, therefore, had to first lose their nationality (milliyet) and then be prevented from adopting others, like Arab or Armenian identities. . . . Jacob Künzler, a Swiss medical missionary in Urfa and a rare foreign observer and reporter of the Kurdish removal, organized help for tens of thousands of Kurds who starved near Urfa in 1916. . . . “The intention of the Young Turks was to keep these Kurdish elements from returning to their ancestral homeland. They should slowly become assimilated into Turkdom in Inner Anatolia,” Künzler wrote. “In spite of a good harvest that year, almost all of the deported Kurds were victims of the famine.”
Kurdish mass deaths of 1916–17 were to put mildly, the result of irresponsibility and negligence, but never of massacre. This distinguished them from the Armenians.2
Turkishness: The Driving Force for Nation-Building
Kurds were exempted from the genocidal policies directed at Christian Armenians. They, although Muslims, were considered as unreliable elements, and were targeted for assimilation into Turkdom or Turkishness; this ultimately led to the denial of their distinct identity and language. The social and demographic engineering involved preceded the foundation of the Turkish nation-state in the early 1920s. The groundwork for this denial started during the rule of the CUP in the last years of the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 1910s, while World War I was ongoing.
The Turkish sociologist Barış Ünlü proposed two concepts, “the Muslim Contract” and “the Turkishness Contract,” as tools for the analysis of the history of Turkey of the past hundred years. The Muslim Contract, which he used to describe the social engineering performed by the powerholders of the Ottoman state in the wake of the Balkan Wars (1911–1912) and by the founders of the Turkish nation-state in 1923 following the national struggle, was a gateway to the subsequent Turkishness Contract that suppressed and effectively denied the Kurdish identity. He argued that his concept of the Turkishness Contract has “three fundamental articles.” The first of these is that to live privileged and secure in Turkey, to have upward mobility or at least the potential for it, being Muslim and Turk are primary requirements. The second article is the absolute ban on showing solidarity with or engaging in political activity favoring the Ottoman and Turkey’s non-Muslims, and on speaking the truth about what has been done to them (deportation, massacre, genocide, confiscation, racism, discrimination, etc.) The third article concerns the Muslim groups, and especially the Kurds who have resisted Turkification decisively and firmly. To speak the truth on what has been done to them, to be involved in pro-Kurdish political action, and to show empathy and to establish emotional solidarity with them are strictly forbidden.3
Being Muslim was the first gate that opened to the Turkishness Contract; if the person was a Muslim, she/he could pass to Turkishness. This distinguishes the situation of non-Turkish Muslims more than those citizens of Turkey who are not Muslims. Because Turkishness is equipped with material and moral rewards and not being so is identified with material and moral punishments, millions of Muslims who are originally non-Turkish passed into Muslim Turkishness and espoused the assimilationist policy of the state; they were assimilated. In other words, millions of Muslims abandoned being Kurdish, Arab, Circassian, Pomak, Georgian, Laz, Albanian, Bosnian. In retrospect, that abandoning may not be understood well, because generations have passed since the first generation [that abandoned its original identity to be Turkish]. The identity abandoned has been left behind, no longer exists, and indeed has been obliged to be forgotten. There is no memory to remember or to know what has been left behind. Looked back, the transition may be seen as if it has always been there, a natural and a normal phenomenon. But, for the first generation that made the transition it was probably an arduous process that required an intense and conscious endeavor. The dual nature of the process was an element that made it even more difficult: To abandon what you are and to be able to learn who you will be.4
“Turkishness” as the driving force in the nation-building and state-crafting following the national struggle (1919–1922) under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) followed an evolutionary course. This was already embedded in the Unionist weltanschauung during the years of World War I, in the wake of the Balkan Wars where the Ottoman Empire had lost its geopolitical heartland. Its evolution signified the transition from the Society of Union and Progress, the ruling party of the late Ottoman period, to the People’s Party (later the Republican People’s Party) of Mustafa Kemal, which largely carried the legacy of the former. It also manifested the continuity between the two organisms and the two sequential historical periods.
Erik J. Zürcher, the Dutch scholar who is the most authoritative and indisputable expert on the Young Turks, the last period of the Ottoman Empire under the rule of the Union and Progress (İttihad ve Terakki), and the formative years of the new Turkish republic, has explicated the evolution of the inferred “Turkishness”:
On the issue of national identity, a radical choice was also made. Ottomanism obviously no longer was an option. But the Muslim nationalism which had been championed from 1912–1922 was now also abandoned the new republic was made, based on the idea of a “Turkish” nation . . . a romantic idealization of the Turkish national character, with racist elements. . . . Turkish nationalism led to the forced assimilation of the 30 per cent or so of the population which did not have Turkish as its mother tongue.5
As early as 1923 laws, government proclamations, and the programs of the People’s Party (the founding political vehicle of modern Turkey, led by Mustafa Kemal) ceased to speak of “Muslims” or “Kurds” and “Turks.” The third article of its 1923 statute states: “Every Turk or every outsider who accepts Turkish nationality and culture can join the People’s Party.”6 Two years later, on December 8, 1925, the Ministry of Education announced in a proclamation on “currents trying to undermine Turkish unity” that use of the terms “Kürt,” “Çerkez,” and “Kürdistan” (Kurd, Circassian, Kurdistan), as well as “Laz” and “Lazistan,” would be banned.7 In 1931, “Turk” was defined: “Any individual within the Republic of Turkey, whatever his faith, who speaks Turkish, grows up with Turkish culture and adopts the Turkish ideal, is a Turk.”8
The renowned historian Erik J. Zürcher, using those reference points, concluded the unique characteristic of Turkish nationalism as the foundational ideological pillar of the new Turkish state in the following passage:
The Kemalist concept of nationality was thus firmly based on language, culture, and common purpose (“ideal”).9
The Roots of the Kurdish Question
The Kurdish question therefore, in the allegoric sense, is the outcome of those Kurds who refused to sign the “Turkishness Contract” or could not be accommodated in it. In other words, those segments of the Kurdish population that the Turkish state was unable to assimilate, or those who resisted and, going even further, revolted against the denial of their identity in consecutive uprisings.
In a country where one of two Kurds in the world reside, the ban on the usage of the terms Kurd and Kurdistan and the subsequent persecution and suppression of those who resist the ban, has placed Turkey in a unique position. Among the four countries in the Middle East where Kurds form a significant component of the population, Turkey is the only one in which the word Kurdistan is taboo. In Iran, despite the restriction of fundamental rights for the Kurds, there has always been a province named Kurdistan; in Iraq neither the term “Kurdistan” nor “Kurd” as an ethnic identity with distinct linguistic and even administrative rights has ever been banned or denied; and in Syria, the usage of those terms never has been a matter for persecution.
Despite the absence of official and reliable statistics on the Kurds where they live in the Middle East, there are estimates based on population statistics and various other data. Accordingly it is estimated that, in the year 2016, 12.2 million Kurds inhabited an area of about 230,000 square kilometers in the southeastern and eastern parts of Turkey that the Kurds call Northern Kurdistan. The Kurds comprise 86 percent of this area’s inhabitants. The Turkish citizens of Kurdish descent who inhabit the Turkish-majority regions in Turkey and those in the European diaspora are estimated to number between 7 and 10 million. Turkey’s megapolis, the former imperial capital İstanbul having more than 3 million Kurds, is sarcastically considered the largest Kurdish city in the world. The Kurds of Turkey are thus estimated to number at least 15 million, ranging to 20 million. The most modest estimate indicates them as making up around 20 percent or one-fifth of Turkey’s population. The probable ratio, though, is 25 percent; that is, one-quarter of the citizens of Turkey are Kurdish.
The minimum estimate for the total number of Kurds worldwide is 36.4 million, while the figure could climb to 45.6 million. In both cases, the Kurds of Turkey constitute half of the total Kurdish population of the world.10
In Turkey, the rejection of the terms “Kurdistan,” “Kurd,” and “Kurdish” continued almost to the end of the twentieth century, and the persecution, albeit at different levels, did not cease even in the first decades of the twenty-first. A de facto ban on the term “Kurdistan” is a permanent phenomenon. Apart from the effective avoidance of these terms for Turkey’s southeast and eastern regions—even solely with a geographic connotation in a historical context—Turkey’s rulers refrained from addressing by its official name its immediate neighbor, the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, notwithstanding their close personal ties with its leadership and the fact of Turkey’s being its major economic partner.
Figure 1.1 Infograph of Distribution of the Kurds in the Middle East. Source: Mehrdad Izady.
Figure 1.2 Map of Sèvres for an Independent Kurdistan (1920). Source: Mehrdad Izady.
The Sèvres Treaty
In addition to the ideological background of Turkey’s ruling elite based upon the foundational principles of the republic, Turkish nationalism, which obstructs Kurdish national aspirations even at a minimum, the ill-fated Treaty of Sèvres signed on August 10, 1920, with its perpetual traumatic effect on the Turkish psyche, also had a tremendously important influence on Turkey’s denial of Kurdish identity and its repressive demeanor vis-à-vis the Kurds, even those beyond Turkey’s frontiers.
The Treaty of Sèvres was among the treaties that the losing parties of World War I were made to sign, yet it was also the only one that was not ratified and thus not implemented and ultimately nullified. It is replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne (July 24, 1923), which is regarded as the international legal basis for the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. The Treaty of Lausanne made no mention of Kurdistan or the Kurds. With it, the opportunity to unify the Kurds in a nation of their own was lost altogether, turning Turkey into a negation of the idea of the independent Kurdistan. Indeed, Kurdistan after World War I was more fragmented than before, and this became the root cause for the rise of separatist movements among the Kurds scattered in various countries of the Middle East.
Veritably, the Kurdish question in Turkey and in the region has deep roots structured in the post-World War I order of the Middle East, an order that survived almost a century. There are thus structural reasons that have led to its remaining unresolved, as well as the ideological shortcomings and restrictions of the Turkish government and lack of acumen among politicians.
Moreover, the Turkish psyche, scalped in the aftermath of the Ottoman collapse, proved to be decisive in the Turkish response to the perceived Kurdish challenge. Although the Sèvres Treaty became null and void, being replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne, in the eyes of the Turkish nationalists, it signified the Western objective of dismembering the territories of Turkey and marked the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I, a sequel to the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), which was similarly never implemented in letter, but symbolized the unwarranted and unjust partitioning of the Middle East among Western colonial powers. Its terms spelled out the renunciation of all the non-Turkish territory, and its cession to the adversaries of the Ottoman state during the Great War. The treaty was signed when the Turkish national struggle was already underway, further stirring hostility and nationalist sentiments among Turks. Although the success of the Turkish national struggle prevented its implementation, its articles, those particularly relating to Kurdistan, were never removed from the Turkish subconscious. Even in the late 1990s and during the first two decades of the 2000s, confronted with Kurdish aspirations that sounded legitimate to many thanks to changing times, Turkish authorities invoked the memory of Sèvres.
The rankling memory of the treaty primarily relates to Articles 62 and 64. Article 62 stipulated:
A Commission sitting at Constantinople and composed of three members appointed by the British, French and Italian governments respectively shall draft within six months from the coming into force of the present Treaty a scheme of local autonomy for the predominantly Kurdish areas lying east of the Euphrates, south of the southern boundary of Armenia as it may be hereafter determined, and north of the frontier of Turkey with Syria and Mesopotamia, as defined in Article 27, II. (2) and (3). . . . The scheme shall contain full safeguards for the protection of the Assyro-Chaldeans and other racial or religious minorities within these areas.11
The wording of Article 64, referring to Article 62, provided the historical background from the perspective of international legality for a Kurdish independent state and thereby the ammunition for Kurdish nationalists in their bid for independence. It said:
If within one year from the coming into the force of the present Treaty the Kurdish peoples within the areas defined in Article 62 shall address themselves to the Council of League of Nations in such a manner as to show that a majority of the population of these areas desire independence from Turkey, and if the Council then considers that these peoples are capable of such independence and recommends that it should be granted to them, Turkey hereby agrees to execute such a recommendation, and to renounce all rights and title over these areas.
The detailed provisions for such renunciation will form the subject of a separate agreement between the Principal Allied Powers and Turkey.
If and when such renunciation takes place, no objection will be raised by the Principal Allied Powers to the voluntary adhesion to such an independent Kurdish State of the Kurds inhabiting that part of Kurdistan which had been hitherto been included in the Mosul Vilayet.12
Sèvres Syndrome
Those articles of the ill-fated Treaty of Sèvres left a profound imprint, really a scar, in the Turkish political culture for generations to come. Trepidation, mainly on the part of Turkish ruling elites, about a possible dismemberment and breaking up of Turkey, territorially and socially, has become a permanent nightmare and instilled the concept of Sèvres Syndrome in the Turkish political lexicon. The reactions of Turkish authorities, particularly during the 1990s, which witnessed the upsurge in the last Kurdish insurgency and violence coinciding with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the Cold War, revived the memories of Sèvres. It is widely interpreted that Sèvres Syndrome drove the resentment of the Turkish political class against Kurdish aspirations.
The Trilogy of Evil: Sèvres, Kurds, West
The permanent effect of the Treaty of Sèvres did not confine itself only to worries of Turkey’s dismemberment. Its wording and spirit turned the Western world into a suspicious entity in the eyes of Turkish authorities, in seeking the ultimate partitioning of Turkey by carving out an independent Kurdish state from its territory. Turkey’s ruling elites believed that the Kurds would never be able to achieve any of their aims without the abetting of the Western powers and their endorsement of Kurdish independence. Turkey’s anchoring in the Transatlantic Alliance, thus entering under the security umbrella of NATO in the early 1950s, may have alleviated its fears regarding its territorial integrity but its suspicions on the West’s intentions concerning the Kurds never entirely died out. On the contrary, they revived from time to time to the extent that they created serious cleavages with Turkey’s primary military and security partner, the United States, as witnessed in the Syrian debacle after the year 2014, having repercussions for the entirety of the international system and the collective security of the Western world.
The Treaty of Sèvres, with its reference to Turkey’s renunciation of sovereign rights on the part of its territory where, if the Kurds enjoy local autonomy, they ultimately may desire independence and “voluntary adhesion to such an independent Kurdish State of the Kurds inhabiting that part of Kurdistan which had hitherto been included in the Mosul Vilayet,” also established an unmistakable association between the Kurdish citizens of Turkey and those of Iraq. Thus, the Turkish political class has always been inimical to any Kurdish national activity whether it is within the boundaries of Turkey or not. In this regard, Sèvres played a tremendously important role in pitting Turkey as an adversary to all Kurds, irrespective of where they live. Sèvres bears a great deal of responsibility for Turkey’s denial of the Kurdish identity within Turkey and its perception of the Kurds as a security problem outside its borders.
The content and spirit of the Sèvres Treaty molded Turkish political culture in such a way that any Kurdish demand in reference to ethnic or national rights was interpreted as a machination of foreign (mainly Western) powers seeking to dismember Turkey whose national struggle, in other words the national liberation war, made its achievement impossible. The connection between foreign Western powers and the Kurdish element in the post-Ottoman Turkish entity born in Asia Minor is established as a matter of fact. The Kurds began to be seen as a potentially divisive element, one that is therefore ready to be manipulated by the foreign centers of power that brought the end of the preceding Ottoman state by carving up its territories. Any Kurdish activity with ethno-national underpinnings and administrative demands pertinent to self-rule is regarded as secessionism to be prevented, even in its embryonic stages.
Turkification: Making Kurds “Mountain Turks”
The acceptance of a distinct Kurdish identity, from the exclusivity of their language (Kurdish) to the geographic name of the land that they inhabit (Kurdistan), would be contrary to Turkish nation-building in Anatolia (or Asia Minor). The denial of the Kurdish identity with all its components and the efforts to transform these people into “mountain Turks” should be understood within this context.
The leader of the military regime (1980–1983) and the president of Turkey (1983–1987), General Kenan Evren, in his speeches before the public frequently referred to the Kurds as “mountain Turks.” Naming of the Kurds as mountain Turks without a language, during the military regime which left a strong mark on the future decades of Turkey, not only became an ideological linchpin of the regime but also simultaneously constituted the gravest form of denial of Kurdish identity.
Notwithstanding the episode of military junta rule of the early 1980s, depicting Kurds as “mountain Turks” and thereby denying their distinct ethno-national identity has been the practice of Turkish governments ever since the foundation of the republic. In his book A History of Turkey: From Empire to Republic published in 1956, Morgan Philips Price (1885–1973), a British historian and a member of the Parliament from the Labour Party, summarizes the opinion of the Turkish government about the Kurds in the aftermath of the Sheikh Said revolt, the first major Kurdish rebellion of the Republican Turkey, in the following lines:
The revolt was suppressed. Several Kurdish aghas were hanged and whole tribes were deported to the interior of Anatolia, where they were surrounded by Turkish peasants, while the country they had left was recolonized by Turks. The nationalist Turks from this time on refused to recognize the Kurds as a separate people, in spite of the fact that everyone knows they have a language of their own. They are now called “mountain Turks,” and are given the same rights as any Turkish citizen but without any national privileges.13
The preposterous denial of Kurdish identity in Turkey has a history as a continuous phenomenon for a very long period. In the wake of suppression of the Sheikh Said revolt, in 1925, then the Prime Minister İsmet İnönü was very explicit on this matter: “We must Turkify the inhabitants of our land at any price, and we will annihilate those who oppose the Turks or ‘le Turquisme.’”14
Mahmut Esat Bozkurt, Minister of Justice of the Kemalist Turkey, reinforced this with his blunt statement recorded in 1930: “In the face of a Turkish majority other elements have no kind of influence. I believe that the Turk must be the only lord, the only master of this country. Those who are not of pure Turkish stock can have only one right in this country, the right to be servants and slaves.”15
The 1930s was the period that the Turkification process had been initiated in full steam in all walks of life. The Turkish Linguistic Society (Türk Dil Kurumu, TDK) was introduced and entrusted with the purification of the Turkish language from Arabic and Persian influence. To achieve this end, a “Sun-Language Theory” with racist undertones was developed. Simultaneously the Turkish History Society (Türk Tarih Kurumu, TTK) was founded, which in its turn focused on discovering the traces of the Turkish nation in pre-Islamic times—in Antiquity. The Turkish History Society claimed that the Sumerians of Mesopotamia and the Hittites who established a civilization in Anatolia were ethnic Turks. The ferocity in the wording of the young Turkey’s justice minister should be understood within the context of the 1930s. The period coincides with the rise of nationalism all over Europe, particularly in Germany under Nazism and in Italy under Mussolini’s Fascism.
The Turkification efforts of the 1930s produced dividends regarding the denial of distinct Kurdish culture and language, and fueling Turkish nationalism. In the 1960s, under a new set of prevailing circumstances, when the Kurds attempted to raise the “Eastern Question” without pronouncing the word “Kurdish,” the Turkish nationalist reaction was severe and menacing. Ötüken, the monthly mouthpiece of pan-Turanian ultra-nationalists, published articles by the influential poet and Turkish ultra-nationalist guru Nihal Atsız (1905–75) in its April and June 1967 issues. Atsız did not deny the Kurdish identity and the existence of the Kurds within Turkey. Unlike many Turkish nationalists who tended to deny a distinct identity for the Kurds and claimed they were originally ethnic Turks, Atsız declared that the Kurds, indubitably, were of Iranian origin, speaking a broken, primitive Farsi (Persian). Using venomous language he insulted the Kurds, and wrote that if they did not want to be assimilated in the Turkish nation, they could leave the country, with an implied threat of expulsion:
Yes. . . . If they resist and remain as Kurds, if they insist on speaking and making publications in their primitive language with four, five thousand words and founding a state [of their own], they can leave. We took these lands shedding blood, eradicating the roots of Georgians, Armenians and Greeks, and defended them against the Knights of the Crusaders. . . . From Vienna to Yemen while the blood of the Turkish race was rolling in, they, the Kurds, were herding their goats in the mountains and the villages they dwelt in, and whenever they have found the opportunity they lived by theft and pillaging that they have committed.16
He repeated the same theme two months later:
Let them [the Kurds] go off wherever they want, to Iran, to Pakistan, to India, or to join Barzani. Let them ask the United Nations to find them a homeland in Africa. The Turkish race is very patient, but when it gets angry, it is like a roaring lion, and nothing can stop it. Let them ask the Armenians, their racial kin, who we the Turks are so that they can come back to their senses. As easily understood, these lines are written against those traitors who want to divide Turkey and to establish an independent Kurdistan in our eastern provinces.17
Atsız may be considered an extreme example of Turkish nationalist expression vis-à-vis the Kurds, yet the terminology he employed and the overall approach he upheld illustrate the disdain that almost every shade of Turkish nationalism still has regarding the Kurds.
Kurdistan: A Taboo for Turkey, a State (Eyalet) for the Ottoman Empire
The denial—or the hatred as illustrated above—of the Kurdish identity and language inevitably resulted in the non-recognition of the Kurdish question. Even if implicitly, there has always been a quasi-consensus that the Kurdish question (with its corollary conflict) is the primary challenge to the survival of Turkey. Not acknowledging the question, treating it mainly as a security matter or downgrading it to a struggle against terrorism is tantamount to not undertaking a serious and real quest for its resolution. Ironically, it is also equivalent to aggravating the matter and transforming it to become gangrenous.
The passage of time, the changing circumstances, and the new dynamics of the post-Cold war period compelled Turkey, albeit reluctantly and gradually, to terminate its denial of Kurdish identity. However, fluctuations in acknowledging the Kurdish question have never ended. While the Turkish establishment vacillated on whether to acknowledge the Kurdish question and its settlement, the usage of the term “Kurdistan,” remained a taboo in Turkey.
In their imperial spirit, the Ottomans, to whom the Turks consider themselves and Turkey the main heirs, had no problem acknowledging or referring to Kurdistan. On the contrary, in the fifteenth century at the apogee of the Empire, Sultan Suleiman I (the Lawgiver) who in the annals of Western historiography is entitled also “the Magnificent,” in a letter to the King of France, François I, boasted of being the “shadow of God on the Earth” and Sultan of the Mediterranean and Black Sea and the countries from Rumelia (Balkans) to Yemen and all the Arab lands—and Kurdistan. In 1847, in the attempt of reorganizing the administrative structure of the empire in order to centralize and modernize the Ottoman government, a state (eyalet) named Kurdistan was formed that comprised the governorate of Diyarbakır, the sanjaks of Van, Muş, and Hakkari, and the districts of Cizre, Bohtan, and Mardin,18 all within the borders of today’s Turkey.
Within the historical context, the foundation of the Republic of Turkey is seen as a radical and revolutionary rupture from the Ottoman past, and a step forward in the sequence of modernization process. However, ironically, referring to Kurdistan within the Ottoman imperial realm has become an anathema for the modern Turkish nation-state. Zürcher asserts that
the republic created out of the ruins of Ottoman Anatolia in October 1923, was, of course, legally and formally a new state. . . . At the same time, it is evident that in some ways Turkey is a very different heir to the empire, say, Syria or Albania. . . . it inherited not only the limbs but the head and heart of the empire, its cultural and administrative centre.19
Thus, in the imagination of the new state, acknowledgment of Kurdistan, implying the land inhabited by a non-Turkish ethno-national community, would prejudice its “head and heart” and also its “administrative centre.” It would also jeopardize its highly avowed unitary character, thereby arouse concerns on further dismemberment of the homeland, which is regarded in modern Turkish historiography as the “last refuge,” the land salvaged from the Ottoman imperial estate.
Yes to Mustafa Kemal, No to Atatürk
To the extent of banning the use even of euphemisms for Kurdistan or the Kurdish language, acknowledgment of the Kurdish question proved to be extremely difficult in the Republican era. In fact, during the initial phase of the national struggle (1919–1922), its leader Mustafa Kemal consistently nourished the hopes of certain Kurdish circles regarding the implementation of specific Kurdish national rights and privileges. This even goes back to October 1919, when Mustafa Kemal and his colleagues, in preparation for the national struggle in Anatolia, signed the Amasya Protocol. The Protocol was signed with the Minister of War of the Ottoman government on the borders of the Ottoman state to be defended against the victors of World War I. The Ottoman land to be defended was defined as where Turks and Kurds live together. The main reference point is the document adopted on January 20, 1921 (Teşkilat-ı Esasiye Kanunu), that practically served as the constitution of the national struggle until the foundation of the Republic of Turkey on October 29, 1923, and even later—that is, until the first Constitution of the republic was made in 1924. In the 1921 document, there is a reference to self-rule to be exercised by the governorates. The Kurdish political leaders continuously referred to Article 11 of the Teşkilat-ı Esasiye Kanunu as the basis of their claims for autonomy or federalism in Turkey.
The most crucial document in this respect is the Draft Law for a Proposed Autonomy of Kurdistan as Debated in the Grand National Assembly (at a secret session) on February 10, 1922.20 The British High Commissioner in İstanbul, Sir Horace Rumbold, sent a telegram including the draft to British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon. Thanks to the archives of the British Foreign Office, the draft has become a source of reference for those seeking autonomy for the Kurds.
Of the draft’s 18 articles, the first is especially interesting. It reads as follows:
(ı) The Great National Assembly of Turkey, with the object of ensuring the progress of the Turkish nation in accordance with the requirements of civilization, undertakes to establish an autonomous administration for the Kurdish nation in harmony with their national customs.21
Articles 15 and 17 are of particular interest in understanding the limits of the autonomy envisaged for the Kurds:
(15) The Turkish language only shall be employed in the Kurdish National Assembly, the service of the Governorate and in the administration of the Government. The Kurdish language, however, may be taught in the schools and the Governor may encourage its use provided that this shall not be made the basis of any future demand for the recognition of the Kurdish language as the official language of the government.
(17) No tax whatsoever may be imposed by the Kurdish National Assembly without the approval of the Governor-General and before the Great National Assembly of Angora [Ankara] shall be informed.22
It should however be noted that some Turkish historians have contested the authenticity of the Draft Law for a Proposed Autonomy of Kurdistan, as cited in the appendix of Robert Olson’s book The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism 1880–1925 on the grounds that the Turkish archives do not contain a secret session of the parliament on that date, February 10, 1922.
Another vital reference point regarding the “promise of Mustafa Kemal” on Kurdish autonomy that has been sporadically brought up over the years by Kurdish political figures is the conversation Mustafa Kemal had with prominent journalists like Ahmet Emin (Yalman) and Falih Rıfkı (Atay) accompanying him in the city of İzmit, in the proximity of İstanbul, on January 16–17, 1923. In responding to a question by Ahmet Emin on what he thought about the Kurdish issue, Mustafa Kemal made reference to Teşkilat-ı Esasiyle Kanunu of 1921 that stipulates self-rule. Yet, he did not specified self-rule exclusively for the Kurds. On the contrary, he drew the attention of his audience to the practical impossibility of drawing borders to delineate the areas that the Turks and the Kurds are living in because of the deep penetration of the Kurdish element in those areas where Turks have settled.
The Kurdish political figures, nonetheless, made frequent references to this “promise” to promote their objectives to achieve self-rule within the context of Turkey’s territorial integrity. Abdullah Öcalan in many of his texts and interviews alluded to the alleged documents and the “the press conference of Atatürk in İzmit, in January 1923.” He distinguished Mustafa Kemal from the other Turkish leaders and spoke and wrote positively about him, in general. In my long conversation with Murat Karayılan in November 2010, as the PKK’s politico-military leader at large, he emphasized that Öcalan always exempted Mustafa Kemal “from the sins committed against the Kurds” and put the blame on the Unionists (İttihatçılar) and their remnants among the Kemalists.
İsmail Beşikçi, a Turkish scholar and sociologist who spent seventeen years in prison for his research on the Kurdish issue, made a distinction concerning the stance of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) toward the Kurds. In his article entitled “Mustafa Kemal, Atatürk ve Kürtler” (“Mustafa Kemal, Atatürk and the Kurds”) published in October 2013, he wrote, “The sentiments and thoughts of Mustafa Kemal Pasha and Atatürk regarding the Kurds are very different. Mustafa Kemal Pasha connotes the year 1919 and the 1920s while Atatürk connotes the 1930s”23 He proceeded to illustrate, in chronological order, how Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had deviated from his initial stance and changed his position on the Kurdish issue.
Kurdish Autonomy: Forever Impossible
Whether Mustafa Kemal ever signaled considering autonomy for the Kurds is still up for debate. But even if he did, it perhaps should be understood in the context of his wit and pragmatism under the most challenging circumstances of the national struggle. Indeed, these qualities were indispensable in forming alliances and gathering as much support as he could against formidable adversaries. As the goals that he had set were surmounted and achieved, he left his temporary and tactical alliances, dictated by the imperatives of the national struggle, behind. There was nothing to suggest that Mustafa Kemal had any ideological background to acknowledge self-rule in the Ottoman territories to be salvaged. Autonomy for Kurdistan was, of course, no exception.
For Jonathan C. Randal, the celebrated American journalist, a prominent expert on the Kurds, “Atatürk’s hallowed interest in the French revolution helped to explain Turkey’s unending penchant for Jacobinism, the belief in a centralized lay state uniting disparate peoples in the cult of the nation even at the expense of their own cultures, languages, religions, and other particularities.”24 Randal asserted, “Only a state as slavishly faithful to the ossified letter of its founding dogma could have backed itself into a corner as totally as Turkey did.”25
Erik J. Zürcher, in his seminal work entitled The Young Turk Legacy: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey, argued that the modernization project of Mustafa Kemal and the new leaders of the Turkish nation-state left no room for Kurdish self-rule:
In the debate about Westernization, Kemal and his circle belonged to the radical wing of the Young Turks. . . . In their eyes. . . only a nation state could give Turkey the coherence needed to compete with the national states of Europe. . . they opted for secular Turkish nationalism. This of course precluded any idea of Kurdish autonomy.26
Ryan Gingeras, an American historian and an imaginative mind on the late Ottoman, early Republican Turkish history, has a similar view. Following the publication of his book Fall of the Sultanate: The Great War and the End of the Ottoman Empire 1908–1922, in an interview in May 2016, almost a year after the disheartening end of the Kurdish peace process and during a period of revived war with the Kurds, he voiced a striking observation on the parallels between the late Ottoman and Turkish perceptions on Kurdish autonomy. His interviewer made the following remark, “As I read about various nationalist movements breaking off from the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, I kept being reminded of the Kurds. Even the language used is similar: Decentralization, greater autonomy, and independence. It is another example of echoes from a century ago resonating today.” To which Gingeras responded:
I find strong parallels in the core premise that was established decades before the Ottoman Empire’s final collapse: Only a state governed centrally, and uncompromising in its treatment of regional centers of opposition, can survive. This is a lesson that gets drawn by leading Ottoman and later Turkish officials: Any time a provincial group demands some sort of renegotiation of the way the government works where they live, it is just the first step that eventually leads to rebellion or separatism and has to be clamped down on. Otherwise, essentially the state is committing suicide.
With Kurds in particular, it’s clear that at the end of the Ottoman Empire there’s no one single Kurdish politics. Politically, the Kurds were fragmented. There was a political ambivalence among many different segments of Anatolian society regarding the future of the state. Between 1914 and 1922, society was totally devastated in all the places where Kurds lived. There was simply not much incentive to debate heady ideas about the future of government when people are just trying to survive. When we finally see a debate about the future of Anatolia on the part of Kurds and Kurdish nationalists, the response within the Turkish elite has already been programmed that this is something that cannot be tolerated: Federalism, decentralization, and provincial autonomy are bad words and cannot be tolerated.27
With regard to the Kurdish question, the aftermath of the year 2015 could be seen as a recurrence of the early 1920s. In Mustafa Kemal’s “New Turkey” that replaced the defunct Ottoman Empire in the first half of the 1920s, the idea of “Kurdish autonomy” was no more than a delusion. Almost a century later, when Tayyip Erdoğan declared his “New Turkey” in the second half of the 2010s presumably to replace the Kemalist Turkey, the idea of Kurdish autonomy seemed, once again, an illusion. That was because, some aspects of novelty aside, Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey was less of a break from the Kemalist Turkey than a continuity concerning the cardinal issue of the country: the Kurdish question.
NOTES
1. Ethnic Greek Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire and later, the Republic of Turkey. The term “Rûm” distinguishes them from the Hellenes of the mainland Greece. It means “Roman” in old Turkish, with reference to Byzantium, the East Roman Empire.
2. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Talaat Pasha-Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Princeton & Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2018), 259, 261.
3. Barış Ünlü, Türklük Sözleşmesi-Oluşumu, İşleyişi, Krizi [Turkishness contract: Its evolution, working, crisis] (Ankara: Dipnot Yayınları, 2018), 14–15.
4. Ibid., 254, 255.
5. Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 149.
6. İsmail Beşikçi, Cumhuriyet Halk Fırkasının Tüzüğü (1927) ve Kürt Sorunu [The constitution of the Republican People’s Party (1927) and the Kurdish question] (İstanbul, 1978), 83.
7. Sami N. Özerdim, Atatürk Devrimi Kronolojisi [Chronology of Atatürk Revolution] (Ankara, 1974), 75.
8. Tarih IV Türkiye Cumhuriyeti [History IV Republic of Turkey] (İstanbul, 1931), 182.
9. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy, 233.
10. The Kurdish Population, Fondation Institut de Kurde de Paris, January 12, 2017. https://www.institutkurde.org/en/info/the-kurdish-population-1232551004.
11. David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 464.
12. Ibid., 464, 465.
13. M. Philips Price, A History of Turkey from Empire to Republic (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), 32.
14. Bilal Şimşir, İngiliz Belgeleriyle Türkiye’de Kürt Sorunu (1924–1938) (Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 1991), 58.
15. Gerard Chailand, A People Without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan (London: Zed Books, 1980, 1993), 56.
16. Hüseyin Nihal Atsız, “Konuşmalar-1” [Speeches–1], Ötüken Dergisi, April 1967.
17. Hüseyin Nihal Atsız, “Kızıl Kürtlerin Yaygarası” [Red Kurds’ Brouhaha], Ötüken Dergisi, June 1967.
19. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy, 141.
20. Robert Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism 1880–1925 (University of Texas Press, 1989), 166–68.
21. Ibid., 166.
22. Ibid., 167, 168.
23. http://www.zazaki.net/haber/mustafa-kemal,-ataturk-ve-kurtler-1624.htm.
24. Jonathan C. Randal, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 255.
25. Ibid., 251.
26. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy, 232.
27. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/interview-ryan-gingeras-on-the-collapse-of-the-ottoman-empire-99151.
