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.
“There is no Kurdish problem where a Turkish bayonet appears.”1 This is what the İstanbul-based journal Vakit announced on May 7, 1925. It is not a denial nor an acknowledgment of the Kurdish question. On the contrary, it signifies
