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.
Historical 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
