it: introducing the military solution to the problem that confronted Turkey immediately following the foundation of the Republic. Vakit’s characterization, given the strict government control on the media, was indeed reflecting the official point of view concerning the Sheikh Said rebellion, the first Kurdish nationalist violent response with strong religious undertone against the secular Turkish nation-state at its earliest stage of construction.
The Sheikh Said rebellion was the first to leave a permanent link in the chain of Kurdish insurgencies that threatened Turkey’s territorial integrity and ultimately its survival. The Turkish (state) response to Kurds’ taking up arms was and has been ferocious. As David McDowell pointed out in his seminal book A Modern History of the Kurds, the most comprehensive source concerning the saga of the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, “nothing that Iraq’s Kurds could complain of remotely compared with the oppression meted out to Turkey’s Kurds.”2
The Sheikh Said rebellion broke out prematurely on February 8, 1925, and was suppressed by the Turkish military might in April of that year. Its leader, a locally influential clergyman of the Naqshbandi order, Sheikh Said (1865–1925), was executed along with the ringleaders of the short-lived uprising. Even their remains disappeared. Not a trace of the leadership of the rebellion was left, probably to prevent burial sites from serving as the object of pilgrimage or reference points for the future Kurdish generations. Following the suppression, the Kurds of Turkey were subjected to assimilation into the upper Muslim identity, the Turk. Any and every measure from deportation, in order to change the demography of the Kurdish-majority regions, to the introduction of new restrictive legislation has been implemented to this end.
Kurdish Rebellion Shaping Turkish Domestic Politics
The consequences and importance of the first Kurdish rebellion in the post-Republican Turkey were not confined solely to the Kurdish question. As would be seen persistently in the unfolding of the Republican Turkish history, it yielded results in shaping the nature of the new regime that was being installed, and also has become instrumental and manipulative regarding the power struggle that has been ongoing among the founders of the new state.
British historian and Labour MP M. Philips Price (1885–1973) in his undeservedly unnoticed book A History of Turkey: From Empire to Republic, published in 1956, astutely observed the pertinence of the issue to the overall nature of the regime of the young Republic. He wrote: “Following the Kurdish revolt in 1925 and the suppression of the Liberals and remnants of the Young Turks in 1926, Turkey became for a time a totalitarian state. All power was virtually concentrated in the hands of Mustafa Kemal.”3
What Tayyip Erdoğan did with respect to the Kurdish problem and his regime change steering Turkey from an, albeit imperfect, parliamentary democracy toward a presidential government system with extraordinary executive powers vested in him looks like a replica of Mustafa Kemal’s handling of the Kurdish revolt of 1925, in eliminating his political opponents (including potential ones) and further consolidating his grip on power. The following assessment in A History of Turkey: From Empire to Republic is noteworthy:
Mustafa Kemal . . . saw his opportunity . . . to rush through the Assembly a Statute of Law and Order; established press censorship and set up special tribunals. . . . These tribunals dealt summarily with the Kurdish ringleaders and even those . . . who had given him trouble in the past.4
The most authoritative source on the first Kurdish rebellion of the Turkish Republican era is Robert Olson’s The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism 1880–1925. His narrative, on the aforementioned matter, is more articulate and informative: “The Sheikh Said rebellion occurred at a crucial time in the developing domestic politics of Turkey. . . . The most authoritative source on the first Kurdish rebellion of the Turkish Republican era is Robert Olson’s The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism 1880–1925.” His narrative, on the matter mentioned above, is more articulate and informative: “The Sheikh Said rebellion occurred at a crucial time in the developing domestic politics of Turkey. . . . As a result of the struggle for power between the ardent Kemalists and those who opposed some of the policies of Mustafa Kemal (the Second Group and Kazım Karabekir, Ali Fuad Cebesoy, Rauf Orbay, Refet Bele, Adnan Adıvar, Halide Edip, etc.),”5 Atatürk thought it imperative to call İsmet İnönü back to the government. İsmet İnönü wanted to adopt a much harder line and to mobilize more military force against the rebellion than the Prime Minister Fethi Okyar. Mustafa Kemal sided with İnönü and his hard-line approach. İnönü criticized the press that was opposed to Mustafa Kemal, saying that indirectly encouraged the rebellion because of its opposition the government’s secularization policies. . . . On 25 February, the government proclaimed martial law in all of the eastern provinces. . . . After losing a vote of confidence within the People’s Party on March 2, Fethi Okyar resigned, and İsmet İnönü again became prime minister with a mandate from the government and from Mustafa Kemal to pursue strong measures against Sheikh Said. The very next day, March 4, İnönü got the Grand National Assembly to pass the Takriri Sükun Kanunu (Restoration of Order Law). This law allowed for the reactivation of independence tribunals for two years. Granted dictatorial power to convict, imprison, and execute rebels or traitors against the government, the independence tribunals were to be operative in Diyarbakır and Ankara. The Ankara tribunals were to be utilized to prosecute individuals opposed to the Kemalists. The tribunal in Diyarbakır was to be used primarily to prosecute and sentence the rebels and their collaborators. The great significance of the Restoration of Order was not lost on the opposition to Mustafa Kemal, which realized that it could and would be used to limit or stop all newspapers and publications that stated views differing were from those of the government.6
The story is continued by another writer, David McDowell, in his A Modern History of the Kurds:
In early April Kâzım Karabekir and a colleague, both vociferous critics of Mustafa Kemal’s autocracy were denounced by two khojas, as supporting the insurgents in their attempt to restore the caliphate. Despite the absurdity of the accusation, it served notice of the government’s intention to crush him and his associates. Karabekir was accused of writing to Khalid Beg Jibran [the most important military commander of the rebellion] two years earlier complaining “They [the Kemalists] are attacking the very principles which perpetuate the existence of the Muhammadan world,” while his Progressive Republican Party was accused of sending delegates to stir up religious fervor in the Eastern vilayets. That the Progressives roundly condemned the revolt did not protect them. In the second week of April, the party headquarters suffered a night raid by the police and all its papers were confiscated. The party was suppressed. Likewise, the government began to harry journalists who wrote unwelcome commentaries on political events.7
Whatever opportunity the botched military coup of July 15, 2016, provided to Tayyip Erdoğan for eliminating his political opponents, stifling any dissent to his regime change that transformed Turkey’s parliamentary system into a presidential government system giving the president unprecedented executive power, thereby consolidating his one-man rule, a variant of autocracy, as we will see later in this book—the Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925, the first Kurdish uprising against the Turkish nation-state, almost provided the same to Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk). Built around a personality cult, along with the alleged assassination plot in İzmir that targeted him in the following year, Atatürk’s one-man rule ended with his death in 1938. It was replaced by the reign of İsmet İnönü, which ended 1950 thanks to a global paradigm shift as a result of the end of World War II.
What July 15, 2016, is to Tayyip Erdoğan, Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925 was to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. For some with knowledge of European history and the advent of totalitarianism in Europe, the Reichstag fire in 1933 Berlin that became a milestone in the future practices of Hitler and Nazi Germany served as an analogy to explain the function of the botched coup of July 15, 2016. Yet, Turkish history itself provides much more apt and vivid precedents for such an analogy, like the Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925.
The Sheikh Said Rebellion and the Mosul Question
