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
