issue. It has been an enigma from its very birth and has not changed much in this regard.
NOTES
1. McDowall, A Modern History, 200.
2. Ibid., 184.
3. Price, A History of Turkey.
4. Ibid.
5. The Second Group is the title used for those members of the parliament opposing Mustafa Kemal. Among the names listed, Kâzım Karabekir, Ali Fuad Cebesoy, Rauf Orbay, and Refet Bele were erstwhile comrades of Mustafa Kemal, legendary generals of the Turkish National Struggle (1919–1922). Adnan Adıvar and Halide Edip were among the leading thinkers and public intellectuals of the time.
6. Robert Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1885–1925 (Austin; University of Texas Press, 1991), 123, 124.
7. McDowell, A Modern History of the Kurds, 196–97.
8. P. B. Kinross, Atatürk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey (London: Quill, reissue edition 1964), 407; Walter Reid, Empire of Sand: How Britain Made the Middle East (Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd, 2011), 192–93.
9. Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism, 128.
10. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 449; H. W. V. Temperley, ed., A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, 6 vols. (London, 1920–24), vol. 6, 91.
11. MacMillan, Paris 1919, 445.
12. Ibid., 446.
13. Randal, After Such Knowledge, 4.
14. David Cuthell, A Kemalist Gambit: A View of the Political Negotiations in the Determination of the Iraqi-Turkish Border (Columbia University Press, 2004), 90–91.
15. Cengiz Çandar, Mezopotamya Ekspresi: Bir Tarih Yolculuğu [Mesopotamia express: A journey in history] (İstanbul: İletişim, 2012), 509–10 (my translation).
16. Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism, 99.
17. Ibid., 126.
18. Harriet Allsopp, The Kurds of Syria (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 150.
19. Hamit Bozarslan, La question kurde. Etats et minorités au Moyen-Orient (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1997).
20. Jordi Tejel, Syria’s Kurds: History, Politics and Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 5.
21. Ibid., 16.
22. Allsopp, The Kurds of Syria, 53–54.
23. Tejel, Syria’s Kurds, 17.
24. Ibid., 18–19.
25. Allsopp, The Kurds of Syria, 55.
26. Tejel, Syria’s Kurds, 19.
27. McDowell, A Modern History, 207.
28. Ibid., 208.
29. Ryan Gingeras, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Heir to an Empire (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 166–67.
30. David Romano, The Kurdish Nationalist Movement: Opportunity, Mobilization, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 107.
The Longest Kurdish Insurgency
On August 15, 1984, at 9:00 p.m., the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, later to be known worldwide by its Kurdish acronym PKK, struck two small towns in the remotest corners of Turkey. One was Şemdinli, situated at the south-easternmost point in Turkey, not much more than a stone’s throw away from Iraq and Iran and equidistant to both—that is to say, the Kurdistan region of Iraq and the Kurdistan province of Iran. The other, and militarily speaking more significant, strike was on Eruh, a town in a very mountainous terrain overlooking a deeply gorged river called Botan that flows into the Tigris and was mentioned by Xenophon (ca. 435–355 BC) in his Anabasis. The guerrilla forces, each comprised of thirty people, controlled the two small towns for a few hours, distributed their propaganda pamphlets, and, in Eruh, from the loudspeaker of the village mosque they addressed the townspeople and played martial songs in the Kurdish language. They then introduced themselves as the PKK, and declared that they would be back. The local people were told that the liberation struggle of the Kurds had begun.
The casualties for such an audacious attack that may have changed the course of history in Turkey were insignificant: one gendarmerie soldier was killed and six soldiers and three civilians injured in Eruh, and two police officers were shot and one police officer and a soldier were injured in Şemdinli. The PKK squad confiscated 60 weapons in Eruh, loaded them in a van they hijacked, and both squads eventually withdrew from both localities without any casualty on their side.
Turkish state officials initially downplayed the incident. They dubbed what had happened in two very remote townships in southeastern Turkey, with no tremors felt in the rest of the country, as the work of a “bunch of bandits.” Prime Minister Turgut Özal, though cutting his summer vacation short and returning to Ankara to assess the development, resumed his holiday after just two days. President Kenan Evren, a four-star general, the leader of the military coup of 1980, and the head of the military junta that reigned from 1980 to 1983 until the parliamentarian system was restored with a new and restrictive constitution enacted in 1982, made an equally self-confident stance before the public. The bandits would be smashed, if not in weeks, in the upcoming months just like what had happened with similar gangs previously. Any Kurdish military attempt since 1920s was characterized as the work of bandits, as if the Turkish state was confronting an ordinary crime. The ferocity of the crushing of Dersim in 1938 was intended to be an unforgettable lesson administered by the authorities to anyone who might dare to revolt in the predominantly Kurdish areas. Massive deportations, elimination of anything associated with Kurdishness or demands on Kurdish identity, and massacres at different levels were used to intimidate the Kurds into silence, submission, and obedience.1 It certainly worked—to push the Kurds into submission has become a mission accomplished. For at least three decades, silence prevailed in Turkey’s east or Turkish Kurdistan. The quiet years, however, were interrupted suddenly on August 15, 1984.
The two-pronged attack on Eruh and Şemdinli was echoed within days in the nearby Kurdish settlements, causing bigger military casualties. Insurgent violence escalated steadily and severely in the predominantly Kurdish southeast of Turkey.
The Insurgency That Ended the Silent Decades
The silent decades, which were happily presumed to last forever, were over. The Kurdish insurgency was back. “After just over three silent decades, which began in the aftermath of the suppression of the Dersim uprising [there is no consensus among historians whether to call it an uprising or a massacre] in 1938, there were hints of the ‘noisy’ years that were to come.”2 However, nobody could predict that a bunch of students at Ankara University, a group of housemates who would move from the capital of Turkey to a small village near Diyarbakır that is spiritually regarded as the capital of Kurdistan, would found a party that would essentially become the biggest and most existential challenge to Turkey. The party that was founded in the village of Fis would be named as the PKK
