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
