13 A Coup for a New Turkey
14 Deep State
15 The Pedigree of Turkish Autocracy
16 New Turkey: A Reincarnation
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Timeline—Late Ottoman and Modern History of Turkey
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
| Figure I.1 | Iconoclastic Meeting in Ankara, 1992. Turkey’s President Özal (fourth from left) receiving anti-Saddam Iraqi opposition delegation. On his right and left, the Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani. Author was the architect of the meeting |
| Figure 1.1 | Infograph of Distribution of the Kurds in the Middle East |
| Figure 1.2 | Map of Sèvres for an Independent Kurdistan (1920) |
| Figure 3.1 | Author with Murat Karayılan, the Top Commander of the PKK on Mt. Qandil, Iraqi Kurdistan’s Border with Iranian Kurdistan. Discussing the PKK’s fighting tactics and its conditions to “leave the mountain” and disarm |
| Figure 3.2 | Turkish Military Presence in Iraqi Kurdistan (where the PKK also operates militarily, and names the area “Media defense zones”) |
| Figure 5.1 | The Historic Image of a Historic Moment, Öcalan Declaring Cease-Fire in Bar Elias, Lebanon, March 16, 1993. To his right, the mediator for Turkish-Kurdish settlement Jalal Talabani (president of Iraq 2006–2014). Standing on his left with eyeglasses is Kamran Karadaghi, who played a major role with the author on the establishment of relations between Turkey’s president Turgut Özal and the Iraqi Kurdish leadership. The author is next to Karadaghi, staring at Öcalan during his declaration of the PKK’s first cease-fire |
| Figure 5.2 | President Turgut Özal of Turkey, in an Exceptional Emotional Gesture to the Author at the Reception for the Seventy-eighth Anniversary of the Republic, October 29, 1991, Presidential Palace, Ankara |
| Figure 5.3 | Author Flanked by Abdullah Öcalan (L) and Jalal Talabani (R), March 16, 1993, Lebanon. The photo was shot following the author’s private conversation with Öcalan after his declaration of the first cease-fire by the PKK in the history of the Kurdish conflict |
| Figure 6.1 | With President Turgut Özal and President of Czech Republic Václav Havel, September 1991, Prague. Havel signing his acclaimed book Living in Truth for the author |
| Figure 7.1 | With President Abdullah Gül in Isfahan, Iran, January 2011. The author was approached by Gül to carry a peace initiative to the Iraqi Kurds in 2007 |
| Figure 10.1 | Discussing the “Kurdish Question” with Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan on Board His Private Plane, October 28, 2005 |
| Figure 11.1 | Author with the First President of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, a Historical Leader of the Iraqi Kurds, Masoud Barzani, in the KDP Guesthouse in Massif, North of Erbil. July 2003. The war in Syria would be discussed in the same room in 2011 |
| Figure 12.1 | Turkish Safe Zone East of the Euphrates, February 2019 |
| Figure 12.2 | Ethnic Divisions in Northern Syria, 2018 |
| Figure 12.3 | Turkish War on Northeastern Syria, October 9, 2019 |
| Figure 12.4 | Northeastern Syria According to the Memorandum of Understanding between Russia and Turkey, Signed on October 23, 2019 at Sochi |
| Figure 16.1 | Military Situation in Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria |
The Kurdish question emerged from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I. A century later, it remains one of the most intractable problems to arise from the postwar partition of Ottoman lands.
A distinct ethnic community in the multinational Ottoman Empire, the Kurds were a fully assimilated part of the Ottoman body politic. Their cultural rights were respected, with Kurdish recognized as one of many national languages in the polyglot Ottoman state. In their majority Sunni Muslims, the Kurds fully shared in the dominant religious culture of the Ottoman state and recognized the Sultan as both a temporal and, in his role as Caliph, as a spiritual leader. While Kurdish intellectuals began to argue for a distinct national identity within Ottoman society, there was no separatist movement among the Kurdish communities before World War I. Instead, Ottoman Kurds fought to preserve the Empire and their place within it.
All was to change with Ottoman defeat in the Great War. In October 1918, the Kurds confronted a post-Ottoman world. Like other distinct national communities in the Middle East (the Arabs leap to mind), the Kurds began to consider the possibility of national independence, as well as the risks of falling under European colonial domination. Yet the European Powers had other plans for the Kurds.
Throughout the four years of the war, the Entente Powers had negotiated the partition and distribution of key Ottoman territories to Russia, Britain, and France. With the Entente’s victory, Britain and France sought to conclude their territorial gains as war prizes. Bolshevik Russia, for its part, disavowed all prior claims staked by the Tsarist regime. In spite of this Russian concession, relations between the Bolsheviks and Russia’s wartime allies were tense.
The British, in particular, were determined to create a buffer between Russia and French positions in Syria as well as Britain’s claims in Iraq. Toward this end, the British supported the creation of a Kurdish autonomous zone in Southeast Anatolia as part of the postwar settlement.
The international community formalized the establishment of Kurdistan in the Treaty of Sèvres, signed by the Entente and the Ottoman Empire in August 1920. Section III of the Treaty called for “a scheme of local autonomy for the predominantly Kurdish areas lying east of the Euphrates, south of the southern boundary of Armenia . . . and north of the frontier of Turkey with Syria and Mesopotamia.” Article 64 of the Treaty gave the Kurdish people the right to apply for independent statehood after just one year of autonomy in both Turkish Kurdistan and “that part of Kurdistan which has hitherto been included in the Mosul Vilayet”—that is, what would now be called Iraqi Kurdistan.
As we all know, the promise of a Kurdish state was never realized. Kurdistan fell victim to the Turkish War of Independence. Aside from the Dersim insurrection (in modern Tunceli) in which Kurdish militias fought against the Turkish army, the Kurds chose neutrality or to side with Kemalist forces between 1920 and 1922. When Ismet Inönü went to Lausanne to negotiate a new peace treaty with the Entente, he ultimately secured the whole of Thrace and Anatolia, including the areas allocated under the treaty of Sèvres to the Kurdish autonomous region, as Turkish sovereign territory in the Treaty of Lausanne. Turkey and Britain referred the Mosul question to the League of Nations
